EXPERT OPINION

Expect Greater Legal Scrutiny of Your Recruitment Programs

As most HR managers know by now, OFCCP (Office of General Contract Compliance Programs) has issued its final guidelines on Internet applicants. These guidelines are rather complex and many issues have been raised regarding them. As a result, the OFCCP has provided several documents to help companies understand the new guidelines, including a short summary that might be used as a presentation to other managers and a list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) that addresses some important issues...

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THOUGHTS ON LEADERSHIP

Are Leaders Born or Made? Why Most Training and Development Programs Fail to Deliver an Appreciable ROI

Over the last 30 years I haven't seen more than a handful of people go into managerial roles for the first time knowing instinctively what to do. Managing, like any other skill, requires knowing "what" to do and then practicing over time to get progressively better.

The "what" of managing is pretty simple, really. You need to know four things...

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TODAY'S NEW WORK PLACE

The Virtues (and Challenges) of Being Virtual

Part One: Building a Virtual Infrastructure

Working collaboratively with people who are not in close proximity to each other is nothing new in today's workplace. Exciting communication technologies allow innovative minds to collaborate in virtual teams regardless of how geographically dispersed the participants are. The virtual team is a type of small group made possible and necessary by new forms and tools of communication, but it is not without its perils. A few rules of thumb should be followed to help a team achieve peak performance...

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IN THE NEWS

An article with the following title recently appeared in Business Week: White Men Can't Help It

According to a recent article in Business Week, many large class action employment discrimination cases are relying on the notion of unconscious bias, a theory put forth primarily by a sociologist named William T. Bielby from the University of Pennsylvania. He has applied the findings of social psychologists that people use categories to reduce complexity to claim that white men can't help themselves from being biased against women and minorities...

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Book Review: The Feiner Points of Leadership

Understanding the difference between management and leadership skills and how to keep them properly balanced begins Michael Feiner's discussion of leadership. Formerly chief people officer at Pepsi-Cola, Feiner is currently a professor of management at Columbia Business School in New York. Knowing how to motivate and energize people is the way to achieve great results, he contends. Corporate success means managing relationships down, up and across...

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