In spite of the fact that most of the thanks I receive for my military service are shallow and reflexive, I do appreciate it because I am proud of being a veteran. It is not so much a pride in anything that I have done but a subtle humbleness in what it has made me. My military experience gave me training and knowledge that I would not have received without this opportunity, so I selfishly… Read More »A Veteran Reflects
In case you missed this week’s articles, here is a summary: The Weekender: Another Job Seeker Special Edition – Five previous articles posted on this site specifically target to the job seeker community. There are new posts in this series every Friday. Taming the Time-Suck – RSS Readers and More – If you are still fumbling around by manually crawling through sites looking for the information you… Read More »Reviewing This Week on Make HR Happen – November 4 thru November 10, 2012
Human Resources as a profession has come a long way from the days that carved out a “personnel†function to do the grunt work for managers that were too often insensitive to the people needs of a company. In a mad search for improved productivity, business leaders and academics arrived at similar conclusions that workers are not slaves to their masters’ every whim, but are indeed a valuable “resource†along with other components of success.… Read More »Working in HR Does Not Make You a Leader
In one of those “Other duties as assigned†responsibilities at the bottom of my job description, I found myself heading up a program to build a course of instruction on job evaluation for plant engineers. My company, a large manufacturing corporation, used a modified point-factor system of job evaluation for manufacturing jobs that was not only complex in nature but sensitive because its adoption came about through a negotiated union buy-in. Having been brought to… Read More »Why Job Descriptions Fail
What is leadership? The viewpoint used by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in the famous Jacobellis v. Ohio case in 1964 regarding pornography and obscenity comes to mind: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description…  but I know it when I see it…“ Like other things that we weakly try to define, in many cases we understand a concept by observation… Read More »What Leadership Is Not