Issue 147, April 2008
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| That’s How We Do Things Around Here, Part 1 |
Anita Attridge, a Career Coach at the Five O'Clock Club in America, has kindly allowed me to share her article on organisational culture with you all. Over the coming newsletters, we will look at researching organisational culture from without, accepting it, networking around culture and learning about culture from within.
“Custom, that unwritten law, by which the people keep even the King in awe” - Charles Davenport
Joining a new company can be like moving to a foreign country. You will encounter new customs, dress, language, ideas and rules, and you will need to learn about all of these in order to do well.
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You will be expected to work and interact effectively in the organization.
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You will be accepted and you will fit into the organization—or not!
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You will be assessed for recognition, compensation, rewards and promotion, depending on how well you perform in the new—and perhaps very different—culture.
If you choose to ignore organizational culture, you do so at your own peril.
Yes, there will be the new customs, dress, language, ideas and rules, but simply defined, organizational culture is the set of written and unwritten rules by which people function to get their work done.
What makes you successful in one company may not make you successful in another company. For example, at General Electric, the organizational culture is regimented and managers are expected to use the GE processes without question. At Xerox, the organizational culture is fast-paced, and continuously changing. Managers have considerable latitude in how they get the job done. At Merck, the organizational culture is consensus driven, with a strong emphasis on data analysis. Managers need a consensus to accomplish their goals.
What kind of environment are you accustomed to? If your new employer expects people to work differently than you did at your previous organization, you will be expected to adapt to the new culture.
Case Study: Sara and the Hierarchy
Sara, a highly successful marketing director in an insurance company, accepted a marketing director position with a prominent healthcare company. The insurance company had strict rules about meeting with senior management. People were expected to discuss their marketing ideas in detail with their own manager, request permission to meet with senior managers, and then share the results of those meetings with their manager.
In her new job at the healthcare company, Sara’s first assignment was to develop marketing ideas for a new product. She followed the process of meeting with senior managers that had been expected in the insurance industry. She was taken aback when her manager said, “Sara, why are you bothering me with all of this detail? And why haven’t you met with the senior managers already?” The following day, a colleague explained that Sara didn’t need permission to meet with the senior managers: “Everyone here has access to whomever they need to talk with to get their job done. I’m surprised you waited so long to meet with them, too.” Having the freedom to meet with senior managers whenever she needed was a new way of working for Sara.
Organizational Culture: Unwritten, Unspoken and Powerful
Organizational culture is powerful because it determines how a person will fit into the workplace. It can prevent a person from being promoted because, despite talent, skills and contributions, she chooses to do things “her way,” going against the grain of “the way we do things here”. Unfortunately, organizational culture is:
But it does govern the way work really gets done. We sometimes hear that a person was turned down for a job because the interviewer felt that he or she would not be a good fit. In other words, the interviewer knows organizational culture well enough to gauge who will succeed and who won’t. If the job hunter has little idea about the culture of the hiring company, it will be hard to grasp why he was not hired or, more importantly, what he could have done differently in the interview.
Case Study: Bart Knew His Stuff, but that Wasn’t Enough
Bart, a finance manager who worked for a large telecommunications company, landed an interview for a similar position with a computer company. During the interview, Bart was asked about his accomplishments, how he interfaced with department heads and how the work was done in his company. The telecommunications company had automated financial systems honed to meet the company’s needs, and prided itself on how well the processes worked. Changes were carefully thought through before they were implemented.
The computer company, however, had a different attitude about how to get work done. Responsiveness to changing customers’ needs was key and their financial systems were continuously modified to keep up. Managers in all functions were expected to anticipate changes and be prepared to respond rapidly. When Bart was not invited back for the third round of interviews, he called the hiring manager to find out why he had not made the cut. The manager told Bart that his financial skills were impressive, but that she did not think he was a fit for their organizational culture. Bart met with his Five O’Clock Club Career Coach to discuss what had happened. When pressed by the coach, he admitted that he didn’t know much about the culture in the computer company. He’d gone on the interview unprepared. With a little research and reflection, Bart realized that the expectations of a finance manager in a computer company differed greatly from those in a telecommunications company. On his current job, the pace of change was moderate. The computer company was fast-paced; chaos was accepted and the ability to change at a moment’s notice was crucial. Bart now understood the cultural differences, and saw that he had not positioned himself well during the interview.
In the next newsletter, in part two of Anita's article, we look at accepting organisational culture, at understanding yourself and at how to investigate organisational culture from without.
Author Bio: Anita Attridge is a Career Coach at the Five O’Clock Club, a national outplacement and career counselling network. For more information: www.fiveoclockclub.com, America's Premier Career Coaching and Outplacement Organization. "One organization with a long record of success in helping people find jobs is The Five O'Clock Club" - FORTUNE MAGAZINE
| UK Online Ad Spend Tipped to Overtake TV |
TV advertising spend is predicted to fall below internet spend by 2009, as per the Reuters article below. This appears due to a number of factors; the growth in pay-per-view TV & live-&-streaming news casts; the increased use of hard drive recorders and satellite services; the increased penetration of the internet; increased consumer sophistication; the difficulty in gaining cut-through with traditional advertising forms; and changing customer expectations around personalisation - how they want to be reached and interacted with on an individual level rather than mass marketed to.
LONDON (Reuters - Reporting by Kate Holton; Editing by David Hulmes) - The Internet will usurp television as the biggest advertising medium in Britain by the end of 2009, according to a report published on Monday April 7th, 2007.
Britain has the most developed online advertising market in the world which the report by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), PricewaterhouseCoopers and the World Advertising Research Centre said was worth 2.8 billion pounds ($5.6 billion) in 2007.
It said last year's 38 percent online ad growth was driven by the rising number of people online, the introduction of cheap laptops and the growing popularity of catch-up TV on the Internet through services such as Channel 4's 4oD. "With broadband speeds on the up and consumers spending more time on more sites, the outlook for online advertising is rosy - in fact we expect it to overtake TV in 2009 when it will become the UK's biggest medium," IAB chief executive Guy Phillipson said in a statement.
The report said the Internet was the biggest driver of overall advertising growth in 2007, with the entire sector in Britain experiencing 4.3 percent growth to 18.4 billion pounds.
Online ad spend had a market share of 15.3 percent, up from 11.4 percent in 2006, but behind display press advertising at 19.9 percent and TV at 21.8 percent. Display online advertising, such as banners and video, grew 31 percent while paid-for search marketing was "maturing, but not slowing" as marketers and brands learned to secure a greater return on their investment through "key phrases" and accurate targeting.
Advertising spend on search grew 39 percent, in line with overall growth, to 1.6 billion pounds, while its market share remained largely the same at almost 58 percent. Classified advertising showed 54 percent year-on-year growth.
Among the different sectors, recruitment led the market with 25.7 percent market share, ahead of the automotive sector and technology, which overtook finance for the first time.
| NZ Career Practitioners Links |
Below are a few updated links for useful websites if you are in the career field. Enjoy!
Here are this newsletter's TLAs for you:
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SSD, Solid State Drive. Forget shaking your PC & having the HDD not being able to process; SSDs are data storage devices that uses solid-state memory to store persistent data. An SSD emulates a conventional hard disk drive, thus easily replacing it in any application.
Please feel free to email me with any TLAs that you want to get the bottom (meaning!) of.
Over the next few newsletters, we are going to look at all you can do with Alt and letters. This time it's D:
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Access "Open the selected table, query, form, report, data access page, macro, or module in Design view" Alt & D
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Excel "Move the selected field into the Data area in PivotTables" Alt & D
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IE "Select the text in the Address bar. " Alt & D
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Outlook "Decline when responding to an E-Mail schedule request" Alt & D
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Word "Insert a Date field into a document" Alt & Shift & D
A while ago in the media there were stories about very small human fossils being found in Indonesia. Now scientists think that the fossil's small stature may have been due to an iodine deficiency. Check it out at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7276943.stm This website is a must for those of you who need to give people regular directions to somewhere, or who want to document how to get to somewhere you have discovered at http://www.backofmyhand.com/ And lastly, if you want to keep up with news from the UK, then http://www.newsnow.co.uk/h/ is the site for you. Links to feeds from a variety of news agencies are posted on the page so you can keep up to the minute with what is making the news in the British Isles.
Catch you again soon!! E-mail your suggestions to me here 
