Friday, November 29, 2019

The psychopathic consequence of a bad boss

The psychopathic consequence of a bad bossThe psychopathic consequence of a bad bossIf youre succeeding under a bullying boss who berates and belittles you, it may reveal something unflattering about your own personality.According to a new study in the Journal of Business Ethics, psychopaths have a natural advantage in workplaces overrun by abusive supervision, and are more likely to thrive under these terrible kind of bosses.Study Psychopaths flourish under abusive bossesWhen many of us think of psychopaths, we may picture Christian Bales chilling portrayal as serial killer, Patrick Bateman, in the movie American Psycho. In real life, psychopathy is a stable personality trait that is partly based on hereditary factors, the studys lead author Charlice Hurst,assistant professor of management in Notre Dame, told Ladders. It is primarily characterized by a lack of empathy, a skill with superficial, insincere charm, and fearlessness.Being a psychopath is not good for the betterment of so ciety, but it can be advantageous for your job when your boss is abusive. To determine abusive supervision, participants in one survey were asked to answer to what extent their boss acted abusive, answering items with Ridicules me, Reminds me of my past mistakes and failures, and Is rude to me. The study found that employees with high levels of psychopathy showed higher levels of engagement at work than employees with low levels of psychopathy under abusive bosses.These psychopathic employees were more likely to feel energized and inspired working for an abusive boss. Under normal supervision, psychopathic employees reported feeling less engaged.Citing research that found psychopaths are generally resistant to stress, including interpersonal abuse, and seem to have less of a need for positive relationships than others, the studys findings suggest that psychopaths might have the resources to keep going under abusive conditions that would hold back other people. Psychopaths do not fee l the saatkorn need for belonging that others do, so when abusive bosses threaten that, they can keep working unaffected.To root out psychopaths, change needs to start from the topHunt says you cant reverse psychopathy once you have it, but as an employer, you can at least stop the behavior that is enabling and rewarding its success in the workplace. To root out psychopaths in the office, change needs to begin with stopping organizations from creating toxic environments where bullying bosses can act out on their teams.The question is whether the organizations leaders really want to see what is happening and whether they are inclined to make changes if their culture is toxic. Research suggests that much of what makes supervisors abusive is due to the organization, Hurst told Ladders. When bosses are under severe stress because of factors like unrealistic demands and unfair procedures, it may result in bad behavior toward their subordinates.So it makes sense to ask not what employees should do about their abusive supervisor, but what the organization is willing to do to reduce the likelihood of supervisors being abusive.

Sunday, November 24, 2019

The rules of Slack communication in the workplace

The rules of Slack communication in the workplaceThe rules of Slack communication in the workplaceTeam messaging apps have, for several years, brought informal text messaging into the workplace Slack messages, Facebook Messenger, and Gchat have all become replacements for email, allowing colleagues to communicate with their teams without having to speak out loud very often.Then why do we totenstill misunderstand each other all the time?Thanks. Thank you. Thx. TY. TaWeve seen colleagues give each other the cold shoulder for days because of a too-formal punctuation fruchtmark in a Gchat message or an errant GIF in Slack. And never mind the difficulty in interpreting jokes.Welcome to the new era of emojis, no periods and thxinstead of thank you between your request for project deadlines.As a millennial who has worked on all of these platforms, I have witnessed firsthand how tone can be misconstrued between millennials used to texting informally and older generations who have been traine d to always use proper punctuation in work emails.We overcompensate cheeriness at workWhen you cant see the person on the other side of your screen, its harder to interpret feelings, and there are usually no easy answers. One popular corrective many people use is to overcompensate with friendliness, piling on exclamation points and smiley faces.But even that gets complicated Was tacking on thatsmiley face emoji after a work request cheerful or passive aggressive? It can be both Allow me to be your millennial soothsayer on this translation journey down into what gestures can be misconstrued and how you can avoid them.Periods are aggressivePeriods carry a stern finality in instant messenger communications. If you want to communicate well across generations in the workplace, drop your periods. They are the equivalent of too-formal text messages from your parents that start with Dear son and end, Sincerely, Mama.In text message bubbles, you already know when the sentence has come to an end, so you dont need the full stop of a period. Adding a periodin these cases can seem excessive, and even aggressive.In a 2016 study, researchers found that university students rated texts that ended with periods as less sincere than those that ended without one. Periods in text messages can even be interpreted as being a jerk.In Slack messages, I find periods can aggressively signal that the conversation is not just over, but OVER.As an example When your boss asks for one more task, you can reply fine, or fine. The former is a happy-go-lucky shrug of whatever. The latter indicates youre angry or annoyed.A quick guide to working with millennials the more formal the language they use, the more they are telegraphing keeping you at arms length. In emails, I still button myself up informal language, but in my professional Slacks and Gchats, the more informal I am, the more comfortable I am around you.When in doubt, use a thumbs upPictograms were the earliest form of human communicatio n for a reason. Emojis provide useful aids to make your language clearer - particularly emotions.As linguist Gretchen McCullough explained, emoji are more like gesture than language. When you crunch the numbers, the face, hand, and heart emoji are by far the most popular.Indicating neutral agreement can be fraught when punctuation and truncated syntax- k, kay, kk- is loaded and ambiguous online. I once had a fellow millennial colleagueask if my tersek meant that I was less than enthusiastic about completing a request. This was in a job wherethe majority of editorialdebatesand professionalcommunication happened overFacebook messenger, so tone was hard to read.After that, I tried sprinkling my instant messenger communications with more exclamation points, but its loudness felt performative and forced K Ok Okay Im so grateful to be alive to create this productSince then, I have become a proponent of using the thumbs-up emoji over using any version of okay when it comes to signaling a greement. I use the praise-hands emoji to indicate louder agreement. When I need to be clearly understood, I supplementmy meaning with unambiguous gestures.Dont use GIFs if youre a beginnerGIFs- short looping videos that are integrated into these instant messenger platforms- are an advanced tutorial that we would need a whole semester to cover.GIFs represent emotions even more strongly than emoji do. If youre a beginner, I would avoid using gifs. In GIFs, youre using other peoples emotions to indicate your own, and you dont want your colleagues to wonder what you mean by your Michael Jackson eating popcorn GIF.https//giphy.com/gifs/michael-jackson-watching-popcorn-ftXvsSyRzKXXGThese are just a few basic tips I have learned through trial and error. Instant messenger platforms have afforded us the nimblenessto communicate at a moments notice, but they have also opened Pandoras box of ambiguous nuance and words that have been changed by memes. Until were all projecting our communicat ions into each others minds through the Cloud, well need to remainthoughtful about how we communicate that we are ok online. U mad?

Thursday, November 21, 2019

Job Interview Questions and Answers

Job Interview Questions and AnswersJob Interview Questions and Answers