#HR #RRHH Making love and making personal #branding #leadership

Chances are you’ve heard a friend complain about having to "manage up." The act of managing up is often cast in a negative light — an inappropriate act of having to cover for a manager who would have otherwise let things fall through the cracks.

But just as managing down to a team is a complex responsibility that requires much practice, so is managing up. Both are essential skills for career development, and both are far more involved than simply delegating work or picking up an extra project.

But if you’re already busy, feeding this appetite can feel like one more task on your list. So what should you do?

I put this question to several business leaders recently, and the short answer was this: get over it.

"Every manager should be giving feedback to everybody," says Bernard Tyson, CEO of Kaiser Permanente. "They shouldn’t have to ask. It’s how you let someone know if he’s hitting the mark and what to do to become more effective." The Millennial appetite is a huge opportunity for business. "Millennials are after feedback because they’re trying to get better at what they’re interested in doing."

Embrace Different Perspectives

"We'll never stop employing people of different generations here. Although it's a challenge to work together, meshing new ideas, different energy levels, and time-tested experience, I'm a firm believer that evolution only happens by getting outside the comfort zone. There's great value in the diversity of our employees. They provide insight on our wide range of customers, giving us a well-balanced perspective."

In theory, technology should increase both work flexibility and productivity, but it is also responsible for procrastination and a major threat to people’s work-life balance.

In fact, much of the recent debate about work-life imbalance is concerned with our relationship with technology, in particular our inability to disconnect or go offline.

For example, in the U.S. almost 50% of working adults report being “hooked” on email, which is estimated to cost the nation's economy at least $900 billion a year in productivity loss. According to consulting firm McKinsey & Company, professionals spend 28% of their work time reading or answering emails. These statistics explain the international success of bestselling books like The Four Hour Work Week.

Vacations are great, but they exact a price. You come back to such a pile of work that you wonder if going away was worthwhile.

The answer is probably yes, but even so, there are ways to make re-entry less traumatic.

1. Plan ahead.

Managing the post-vacation plunge starts before your vacation does. You may be tempted to pile on meetings and projects as soon as you get back to make up for lost time, but a better approach is to stagger the catch-up work over a longer period. At least don’t aim to do it all on the first day. Accept your limitations. A lot of stuff can wait.

When I started my first company, I hired people I knew and loved.  I thought, Why wouldn't I want to work with my friends all day?

In many cases that worked out fine. Then my company began to grow beyond my circle of friends. The talents required for success became a bigger priority than the camaraderie.

I was usually able to find people who fit the culture and the job description and whom I also enjoyed spending time with. But every once in a while the person I needed to hire just wasn't my cup of tea. And while we shared mutual respect, spending time with this person became a chore, as did the experience of managing him or her.

Most business leaders can agree that teamwork is important for getting anything done. But the agreement usually stops there. In many cases, the company's immediate needs take over, and there's seldom enough time for deep thought about how to actually develop an effective team.

Groups of people are often thrown together and told to get to work. And while many organizations do well when it comes to a team's technical aspects, like bringing in people with the right expertise and establishing deadlines, the less quantifiable, "people-building" element tends to get lost. With a little effort and foresight, though, managers and team leaders can avoid some of the most common problems plaguing teams.

We’ve all known the bosses who act like children when they get bad news, face a crisis, or perceive a bureaucratic slight. Some are screamers. Some are whiners. Some just go “into the bunker” and won't talk to anyone at all. How do you deal with a childish boss?

“When your boss is having a tantrum, he is ‘going grasshopper.’ The grasshopper is like a toddler—he wants what he wants and he wants it now. Because the grasshopper is in charge of short-term survival, his primary responses are as basic as freeze, flight, and fight. That is why you get the withdrawal, whining, and screaming from your boss.”

To meet this goal, a performance management system must provide some way to determine how employees are performing relative to their co-workers. Yet there is currently a trend in HR to “fix” performance management by eliminating the use of methods that compare employees based on performance.

This makes no sense since this is the very thing senior business leaders want from performance management!

The 2 performance management methods:

Magicians are always under pressure to reinvent their performances to stay ahead of the competition. When David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty "disappear," Franz Harary responded with a vanishing space shuttle. The same is true of business managers: They must strive to be innovative, providing the kind of magical product and service experiences that exceed customer expectations and the offerings of competitors. What's the secret?

Success in business as well as magic has less to do with clever marketing and more to do with the innovation process, Thomke and Randal write in the 2012 paper Innovation Magic. The authors also teamed to write The Magic of Innovation, published in the European Business Review earlier this year.

Well, in my experience, the profile of the top performing salespeople is changing. And fast! As I built the HubSpot sales team over the last 6 years, I probably hired close to 200 salespeople. It amazes me, even in that short period, how the profile of the industry’s top performers has shifted. Here are four habits that today’s top performers exhibit that yesterday’s top performers did not.

#1: They are Data Jocks

Historically sales managers have taken extraordinary strides to measure the performance of their salespeople… and salespeople have avoided these tactics like the plague. “What I do cannot be measured. It is an art form.”Today’s top sales performers love the data. To them, data represents the blue print to excellence. They want to know: