The number one priority for CEO’s globally is recruiting the right talent.

Securing optimal talent fit that embodies the knowledge, cultural values, and emotional smarts to get the job done continues to be a top of mind priority for organizations competing in the war for talent. Although we have all heard of Emotional Intelligence (EQ) not everyone has it. A few questions for reflection: Do you say what you think even if you know it will upset or hurt someone - even worse do you do this on email? Do you view people as basically good and well intentioned or are you always finding it hard to trust people and develop relationships over the long-term? Are you happy with life or are you constantly feeling the glass is half-empty? Can you develop sustaining and healthy long-term relationships or are people viewed as transactional experiences (like changing parts with little tolerance for ambiguity in life)? Depending on how you answered these questions you would either have a high EQ or a low EQ. Low EQ talent do not succeed well over the long term in their career roles, and are typically very poor managers as they create havoc in other’s lives and are not effective coaches to help people aspire to be the best they can be.

In today’s competitive environment for finding the best talent, Emotional Intelligence or EQ is more important for recruiting fit than technical skills. Smart people can grown and learn into a role - but if the EQ is not there - organizations will create cultures that are not aware of their emotions, know how to manage them or be aware of how their emotions impact the lives of others. When organizations recruit for emotionally intelligent leaders - managers and people simply do things much better!

The term EQ was dubbed after Daniel Goleman, psychologist and New York Times Contributor came out with his new book Emotional Intelligence. Although in the early days EQ was dismissed as a fad, companies have recognized the value of hiring and promoting emotionally superior workers, with the increased importance placed on leadership, team work, and culture fit. People with higher emotional intelligence know how to create and grow great teams - they are viewed as more human as leaders and they have a strong sense of heart and balance about life and its ebbs and flows. People often are hired due to their IQ - but what gets them to do better on the job is their EQ. Simple EQ questions are important to ask in recruiting that tests for peoples comfort in talking about their feelings. Questions like: How are you feeling about looking for a new job in your life? When you are working, do you prefer to work on several tasks at once rather than focusing on just one? Do you find it easier to complete jobs if you work right to the deadline? Do you ask people for help if a task seems too hard or will you exhaust all options before asking for support? Do you prefer familiar tasks and consistency or do you prefer to have jobs that are constantly changing? Do you say what you think even if it upsets someone or do you look at conflict as an opportunity to learn and grow?

There are many good books on EQ on the market a few of our favorites are summarized. A good book for leaders is by Reldan Nadler, President of True North Leadership, Inc. and author of Leaders’ Playbook: How to Apply Emotional Intelligence - Keys to Great Leadership, as he shares ideas about Emotional Intelligence (EI), and puts its principles to work throughout this book to enhance your own business performance and that of your business team. Another good book for Project Managers is Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers: The People Skills You Need to Achieve Outstanding Results by Anthony Mersino.

There are recruiting tools that can help test and assess for emotional intelligence that help to identify people with enhanced skills - in today’s competitive world - hiring balanced leaders with both IQ and EQ will be a key success factor for enabling growth of organizations. As the talent pool becomes constrained, recruiting the right talent will intensify as an important leadership competency to develop. Even more importantly is for organization’s to have culture and strategy fit with their innovation growth objectives recruiting for EQ will be a competitive differentiator.

Check out www.helixtalent.com for more information or other perspectives on talent management.

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Workplace Stress - A Business Productivity Killer!

Stress in the workplace has become an increasingly hot topic over the past few decades.

Increased stress in the workplace has been shown to increase absenteeism and employee turnover. Increased stress in the workplace also increases medical and insurance costs because of rising. Workers compensation rates and awards due to mounting stress in the workplace suits. Stress, defined, is the “wear and tear” the body goes through as it adjusts to the constantly changing environment. Anything that causes change in a person’s life causes stress. Stress can be short-term (acute) or long-term (chronic). Acute stress is the reaction to an immediate threat. This is commonly known as the “fight or flight” response. The threat can be any situation that is experienced as a danger. Common short-term stresses include:

Stress is on the rise globally due to continued economic upheavals, and workplace stress is on everyone’s mind.

Downsizing, layoffs, mergers and bankruptcies have cost hundreds of thousands of workers their jobs and cause uncomfortable, stressful situations in the workplace. Millions more workers have been shifted to unfamiliar tasks within their companies and wonder how much longer they will be employed, causing a great deal of anxiety and stress in the workplace for everyone. Adding to the pressures that workers face are new bosses, computer surveillance of production, fewer health and retirement benefits, and the feeling they have to work longer and harder just to maintain their current economic status. Workers at every level are experiencing increased tension and uncertainty.

With the war for talent raging as baby boomers retire in droves - will leadership be accelerate focus on creating healthy workplaces? Clearly we are not making the major improvements in this area, as stress levels continue to erode the quality of human capital and innovation capabilities of organizations throughout North America.

Stress in the workplace reduces productivity, adversely affects the bottom line and lowers profits causing company’s stock price to fall. The American Institute of Stress estimates that stress in the workplace costs U.S. corporations over $300 billion annually, or more than ten times the cost of all strikes combined. In addition, employers may be held liable if they do not offer programs designed to reduce stress in the workplace. It has been estimated that 75 - 90 % of all visits to primary care physicians are for stress related problems.

One in five professionals claim that workplace stress has negatively impacted them physically or psychologically. To some, corporate culture mean toxic environments. Boosting employee productivity requires leadership to ensure that they are strengthening their emotional intelligence business acumen, and investing in stress management skills for their employees. In a recent survey by Leger Marketing, their research indicates that over 41% of blue collar, service and professional workers experience workplace stress as a result of work experiences. Physically 53% of Canadians say they are experiencing headaches, clenched jaws, indigestion, fatigue, insomnia due to stress.

As a result psychologically, 55% experience: anxiety, irritability, defensiveness, anger, mood swings, feelings of helplessness or of being trapped. Over 52% say that stress in the workplace increases their levels of impatience, causes them to procrastinate, makes them quick to argue or withdraw. 30% say stress prevents them from being recognized for their work contributions, while 22% believe that stress has prevented them from moving up in their careers.

Other insights on Canadians and stress are summarized below:

• More than six in 10 Canadians report that they are experience a great deal of stress on the job
• 34 percent of Canadians with health plans agree with the statement that “Workplace stress has been so overwhelming that it has made me physically ill at times.”
• 41 percent of Canadians say that their employer does not do nearly enough to help them manage stress at work
• It is estimated that 40% of worker turnover is due to job stress.

Unfortunately stress for professionals has escalated progressively over the past few decades. Unfortunately most organizations are not actively training all their talent to improve their emotional intelligence skills. One quick survey we provide our clients with more insight on their stress realities at work is a short diagnostic tool which gives key insights on employee’s job stress levels.

Job Stress Diagnostic Tool

Add up the replies to each question for your Total Job Stress Score. If you score between 10-30, you handle stress on your job well; between 40-60, moderately well; 70-100, you’re encountering problems that need to be addressed and resolved.

Summary

Employers have a major role to ease workplace stress. Workers need to learn to take some time out at work to reflect on their emotions and ask some tough questions about why they fell the way they do. Responsibility starts by taking control of one’s life and one’s environment. Employees need to have a positive attitude that they are not a victim - if the environment is toxic - change the environment. Start with the law of two feet if you cannot change it - then ensure your mental health and motivation levels are helping you become simply the best person you can strive to be.

An interesting site to visit is the American Stress Institute Website which provides helpful newsletters, knowledge sources, and access to resources to help improve your organization’s knowledge of managing stress.

Our research in creating collaborating cultures has a foundation of creating positive leaders. By thinking positively - you have the power and control to change your experiences by changing your attitude about them. Developing optimistic perspectives vs negative self-talk patterns are critical skills to develop to avoid seeing the glass half-empty - as well when you think positively you are more productive and less stressed, and hence happier with your life. In all starts, however, by knowing who you really are and what you really what out of life.

Each person is unique and there are certain features of your personality that make some jobs a better fit than others. If you’re in a job that’s not well-suited for your personality, you may be putting yourself under unnecessary stress every day you go to work. The following are some good questions to ask yourself:

• Do you like to work toward deadlines, or do you like your tasks to come in a relatively steady stream?
• Do you like to work as part of a team, or independently?
• Do you like things to be structured and routine, or loose and variable?
• Do you enjoy being a ‘big fish in a small pond’, or would you like to be a ’small fish in a big pond’? (Meaning, would you like to be a small part of a large company or a large part of a small company, or something else?)
• Do you believe in what you do, and is it important to you that you do?
• Do you like lots of change?
• Do you like lots of travel or prefer to be working close to home?

Knowing who you are and then selecting the corporate culture that will allow your special talents to soar in is an important leadership skill to develop. Having mentors and advisors in your career path can also help ensure you make the right decisions. I know personally from my own career experiences had I asked the tougher questions I would have avoided making some mistakes in my career journey. However - we learn from mistakes and stress can help us make the tough decisions to change our current reality.

We all experience some level of stress in our careers - learning how to be in control of it on your terms and avoid unhealthy stress is what having more emotional intelligence is all about. As leaders competing in the war for talent - we have a responsibility to create healthy organizational cultures where stress is healthy and not a business productivity killer which is plaguing North American businesses.

For more information you can also visit our human performance and talent management website at Helix Talent for more information on careers that we are helping our clients recruit for or learn more about our Helix Talent Service offererings.

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Is your organization prepared to meet the collaboration needs of young adults to attract, develop and retain the workforce of the future?

Fact - Generation X and Generation Y Talent use more real-time collaboration tools over asynchronous (non real time like email). According to a recent survey by The Associated Press - almost half of the teens surveyed use Instant Messaging (IM) and almost three fourths of teens use instant messaging more than email, while less than a quarter of adults use IM, and almost three fourths of adults who use IM use email, more often than IM.

I know that with my daughter who recently started university - for me to personally keep in close contact - having an MSN IM account was the best way to stay connected as she seldom checks her email, but guaranteed she is always accessible on MSN IM or via cell text messaging.

So, what do these behaviours tell us about the collaboration age gap between different generations?

I think this means a number of things for organizational and leadership communication approaches. Companies need to encourage IM, Blogs, wikis and all forms of real time collaboration to motivate the talent of the future. These communication needs need to be taken into account and designed into all forms of employee communication, online communication and software development approaches.

Asynchronous communication is well on the way to extinction….unfortunately old habits for the Baby Boomers, including me are hard to break.

Demand for real-time collaboration solutions have already generated more than $1.3 B in 2006 - which represents nearly one quarter of all collaboration application revenue. An increasing trend is to integrate all communication toolkits - and in different formats - whether the media form is via: email, IM, or voice - the promise is an integrated platform or a unified communication platform (UM) which promises to improve the productivity of knowledge workers - and for sure simplify operating infrastructure costs.

A promising collaboration company based in Canada that was recently recognized as one of the hottest Web 2.0 companies at the Enterprise 2.0 and Tim O’ Reilly conference recently held in San Francisco is Octopz.

Octopz is a browser based collaboration solution developed in Flash and has a simplified interface allowing ease of navigation, enables interactive and secure communications, and easily allows markup of advanced media types like videos, audio, animations, Flash files, and 360º panoramas. Octopz gives us a good perspective of the increased collaboration toolkits that are viable business productivity tools. This is a company to have not just on your company watch list, but also BUYING a subscription is a MUST to get you underway in using onoe of the most powerful on demand collaboration software solutions that I have seen in a long time.

More information on understanding collaboration commerce and the business impacts can be further understood by reading Collaboration Commerce: The Next Competitive Advantage.

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The world is changing. “Who knows who” is the new competitive advantage. We have seen the old adage of 6 degrees of separation move to 3 degrees of separation, and with solutions like: LinkedIn, Ryze, Spoke and Vizible are all carving out offerings to increase interaction connections. As Bill Ives in his KM and Portal blog referred to the recent McKinsey research on interactions, knowledge worker productivity opportunities are driven by increasing interaction intelligence. For example, Toyota Motors constantly collaborate with their engineeers and managers to solve business challenges. Knowledge workers are now 80% of an organization’s assets, and learning to understand their interaction practices is critical to business success.

New solutions like wikis offer a competitive advantage as serial wiki innovator, Martin Cleaver communicates on a regular basis. A wiki is best defined as: a writeable intranet which users can make real-time changes to content they have permission to edit.

Companies leading the way achieving interaction advantage using wikis include: UK bank Dresner Kleinwort (DKW), Citibank and Bank of America. According to the former CIO of DKW, JP Rangaswami, ”the wiki counters what you might call the conference room questions problem, where peole have important ideas, information and questions to contribute, but do not want to be seen to do so directly. Small changes soon add up and make a real difference to productivity. When a wiki is set up to serve a certain project, email volume drops by 75 percent.”

Canada I believe is lagging behind so we have launched a new service offering to help close this gap. Check out Helixwikiconsulting.com or contact martin@helixcommerce.com. One of the things I learned when I was with Accenture as a practice partner was that everyone relied on the informal networks of who knew what to get the best and most relevant intelligence to rapidly solve customer needs. Irrespective of the millions of pages logically filed in the Knowledge Exchange, nothing was better than the material on the subject experts current files - not always resident on the internal KM portals.

As businesses transition to ensure experts are sharing their knowledge, there needs to be incentives and tools to enable them to easily contribute and iterate with other colleagues globally. Wikis are a powerful paradigm to help companies work differently. We are starting to use wikis with our Helix clients - we don’t have this right yet. We have learned that training alone and role modeling is insufficient - rather they need daily coaching and institualizaing these tools in their own cultures to unplug old habits.