Through our recent assessment work, we have noticed a number of candidates with traits that are not considered desirable in a sales role. In particular, those who have high Social and low Utilitarian motivations. Often, these people have a need to be liked, accepted and helpful even to their own detriment. Those traits are desirable in many positions, but not sales. The main reason is this type of salesperson’s inability to qualify prospects by asking strong questions. A sales person that doesn’t qualify opportunities wastes valuable time, energy and company resources. They typically will take any meeting they can get, return with no particular purpose in mind and spend way… Read More
Continue ReadingGo To Your Strengths – The Art Of Playing Dumb
Red Bird and myself are fighting over the chance to claim this CareerJournal.com article – The Art of Playing Dumb To Deter Unwanted Tasks. Jared Sandberg is an entertaining writer and I highly recommend this article. At first I thought it was tongue-in-cheek, but it is not. This ability is a real artform. Strategic incompetence isn’t about having a strategy that fails, but a failure that succeeds. It almost always works to deflect work one doesn’t want to do — without ever having to admit it. For junior staffers, it’s a way of attaining power through powerlessness. For managers, it can juice their status by pretending to be incapable of… Read More
Continue ReadingIncreased Pay or Better Benefits? That Is The Question.
So which is more important to employees, pay or benefits (specifically health benefits)? In last week’s Workforce Management’s newsletter, a nationwide survey was recently conducted by the National Business Group on Health that asked 1,619 employed people that specific question. They found that employees in the U.S. consider their health plan to be their most important benefit. Furthermore, in a world of rising health care costs, employees would rather give up wage increases and other benefits to preserve health care coverage. More than 50% said they would accept fewer choices in order to keep their premiums low and roughly 75% would rather receive employer health benefits than get paid more… Read More
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