Being ‘bossy’ is not usually looked upon kindly. What’s more, an extensive body of studies have concluded that collaborative management is the style that usually works best. However, that doesn’t hold true for new leaders who have something to prove.
Leaders who come into a management role with factors which could be seen to negatively count against them – namely their age, education, or experience – need to quickly and firmly establish their position by telling their subordinates what to do. That’s according to Professor Stephen Sauer from Clarkson University, who has said that for those bosses, it pays to be bossy.

The conclusion is the result of a series of experiments which time and time again found that leaders who were inexperienced received the best results when they were ‘directive’ instead of ‘participative’. “Low-status leaders who took a directive approach received higher ratings from their teams in terms of both confidence and effectiveness than low-status leaders who took a participative approach. And teams with low-status directive leaders performed better than those with low-status participative leaders,” the study found.

Case study

According to Sauer, if these results seem counterintuitive, imagine this: You’re on an experienced team member who gets an unfamiliar leader. Read more…

Are you feeling frustrated because you can’t break into an offshore job?

Andrew Collingwood knows how you feel.

Since attending our Perth mining Jobs EXPO on 25 May, he’s received five jobs offers.

We asked if he could share some of his tips for success and he readily agreed.

Andrew Collingwood, a 53-year-old truck driver, has been looking for a job in the mines for some time. Interviewed by ABC while at the Jobs EXPO, he readily admitted to feeling frustrated in his job search.

"It's harder than you can ever imagine," he said.

"You send in emails, you go for induction but I'm getting no feedback at all."

Things have changed from Mr. Collingwood who starts work today for a major mining company driving dump trucks. He’s been told he has the opportunity to move into a trainer position within 6-12 months.

Here is his advice for how to turn your job search into a job.

Work on your resume

The first thing Andrew did was work on his resume to make it more attractive to employers. He put all his experience, equipment and licences and tickets at the very top.

Have a look at our Resume Writing Service for a mining, energy, or oil and gas resume. 

Change your attitude

“I started thinking about what I could do for the employer,” Andrew said.

“I didn’t ask one person what they could do for me. I told them what I was prepared to do for their company.”

In fact, he even volunteered two weeks of his time for a shot at a job.

Be prepared

“I approached every single exhibitor with a plan. I knew what I was going to say and I had my answers ready,” explained Andrew.

“They don’t like to see any hesitation when they ask you a question.”

Andrew went to several information sessions and acquired new ideas on what employers were looking for and how to research a job.

Get in early

“I arrived half an hour before the event started. I had the chance to speak at length with people on your stand and others before the crowds arrived,” said Andrew.

“I was given very good advice about what information sessions to attend and who was looking for my skills.” 

Sean (name has been changed) is a master at this. He pursued a job offer at a Fortune 500 company to be the first Chief Administrative Officer (CAO). He was well-qualified, presented himself well, and got the offer. He'd been competing with capable people. He was proud he'd "won the contest."

The next step was a return visit, after which he'd decide to accept the offer. Sean had already learned a lot about the company's businesses and some things about the organization. His priority now was culture and how the new position might fit: "I asked people, 'What are you excited about? What are you proud of? Who are your close friends in the company? How does the group function together?'" Sean learned things like who the heroes were, what made them successful, and what his biggest challenges and opportunities would be in the job. The different people he met with were learning from his questions. It was almost like he already worked there, and they were jointly determining how to make the new role successful.

Surprisingly, Sean turned down the offer. The new role was a misfit in the company's culture.

As he learned more about the company, Sean questioned how he'd be viewed as the first CAO in a company where everyone else focused on bottom-line results. It was a highly performance-driven environment with lots of business units. Corporate staffs were secondary.

"I asked how they'd keep score on me, how they'd really know I was making a difference," he said. "We never got to satisfactory answers to that question. They weren't hiding anything. This CAO position was a new one, and they didn't really know."

Sean was concerned that this new position wouldn't fit in the company's culture, that he wouldn't really be accepted, and that it wouldn't be a springboard to the line job that he really wanted after two or three years as CAO. He might have made it work, but why take the risk?

It's not uncommon for job seekers to enter organizations without understanding the culture and come away disappointed. When considering a new job, be sure to investigate the institution's culture. Consider these questions to guide you:

1. What should I learn? Understand the organization's purpose — not just what they say they're doing, but also how their purpose leads to decisions and what makes them proud. Learn how the organization operates. For example, consider the importance of performance, how the organization gets things done, the level of teamwork, the quality of the people, how people communicate, and any ethical issues.

Except for ethical issues, there's no absolute standard of what's best in organizational culture. Different purposes and different organizational features can be more or less appealing to different people. When you understand how the potential employer operates, you'll need to consider how well that matches your goals. Your target organizational culture is an important part of your aspirations.

2. How should I learn? Read everything you can find about the institution, but read with a critical eye. Institutions have formal vision statements, and they often mention cultural topics in other public reports, but these documents are written with a purpose in mind. Independent writers take an independent perspective. They can be more critical, but they can miss details and get things wrong. Read more…

An employee must make an unequivocal statement expressing their unambiguous decision to resign, and nominate a specified date as the end date of their employment (no sooner than the minimum notice period).

In cases where a resignation has been received in heat-of-the-moment or adverse circumstances – such as delivered verbally during an angry outburst – case law has determined that employers should insist they receive written confirmation of the resignation within a reasonable time period, allowing the employee time to ‘cool off’. According to the authors of Managing Termination of Employment: A Fair Work Act Guide, obtaining written notice will assist the employer if the employee later disputes their resignation with an unfair dismissal claim. In circumstances where an employee refuses to provide a written statement of resignation, employers should ensure they keep a meticulous record of events.

Clarifying a resignation – Case study examples
Unfair dismissal claims have arisen in circumstances where an employee claimed that because their resignation withdrawal was not accepted it amounted to a dismissal.

In Luszczynski v Cement Australia Packaged Products [2005] NSWIRC 1180 a resignation was found to be valid despite having been initially made in the heat-of-the-moment, principally because the employee also provided a written statement.

The NSW Industrial Relations Commission found that despite the employee having made a heat-of-the-moment decision to resign following a performance appraisal, her subsequent email and discussion with the HR manager rendered her resignation a “deliberate, voluntary and considered action”. Her unfair dismissal claim was dismissed. Read more…

As a result, there’s a growing sense in some parts of the business community that traditional power and control will have a hard time continuing in their existing forms. Influential business thinker and strategist JP Rangaswami has been exhorting businesses for several years to begin ‘‘designing for loss of control’’ based on his experiences as chief information officer of British Telecom, one of the largest organizations in the world. Influence and power are inexorably flowing into everyone’s hands now that all individuals have access to equally powerful tools for self-expression. Every company now has to consider virtual competition with the entire world, not just a few large businesses, as competitors evolve faster and possess better tools, technologies, information, and methods of organization than ever before.

The future of business is turning into a very different one from what it was in the twentieth century. Institutions unwilling to respond in kind with the new sensibilities and types of engagement the marketplace wants and increasingly expects will experience the consequences. For those that don’t, customers and employees will soon come to distrust them, with consequences that vary but inevitably will be undesirable.

Today customers who want to use a company’s products can quickly consult with the collective experience of the world or broadcast their disapproval of the outcome globally for all to see. Prospective workers no longer have to take a company’s assurance of what employment will be like; they can rapidly find out from people who already work there.
But this new world is far from the exclusive benefit to consumers; businesses too can benefit. They can now pick and choose new partners in an open marketplace, where business reputations and prior performance are shared and visible for all to see.
New social models and enabling tools, combined with the means to employ them effectively, are remaking the landscape of business, society, culture, and government. This future can appear daunting, uncertain, and decidedly unfamiliar. But more and more, companies are studying what’s happening, absorbing the lessons to be learned, and gaining competency in what’s required to succeed in this new world.

The fundamental principles of social business can be distilled down to three basic ideas:

Social Business Tenet #1: Anyone can participate.

The processes of product development, marketing, sales, operations, customer support–in short, nearly all aspects of business–will ultimately be open, social, and participative. This applies to employees, business partners, customers, and the rest of the world, and includes all possible uses. Although there must be some constraints and rules regarding who gets to participate and when, in general, the more open the participation, the more superior the result. When people and their friends use the explicit connections they have between each other, participation is most vibrant and useful.
Social Business Tenet #2: Create shared value by default.

Contributors have intrinsic worth based on their inherent ability to increase overall community value through participation. Building value requires that whenever possible, contributors automatically share content with the entire community in as close to real time as possible. The individual reputations of contributors matter as well, along with the resonance of their contribution with others engaged in similar work to create a virtuous participation cycle. Most shared value is created in simple social connection and incremental contributions such as conversations; however, contributions can be complex and sophisticated as well. Individual additions of shared value are tiny, but when they are aggregated into the output of millions of customers and interested stakeholders, value builds exponentially and accumulates into industry-leading outcomes. Formally, the process of automatically building shared value is called a network effect.

Social Business Tenet #3: While participation is self-organizing, the focus is on business outcomes. Read More…