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Bad Bosses
Many managers fear that their subordinates will learn how inadequate they feel in their jobs. Although hiding vulnerabilities is hardly new, this concern has been exacerbated by a new fear of either becoming obsolete or technology-driven toast in a world of business transformation. "I've never seen businesspeople have to fake it more," says B. Joseph White, past business school dean and interim president at the University of Michigan and now president of the University of Illinois.
Four out of ten newly promoted managers and executives fail within 18 months of starting new jobs, according to research by Manchester, Inc, a leadership development firm in Bala Cynwyd, PA. "Failing" includes being terminated for performance, performing significantly below expectations or voluntarily resigning from the new position.
Managers often fail for a few common reasons: due to unclear or outsized expectations, a failure to build partnerships with key stakeholders, a failure to learn the company, industry or the job itself fast enough, a failure to determine the process for gaining commitments from direct reports and a failure to recognize and manage the impact of change on people.
Those all-to-common poor managers create plenty of problems for companies as well as leading to poor morale, less production and higher turnover.
FSU Survey Sites Worst Boss Offenses
Nearly two of five bosses don't keep their word and more than a fourth bad mouth those they supervise to co-workers, a Florida State University (FSU) study shows. The FSU survey included more than 700 people working in a variety of jobs and asked how their bosses treat them.
"They say that employees don't leave their job or company, they leave their boss," says Wayne Hochwarter, an associate professor of management in the College of Business at FSU. Employees stuck in an abusive relationship experienced more exhaustion, job tension, nervousness, depressed moods and mistrust, the researchers found. The findings include:
39 percent of workers said their supervisor failed to keep promises
37 percent failed to give credit when due
31 percent gave them the "silent treatment" in the past year
27 percent made negative comments about them to other employees or managers
24 percent invaded their privacy
Workers in bad situations should remain optimistic, Hochwarter said.
Keep doing your job in the best way possible while being tolerant of your boss...who may be trying to learn how to best manage you and others. If your boss has been recently promoted or recruited, you can expect that he or she will be incompetent for the first 9 to 12 months in the new position.
Source: Brent Kallestad, The Associated Press
Searching for Love
The Internet has special appeal for Baby Boomers, an impatient lot used to getting their way. 
According to JupiterResearch, 15 percent of Internet users between the ages of 45 and 54 browsed dating sites last year—almost as much as the average online user.
Internet dating is quick, it's efficient. Boomers searching for same-age partners can comb through sites like PerfectMatch.com (63 percent are 35 to 60) and PrimeSingles.net, a 50-plus site whose membership grew 39 percent in 2005. "As people get older, they definitely start dropping a lot of the look requirements they have in their mind," says Joe Tracy, publisher of the Web-based Online Dating Magazine. "They're more successful at finding what they want, and that's why they do well with personality sites that match them; it's easier for them to skip over the players."
At "compatibility sites," where people are matched by the results of personality tests, there's who a race to lure boomers who can pay the heftier membership fees. Chemistry.com, a new brand from Match.com, and eHarmony.com have both hired social scientists who they hope will make their questionnaire-to-romance algorithms more credible. Over at Chemistry.com, anthropologist Helen Fisher has been pondering this: "Fifty percent of personality is based in genetics, brain chemistry and hormones, so maybe we are attracted to somebody not only because of all of the social and psychological reasons but for chemical reasons, too."
Better loving through chemistry with an assist from technology.
Source: The Boomer Files, Newsweek, Feb 20, 2006
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