Posted on: October 14, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
In my opinion trust, confidence, extensive experience, and training are necessary for a manager to become a mentor. In my working career (which started before high school and really got moving after graduating college) I’ve worked for companies the least being one and most being nine years.
Trust and Confidence
I’ve always had the perspective to trust that a direct report would not be able to take my position. If they did, I was confident that it would help me move to a better position there or at another company. Still today, after managing more than a hundred team members in my career, I haven’t ever had someone have the ability to replace my position while I was there. My generous team working attitude has helped me consistently work on growing my experience while also focusing on growing team members as much as possible. With that, and helping team members to grow, I’ve found people go home at the end of the day or weekend content and with hope. And then they bring more enthusiasm to their next work day. Having strong trust between the employee and manager is essential.
Experience
Experience I had after college vs now is very different. When a person is a manager and has managed many other people in the past, they can know well how to deal with situations that again arise. They can easily improvise if needed. The learning curve grows so a manager has enthusiasm in quickly learning new things. Most importantly, the manager needs the experience to be an expert in everything they manage so that their team has someone who can manage what they do, have realistic expectations, and do everything as well if needed.
Training
I believe in offering not only training and mentoring, but also support in the way of possible career advancement and salary increase opportunities for performance. I would think most people like to look forward to good things. If someone can go through their work day knowing they not only have the training they need, but that they can grow from there, that can make their attitude for the day that much better.
Posted on: October 14, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
The most recent unsolicited email I received from someone I don’t know offering online marketing services was this morning. It amused me to no end. I think it was partly the grammatical errors that added to their professionalism. Or possibly it was that they didn’t know my name and addressed me as sir or madam. Or maybe it was the fact that the person spent a paragraph explaining they really did look at my Website thoroughly before sending me an email. But in their email they didn’t take the time to actually mention my Website name / URL! They talked about having techniques to get any Website to the top of Google quickly. They alluded to a handful of social networking Websites as examples of the kinds of sites they would automatically link me to. They feel it is effortless for them to do this work, as if their magic computer would plug my Website into the “mysterious” online world. Their ending, to gain my trust, was to offer their personal cell phone number and Skype ID.
They are probably contacting me not from jordanhardy.net, but another Website I had worked on in past years where they somehow found my contact info on a cached page.
If really this person is legit, I see some problems in their offering.
Personal Issues With Hiring this Person
- Generally when I’ve hired marketing, sales, and other team members, it has never been from unsolicited emails like this one. It has been from posting an ad on Job Websites, sorting through a huge number of applications, and finally interviewing up to 20 people to fill each open position. Or it has been through networking.
- They’re the expert? What about the fact that it has taken me a huge amount of experience and training to do this so well myself? They just happen to be gifted? How come it is so difficult for me to find high quality sales and marketing people when I hire? Just this one person will do it all for me? Wow! When I hire people, to get them very good at what I need them to do, it usually takes a lot of training, coaching, and experience.
- Where are they? What proof do I have they are really one person?
- Why is there no portfolio URL in their email letting me know I can contact them from their Website as well?
- How would I know they are actually getting me linked out there in a good and not bad way? Can they provide links that show a human has done marketing work, or will it have been that a cheap Web tool submitted automatically with many errors or submissions to low quality Websites therefore affecting Google Pagerank?
- Do they know who I am? In other words since they did now know my name in the email, what would happen if I used a technique I use with telemarketers? I’d say, well since you’re alluding to me and my Website, what is my name and what is my domain?
Professional General Issues with Hiring this Person
- It needs to be clear how they will go about their work. They need to be clear what kinds of Websites they work with, how they work, and how many of each task will be done. When work is done, they need to track it to provide to the client.
- Although in rare instances someone can find an employee like this, it would be much better finding the person from online research, a reference, or digging up their resume online.
- Spelling errors should always be corrected.
- Although there is some special magic that comes from extensive experience in online marketing, most is smart, hard work. This needs to be clear.
Although this was a bit of a long post, I had to do so to have a bit of fun.
