Would you lie on your Resume? – Reflections prompted by Timothy Olyphant (Justified)

News Item:  Justified (the program on FX) just won a Peabody Award

The entertainment programs selected included The Good Wife, a CBS dramatic series about a political spouse’s life after her husband’s scandalous downfall, and Justified, FX’s modern-day Western set in the wild, wild hills and hollows of Appalachia.

People distort reality.  (Out of 1,000 resumés, there were substantial misstatements on more than 40 percent).
Jeffrey Pfeffer:  Power:  Why Some People Have it – and Others Don’t

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So here’s the ethical question of the day.  Would you lie on your resume?  4 out of 10 do.  Would you?

My answer is, “of course not.”  I think it would totally undermine all credibility – and until we get that number down to about 1 out of 1,000, our society is going to continue to have scandals and crises like the 2008 financial meltdown.

But, then again… maybe…  it’s not that simple.

Deputy U. S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant)

I am a big fan of Justified.  I record every episode, and miss none of them.  There is something about the earthiness of the Harlan, Kentucky modern-day Western feel that just sweeps me in.  I have liked Timothy Olyphant in Live Free or Die Hard, and Hitman.  (I’ve never seen Deadwood, his other hit show).  So I was excited to hear Timothy Olyphant interviewed by Terry Gross.  (Who is better than Terry Gross? – audio and transcript, here).  So – here is a lengthy excerpt…  Read it carefully, and I’ll get back to you with my question at the end.

From the transcript:

Mr. OLYPHANT: No, this was my first job of any kind outside of lifeguarding. You know, I moved to New York, I studied acting. My resume had a bunch of things I made up. You know, scenes I did in class and said that I’ve done in some regional theaters or something. And I went in a read for the late Phyllis Huffman, who cast all of Clint Eastwood’s movies and I got the job. It was for the WB network – their first season. Warner Brothers was starting this new network. Clint had – as I understood the story – Clint, you know, his relationship with Warner Brothers is legendary, so he was going to produce this show and I was going to be the kind of the Edd “Kookie” Byrnes-type character.

It was a tribute to the show. It wasn’t a remake. Some guy – Jim Caviezal was the star. He was the guy who moved out to L.A. and started a detective agency and named it after his father’s favorite television show, “77 Sunset Strip.”

GROSS: Oh, I get it.

Mr. OLYPHANT: Maria Bello was in it.

GROSS: Uh-huh.

Mr. OLYPHANT: So, I flew out to L.A. to shoot. We sat down at the table read. I was looking for Clint everywhere. He’s nowhere to be seen. So when we finished the reading I asked, where’s Clint, you know. They said he quit. Apparently, you know, about three-four days of television network executives he pretty much decided, ah, you guys go ahead without me. And so, that was it. But the pilot -the show didn’t get picked up.

GROSS: Let me back up a couple of steps here. You said you made up things on your resume.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. OLYPHANT: Yeah.

GROSS: You took things you did in your acting class and made class and made it seem like you’ve did them on stage in regional theater. Was there a little voice in your head thinking, maybe that’s unethical, but maybe it’ll get me a job?

Mr. OLYPHANT: Are you kidding? Where am I supposed to – hand in a resume that just says, Timothy Olyphant, actor. Experience, none. I mean, I was like, come on. I was 20-something years old, I’m looking for work. People aren’t – you know, you got to make them feel a little comfortable. I’ve done something.

GROSS: Were you afraid that someone would know, like, the New York theater scene and the regional theater scene so well, and they’d look at your resume and say, no, you didn’t?

Mr. OLYPHANT: If I’m not mistaken, I have a – now I know I’m not mistaken, ’cause I have the book at home. My first play of any kind was an off-Broadway production of a play called “The Monogamist,” and every year this Theater World magazine in New York gives awards for outstanding debut performances, for Off-Broadway and Broadway. And I was given an award for my performance in “The Monogamist.” And in the book – they issue a book every year with the people who won the awards that year and all the previous years for on and on and on. The names are amazing. I mean it’s I’ve gone, I’ve looked at them. It’s just incredible company of people that have been given these awards. And in there is – it says a bunch of plays that I had been in previously that I’ve never been in in my life, in the book.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. OLYPHANT: But you know, that’s – I mean, I don’t know what they’re doing these days, but that’s what people did, you just, you know, you’ve got to put something on there.

So, you are an aspiring young actor, and you get no auditions if you have no experience, and you have no experience except drama classes.

Now, would you lie on you resume?

{and, for those who wonder is there ever a time for “situation ethics” – do you remember the stories of the brave young men ready to fight in World War II who lied about their age to go to war?  Were they right or wrong?}

I think it is wrong to lie on your resume.  Don’t you?  And in practically every instance, it is truly inexcusable.

But… maybe… there are times when it is a little more understandable than other times.

Life can be complicated.

Cleopatra’s Three Can’t Miss Tips for Business Success

Sean Silverthorne

Here is an article written by Sean Silverthorne for BNET (March 25, 2011), The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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I’ve always wanted to write one of those cheesy books about what a great figure from history can teach us about modern day business management. Subjects revived from the dead to instruct us have included Genghis Kahn, Lincoln, Capt. Picard, Patton, Gandhi, Shakespeare, and  Sun Tzu.  Even Napoleon, whose decision to war on Russia in the middle of winter may be one of the worst tactical decisions ever made, gets a book on project management!

Well, I’m reading Stacy Schiff’s brilliant biography Cleopatra: A Life and I believe I am now able to impart to you the secrets of her incredible success. Unbelievably, I am doing this for free, and with this promise: If you can duplicate Cleopatra’s skills, you too can rule your empire like a god or goddess. Here is all you need to do:

Be Bewitching. By most accounts, Cleopatra was not only beautiful but funny, persuasive, seductive, a natural-born flatterer, and willing to spend massive amounts to throw unforgettable parties. The people loved their queen, and so did Julius Caesar and Marc Antony — the two most powerful men of the time. The Lesson: For business success develop a great personality, be rich, and be willing to kiss-up (literally) to anyone who is powerful enough to defeat you.

Be Ruthless. When her sister Arsinoe threatened to disrupt her reign, Cleopatra let her displeasure be known to Marc Anthony and the problem was, well, eradicated. No better fate befell Alexandrians she considered conspirators — Cleopatra sent the detached head of one of them to a strategic rival in order to curry favor. The Lesson: Dead men don’t tell tales, but they do make good marketing platforms.

Be Brilliant. She could build a fleet, beat down a revolt, and control the minutest details of the country’s currency. She was highly educated, fluent in nine languages and likely played a lovely lyre. She could converse eloquently on Homer with one breath, drop a ribald joke with the next. The Lesson: It doesn’t hurt to be the smartest person in the room, as well as the most beautiful and most compelling.

Here’s a bonus Cleopatra trait you’ll also want to cultivate.

Know how to make an entrance. When the Queen of the Nile visited Marc Anthony for the first time in his home city of Tarsus, Turkey, she had to make an impression to get the powerful warrior, and his followers, on her side. She arrived on a decorated barge, sailing under large purple sails and powered by 170 men with silver-painted oars. Here’s one account cited by Schiff:

“She herself reclined beneath a gold-spangled canopy, dressed as Venus in a painting, while beautiful young boys, like painted Cupids, stood at her side and fanned her. Her fairest maids were likewise dressed as sea nymphs and graces, some steering at the rudder, some working at the ropes. Wondrous odors from countless incense-offerings diffused themselves along the river-banks.” The Lesson: It’s better to be looked over than over looked.

And there you have it, Cleopatra’s solid gold tips for business success: Be beautiful, rich, ruthless, a flirt, smart and a party girl with a sense of the dramatic. (Oh, and it would have helped if Elizabeth Taylor, R.I.P, played you in the movie.)

Time to get to work!

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Sean Silverthorne is the editor of HBS Working Knowledge, which provides a first look at the research and ideas of Harvard Business School faculty. Working Knowledge, which won a Webby award in 2007, currently records 4 million unique visitors a year. He has been with HBS since 2001. Silverthorne has 28 years experience in print and online journalism. Before arriving at HBS, he was a senior editor at CNET and executive editor of ZDNET News. While at Ziff-Davis, Silverthorne also worked on the daily technology TV show The Site, and was a senior editor at PC Week Inside, which chronicled the business of the technology industry. He has held several reporting and editing roles on a variety of newspapers, and was Investor Business Daily‘s first journalist based in Silicon Valley.

Decide what you think, first

 

 

 

Here is another valuable Management Tip of the Day from Harvard Business Review. To sign up for a free subscription, to any/all HBR newsletters, please click here.

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When working on a challenging task — writing a speech, preparing an important presentation, or developing a new idea — it’s helpful to get feedback from others.

Do they think it’s any good? In what direction do they think you should take it?

But sometimes, too much feedback can drown out the most important opinion: your own.

If you feel like you’re getting too much input or are no longer sure what you think of your own work, take a break from the feedback.

Decide what you think. This will build your confidence and trust in yourself.

Once you’ve articulated and refined your own perspective, reach back out to your trusted advisors to get theirs.

Today’s Management Tip was adapted from “How to Teach Yourself to Trust Yourself” by Peter Bregman.

To read the complete post, please click here.

Bullying Bosses Beware

Kellye Whitney

Here is an article written by Kellye Whitney for Talent Management magazine. To check oyt itgercresoyrces and/or sign up for a free subscription to TM and/or Chief Learning Officer magazine (both published by MediaTec), please click here.

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We’ve all had one. The boss you know gives out more tricks than treats on Halloween to the neighborhood kids, because he or she does the same thing on the job.

They may scream, curse, throw things or humiliate people in front of large groups, and all of this loveliness is done often, deliberately and with great pleasure. But, according to a Time article, “Workplace Bullying: New York Bill Targets Abusive Bosses” legislation to rein in this kind of workplace terrorism may be closer than we think.

According to the article, “Workers’ rights advocates have been campaigning for years to get states to enact laws against workplace bullying, and in May they scored their biggest victory. The New York state senate passed a bill that would let workers sue for physical, psychological or economic harm due to abusive treatment on the job. If New York’s Healthy Workplace Bill becomes law, workers who can show that they were subjected to hostile conduct – including verbal abuse, threats or work sabotage – could be awarded lost wages, medical expenses, compensation for emotional distress and punitive damages.”

Of course, many employers are opposing the bill, arguing it could lead to frivolous lawsuits and potentially penalize them “for nothing more than running a tight ship and expecting a lot from their workers” because that’s exactly what bullying is about – not – but the law has been structured to punish only the most offensive and deliberate abuse, wrongful conduct done with malice, essentially, and in most cases the behavior has to be repeated.

The New York state assembly is expected to consider the bill in 2011, and some 16 other states are evaluating similar bills.

We’ll see what happens, but I have a suggestion for a new policy talent managers can implement if the bullying legislation passes: the use of squirt guns in the office.

Boss acting out, misbehaving or otherwise being a nuisance? Pretend he’s your wayward cat and – pow! – hit him with a nice icy cold stream of water right in the puss.

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Kellye Whitney is an award-winning editor and journalist with more than a decade of experience covering, well, a lot of different topics and industries including real estate, music, entertainment and education. She has significant expertise in talent management,  learning and development, and diversity.

 

Commitment or Compliance…It’s Your Choice

Bob Woodcock

I am grateful to Marcus Buckingham for calling my attention to Bob Woodcock and the material he posts at his website.

Here is an excerpt from a recent and excellent article that suggests the quality of Woodcock’s reasoning and writing skills, posted on January 21, 2011.

To read the complete article, check out others, and sign up for email alerts, please click here.

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According to author Daniel Pink traditional management methods are great if what you want from your people is compliance. The problem is that most of us in leadership roles  require far more than that in the new normal that exists in these post recessionary times. Without a committed and engaged workforce our ability to create sustainable business outcomes is severely challenged.

Pink has done some ground breaking work in identifying the true drivers of better performance in the workplace. It turns out that for simple, straight forward tasks the carrot and the stick work well as motivators. For roles that require algorithmic performance, the concept of “if you do this, then you get that” works as a performance motivator. However, if the task gets more complicated – when it requires some conceptual, creative thinking – those kinds of motivators don’t work. We’ve known for years that money is not the primary motivator of successful business outcomes. Science has shown us that performance, and personal satisfaction, come down to three factors:

Autonomy
Mastery
Purpose

Autonomy is our desire to be self-directed, to run our own lives. This is where traditional management methods actually get in the way of performance. In their book First Break All The Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently, Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman identified the differences between what great managers do and what conventional wisdom dictates. Their findings indicated that without fail the managers that concentrated on following had significantly better results than their contemporaries:

• Selecting for talent.
• Set expectations by defining the right outcomes.
• Motivate by focusing on an individual’s strengths.
• Develop the people on their team by helping them find the right fit within the organization.

Defining the right outcomes and focusing on the individual strengths of the members of your team will have a dramatic effect on the sense of autonomy that you engender. Traditional management focuses on setting expectations by defining the right steps for your direct reports. Regardless of what your leadership role is within the organization (leader of others vs. leader of leaders) when you establish what the target or goal is with one of your direct reports and allow them to determine the right steps to success are you provide them with the autonomy that drives both personal satisfaction and improved performance.

The shift from being an individual contributor within the organization to being a leader of others is a difficult one to make. Most of us that have made that transition didn’t get much in the way of training for our new role. We know what has worked well for us in the past and when it comes to crunch time we reach back to those experiences and apply them with our direct reports. Unfortunately much of what we did as an individual contributor has a negative impact when it comes to managing for results with others.

There are some simple steps you can take to ensure that you cultivate a true sense of autonomy with your direct reports. It is important to remember that autonomy and accountability go hand in hand. Allowing your direct reports to determine what the right steps are doesn’t mean that you will be abdicating your responsibility as a manager to ensure that targets are met and successful business outcomes are delivered. It is imperative to the success of your direct reports that you have frequent check-in conversations and that you both monitor the progress to the end result. That doesn’t mean that you should look for a status update every time you talk with the person. Establish a schedule of follow-up meetings and stick with the schedule.

It’s been said that good people don’t leave the organization they work for, they leave due to a misalignment with their manager. That’s often driven by the fact that their manager has been determined to motivate them by identifying and overcoming what s/he perceives to be their weaknesses. The fact is that people don’t change that much. As a manager you are wasting your time trying to put in what you feel was left out. Focus instead on the individual strengths and try to draw out more of what was left in.

Strength based coaching plays directly to mastery. Each of us would like to get better at what we do. I don’t believe that anyone I’ve ever managed got up in the morning and started the day thinking about how they wanted to go to work and do the worst possible job they could. It was only when I began to understand behaviour that I could see how my actions were impacting both the personal satisfaction and individual performance of my direct reports. Once I was able to apply the science of behaviour and truly understand what the motivational drives and needs were for the various people I began to see the shift from compliance to commitment.

It truly is your choice to make. I can speak from experience on both sides of the issue and I have to say that I much preferred commitment from my direct reports. Your role as a leader of a group of individual contributors puts you in the driver’s seat when it comes to the level of engagement within your organization. In most cases this group of managers is directly responsible for the business outcomes of 70% to 80% of the workforce. Give them autonomy, mastery and purpose and watch them shine. Have great conversations and focus on developing their strengths. That’s the way to improve performance.

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According to Bob Woodcock, “My role is to help companies manage their talent and improve profitability by better understanding, motivating and developing their people. It’s a combination of “gut” plus science creating better, more informed decisions. I do this by training leaders to align the capacities of their people with the organizations business objectives.”

For more information please visit www.thepulsecheck.com.