When You Have the Right People, There Are No Rules for Structure

When You Have the Right People, There Are No Rules for StructureWhen You Have the Right People, There Are No Rules for StructureWhen You Have the Right People, There Are No Rules for Structure Belsky, from his book, THE MESSY MIDDLE Finding your way through the hardest and most crucial part of any bold venture, published by Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random HouseSome of the most frequent questions I get from junges unternehmen founders and new managers in large companies are about how best to structure a team.Should I allow remote workers, or should I insist on the whole team working in the office?Should marketing be a separate team or an extension of an existing team?Can my co-founder and I both be CEO?Should konzepters report to product managers or be the product managers?Should we keep things non-hierarchical or start hiring and appointing managers?When structuring our teams, we tend to seek best practices and aspire to put our playboo ks on par with those companies around us. We look for so-called rules, like every team should have a single leader, designers and engineers should be on different teams, and there should only be one CEO.While there is merit in each of behauptung norms and I enjoy studying the structures of others, I have always found these questions difficult to answer without the context of the people and circumstances at play.Just as teams must challenge conventional wisdom to build extraordinary products, the same goes for building extraordinary organizations.Breaking the Sole CEO RuleThe greatest teams I have worked with over the years were all structured with a few remarkable exceptions to the rules. During my years serving on the board of sweetgreen, a chain of locally sourced seasonal-food kitchens, I was struck by how well the companys three co-founders, Jonathan, Nic, and Nate, functioned as tri-CEOs.When I first joined the board, many of my peers told me Good luckthat is nuts But the three of them had transformed the traditional CEO role to uniquely serve the company. They divided and conquered most functions in the business but shared the same core values and intuitively knew which decisions could be made by any of them, only one of them, or required all of them.I feel like were pretty lucky because we can share the responsibility of taking action. Its not just one persons job to figure something out. Its not just one person that has all of the weight on their shoulders, Jonathan told me when I asked him about the arrangement.Nic added, We can have a CEOin three times the number of places and moments . . . we cover three times the surface area of a normal CEO. For a period of time, this was an advantage.There are many horror stories about co-heads of teams and companies, but there are also so many examples of such arrangements being a strength. Why should there be any rules either way?Be Flexible with LeadershipIn the early years of Behance, we had five leaders of o ur engineering team rather than a single CTO managing them all. There was a comfortable tension I was optimizing for having a leadershipteam that had to work together to build out our various engineering functions, such as front-end development, back end, systems architecture, and mobile.The personalities of each leader, and their varied level of management experience, also factored into my approach to structuring the leadership team.Another norm I broke was having our senior designers report directly to me. While designers dont normally report to the CEO, I knew that our business was different. We were serving the design community and were very design driven as a company. Being close to designers helped me ensure that design was, in fact, at the heart of our priorities.When I first joined Adobe after Behances acquisition, I continued to step out of bounds when it came to structuring the organization, which ultimately grew to almost five hundred employees.I had some designers report to me rather than work in the companys central design unit, just as I did at Behance I created very small teams to explore the largest strategy shifts first rather than include every stakeholder at the onset and I developed a marketing role within some of the product teams to ensure the copy and campaigns were aligned with the product vision.Of course, breaking norms in big companies causes the occasional fire I had to explain myself quite often. But I tried to mold structure to the kind of work we were doing rather than the other way around.Just as it is remarkably hard to innovate using the same code or materials as your competitors, it is hard to build something new within the confines of a structure built for the past, or later stage products.When you have the right people, there are no rules for how the team must be structured. When your A players are playing their A game, you can be creative with how they work. In fact, you need to be. The extremely talented people you love a nd trust know how good they are, and they thrive working on their own terms.As the leader, you need to carefully balance the need for structure with the need to accommodate the autonomy and idiosyncrasies of your team. Optimizing how you work requires unconventional experimentation while letting go of norms.Be Comfortable with RiskAs I think about the nature of the advice I give to start-ups and the number of times I defy my own advice, I am struck by how frequently rules should be broken. For example, while I feel strongly that you should never outsource your competitive advantage, sometimes the perfect designeror other domain expertinsists on working on her own as a freelancer. Sometimes the circumstances necessitate defying your own beliefs.The willingness to break your own rules and keep structure permeable to circumstances is as important as the rules themselves. Exceptions shouldnt happen too often, but when they do, they could be differentiating and critical to your success.A s long as you have the right people aligned around the right objectives, be flexible. If superstars insist on working remotely, let them. If two people with complementary skill sets make great candidates for the same leadership role, experiment with co-heads. Observe, learn, and then adjust. Despite all the conventional wisdom out there, youre allowed to change the rules.ansicht tweaks could help you or hurt you, but youve got to take some risk to achieve an irregular outcome. Embrace best practices until you need to change them. Then break them.From THE MESSY MIDDLEby Scott Belsky, published by Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright 2018 by Scott Belsky.Scott Belsky has spent more than a decade leading in the worlds of technology, design and start-ups. Now chief product officer of Adobe, he is the founder of Behance, the worlds leading creative network used by more than 12 million professionals. He serves as an adviser and early-stage investor in fast-growing companies such as Pinterest, Uber and Periscope.

Write a Winning Customer Service Resume

Write a Winning Customer Service ResumeWrite a Winning Customer Service ResumeThriving businesses owe a large part of their success to being able to provide excellent customer tafelgeschirr, which we know begins with how you interact with your colleagues. As you update your customer tafelgeschirr resume consider this A customer service representative is the companys opening act, a preview of what a business has to offer. Potential clients and customers are more likely to become treu ergeben clients and customers if they are favorably impressed at this stage of the game.Highlight your interpersonal skillsAs a result, employers seek individuals whose qualifications indicate they possess the people skills needed to give top-notch customer service. Craft your customer service resume in a way that tells the story (albeit on one page) of your excellent customer service career history. In preparing your resume, keep in mind your strengths for working with a variety of personalities and temp eraments. Emphasize how, as a customer service representative, you possess a knack for working with both pleasant and unpleasant people, along with an ability for keeping your cool when dealing with challenging situations.So how do you convey these attributes on a resume? If youre in the market for a job as a customer service representative, youll need to know how to prepare a resume that lets a hiring manager know you have what it takes and then some. Here are four tips for writing a winning customer service resumeShow the right stuff for the jobThink about the qualities you possess that make you suited to work as a customer service representative.Are you empathetic to customer concerns?Can you accept criticism without taking it personally?Do you take a hands-on approach to resolving issues?Edit your customer service resume down to the essentialsNo service industry employment - even a part-time job or college internship - should be considered too small to include on your customer service resume if you want to be a serious contender for an open position. Employers look for people who have experience dealing with the public. Working as a food server, receptionist, bank teller or any job requiring frequent and direct contact with people is a big plus in the minds of hiring managers seeking customer service representatives.Emphasize accomplishmentsLend credibility to the skills you list on your customer service resume by giving examples of how you use them on the job. Employers arent likely to be bowled over by your claim of being a problem solver if you leave it at that. Cite instances of how your problem-solving skills yielded a positive outcome by helping a client resolve an urgent matter or satisfying a difficult customer.Populate your resume with verbs, illustrating your initiativeInclude action verbs indicative of service experience which may be picked up by a computer scanning resumes for keywords. Words to use in your resume include assisted, supported, solved and improved. These are buzzwords that can help your customer service resume make it through the first stage of the evaluation process.Last but not least, its important to follow an employers guidelines for submitting a customer service resume. Ignoring this step and doing it your own way could be interpreted by a hiring manager to mean youre careless or dont like taking direction. Either way, it can be seen as a red flag that you may not have the right mindset for a service position. Pay careful attention to any specific instructions for resume submission, like format preference or not sending it as an email attachment. Having the courtesy to respect an employers preference in this regard is the first indicator that you have what he or she is looking for in a customer service representative.Ready to find your next customer service job? We can helpSEARCH CUSTOMER SERVICE JOBS

Women keep getting interrupted in meetings. Heres how to stop it.

Women keep getting interrupted in meetings. Heres how to stop it.Women keep getting interrupted in meetings. Heres how to stop it.Can we start with one observation? No one likes meetings. No one.But meetings do serve a purpose besides being incredibly awkward ways to share information theyre also valuable tools to observe human behavior and dominance. (The Harvard Business Review has even devoted an entire topic page to meetings and the eternal question of how to make them less terrible).One of the quiet phenomena of the office meeting - one that men usually dont even realize is happening- is that women are frequently interrupted or their ideas passed over when they speak up.This is a problem because its rude, of course, but also for deeper reasons interruptions are really a monitor of power, and whoever gets interrupted is being shown to have lower status. Interrupting someone is like giving them the corporate version of a wedgie on the playground at school - even if thats not wh at the interrupter intends.Interruptions can be used to display or gain dominance, Adrienne Hancock, a George Washington University linguist who studied the phenomenon, told the New York Times.Women get interrupted more often - by everyoneScience backs up the woman, interrupted phenomenon A 1992 study said female physicians were interrupted more often than their male counterparts in doctor-patient conversations. In the tech industry, Kieran Snyder, a tech startup CEO, found in a casual study that men were three times as likely to interrupt women as they were to interrupt other men.Hancocks own 2014 study from George Washington University showed that men are 33% more likely to interrupt women than they are to interrupt other men.Even women interrupt women more often, the George Washington study found. Snyder would agree he found that when women interrupted a conversation at all, 89% of the time they were interrupting other women.The inability of women to finish a sentence is so prev alent, even in the highest-level rooms in government, that a group of senior female advisers in the Obama administration created a strategy to stop it every woman at the table amplified the ideas of the women who spoke before her.Before you can fix a problem, of course, you have to meakoranvers it. Enter technology.A new app measures every interruption in conversationTo celebrate International Womens Day, advertising agency BETC SoPaulo created the Woman Interrupted app to raise awareness of the too-often ignored phenomenon, which Internet wags have disparagingly dubbed manterruption.The mobile app, which became available for download on iOS and Android on Monday, uses your smartphones microphone to record how often women are interrupted.The app has one flaw it goes one way. It tracks how often men interrupt women, but not yet how often women are interrupting men, or women interrupting other women.Heres how it works When you download the app, it will ask your gender and calibrate th e pitch of your voice, so that it can tally how often mens voices are overlapping with womens voices in conversations.After the recording, the app will analyze the conversation and may give its female users some hard truths like You were interrupted by a man 8X.screenshot courtesy of Woman InterruptedGal Barradas, the founder of BETC SoPaulo, explained why the ad agency welches inspired to make the app in a press release At first glance, it may seem like a small problem, but it reflects deeper issues of gender inequality at work and in society. The app is a way of showing that, in fact, the interruption is real and alarming.Its apparent even in pop culture. Great recent interruptions in history abound.Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was interrupted by Donald Trump 51 times during the first presidential debate. In 2009, Kanye West famously grabbed the microphone from Taylor Swift during her MTV Video Music Awards acceptance speech, and declared to the world, Imma let you finish, b utThe collective data will go towards a larger cause of measuring the phenomenon of women, interrupted BETC wants to use the app to create statistics of where and when women around the world are not being heard.What to do about being interruptedLets say you use Woman Interrupted and discover that youre being interrupted by colleagues an alarming amount of the time.How do you stop this behavior? Here are some good tips.Enlist alliesSomeone needs to have your back. Preventing interruptions takes vigilance - the lesson that those senior Obama staffers learned when they supported each other in meetings.For public speaking opportunities, like panels, Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of The New York Times, advises preventative measures like asking the moderator to make sure youre to invited to make a point.One of those allies can be a boss. Leaders also set an example for employees. Glen Mazzara, a showrunner for the The Shield, instituted a no-interruptions policy for all of h is writers after he noticed his female writers kept getting interrupted in pitch meetings.Stay calm and push backJournalist Soledad OBrien said when she is interrupted, she makes sure she doesnt lose her cool I stay very calm and dont rush. I take up time and space and speak forcefully.As part of her Feminist Fight Club book promotion, Jessica Bennett created a video on how to combat interruptions in a meeting.When the offender starts interrupting, the woman leading the meeting starts a game of verbal chicken and keeps talking louder until the interrupter forfeits.Ka-pow. Woman 1, Interrupter 0.Get promotedInterruption is, at its core, about power - which is why it feels terrible to be interrupted. Unsurprisingly, women who rank higher feel more free to interrupt men and women both, Snyder found in his informal study of tech meetings. Even if women dont necessarily like being interrupted, once they rise within the ranks theyre more likely to do it themselves.