Leadership Done Right

Brandon W. Jones

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Extensive Job Specific Knowledge or Previous Leadership Experience?

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Lately, I have thought a lot about hiring new leaders.  What is more important:  someone with extensive job specific knowledge or someone with previous leadership experience?  When hiring a new person, the ideal situation would be to hire someone with both extensive job specific knowledge and previous leadership experience.  However, this is not always possible.  What do you do then?

Extensive Job Specific Knowledge or Previous Leadership Experience?

Well first let’s look at what characteristics the two types bring to the table.

Extensive Job Specific Knowledge

The person with extensive job specific knowledge knows the ins and outs of the existing working environment.  They know what has worked well in the past and what hasn’t.  They also know how to deal with people specific to the working environment.  All these aspects create a foundation from which they can lead.

Because this type of person only has job specific knowledge without the leadership experience, they also have some downsides.  They may struggle in making quick decisions regarding personnel.  They also may have limited knowledge of how to respond when faced with challenges.  Their inexperience as a leader can appear as a lack of confidence in their personal abilities which could show through to their employees. [Read more…] about Extensive Job Specific Knowledge or Previous Leadership Experience?

Life’s Transitions – The Rest of the Story

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As my blog post the other day about life’s transitions stated, I have been out of the blogosphere for the last little while because of a job transfer. It is very interesting how everything came about.

Life's Transitions - The Rest of the Story

My Experience

Have you ever had an experience that you felt happened because it was meant to happen that way? That is exactly what happened with my recent job transfer. Leading up to my new position I had gone through a number of set backs. I had applied for three other supervisor positions in my company but was not the successful candidate. At that point I was beginning to get discouraged. After earning my MBA, I was hoping to progress to the next level.

In August 2011, I noticed that another new supervisor position had been posted. After applying for three other positions in a short time and not being the successful candidate, I wasn’t sure I wanted to apply again right away. The time I spent applying for the other positions was hard on my family and myself because from one week to the next we didn’t know if we were going to be moving or not. After thinking about the new supervisor job until the last day it was open, I finally decided I would apply because I felt a strong feeling telling me to apply. [Read more…] about Life’s Transitions – The Rest of the Story

Leaders, Obtain And Keep The Right People: Part 1 of 3

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Recently I spoke to a manager friend of mine. He mentioned a major complaint he has with many leaders in the business world. He said that there are far too many “fire happy” managers. They are fire happy because they fail in one of the following three areas:

  1. They don’t hire the right people from the beginning.
  2. They don’t train the right people properly.
  3. They don’t have a good system in place to retain the right people.

Because it all starts with hiring the right people, this post will cover techniques for hiring the right people.

Obtain and Keep the Right People

1. Know your how to do your job.

Leaders need to know their own job really well before they can begin hiring the right people to work for them. They must know the specifics of their job on a daily basis. They must also know what it takes to do a good job in their current position. They must be the expert in their department, so they can answer any questions that people might have of them. Included in being the expert in their department, they must also have a very good idea of what their employees do in their jobs.

[Read more…] about Leaders, Obtain And Keep The Right People: Part 1 of 3

SAS Institute

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SAS Institute is a good example of how to run an organization effectively and smoothly. They were quite different from their competitors in several ways. They were very different in the way that they did their outsourcing, recruiting, compensation, and benefits. They set up a system helped the employees to work effectively and efficiently. The system wasn’t too stringent on the employees. It gave them freedom to set their own schedules.

SAS Institute

SAS Institute

SAS Institute did very little outsourcing which helped to provide more opportunities for new employees within the company. By avoiding outsourcing, they were able to retain more control over every aspect of the work that they did. Temporarily it is fine to avoid outsourcing, but in the long run it becomes very expensive to do all processes in house. They could also run into problems with entering markets that are unrelated to their core processes. [Read more…] about SAS Institute