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Response to Christmas Cards

There is no mistaking that the advice that I picked up from a website about writing greeting cards was critical.

Basically, it was very simple. Add a personal note to every card. A handwritten note, that is. And no, not just a signature either…

This was tough medicine, as it meant that I would be writing a personal note in each of the greeting cards I sent to some 300 people across the region.

But, I did it — as painful as it felt. I got writer’s cramp, I complained to myself, and I had a strong feeling that I was wasting my time, but I persisted.

In the cards I shared about the difficulty my wife and I had transitioning to Jamaica, and how the second half of the year with its hurricanes, rains, dengue, and elections made it full of chaos and change. I said that I was looking forward to a more stable 2008.

It took a few weeks for me to realize that something different was happening — many, many more recipients of my card were responding. Some sent email, others send cards, and one even sent a gift.

I was blown away. It turns out to have been well worth the extra effort, and I am very glad I made it.

Here is the original article I read, and here is another one that I just found that also seems to be helpful.

Original article – Personal notes to clients

New article – Writing Greeting Card Messages

All in all, sending a greeting card is such an old-fashioned gesture that it appears to stand out from the majority who just cannot bother, or who can only send a generic e-card (although I was forced to send some after running out of US postage). I credit the 2time – time management approach for my ability to do it without it killing me!

P.S. I found the link I originally got these ideas from: http://longtermclients.hubspot.com/44254/Blog/bid/2333/Personal-notes-to-clients-tip-sheet

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Already, always networking

The finishing touches are being put on Framework’s new ebook on Caribbean networking and it struck me that a professional is always networking, whether they want to or not. This can easily be seen with what is currently happening on Facebook, which is making the activity of networking in the region much, much easier than it has ever been in the past.

When the topic of Facebook comes up, the reaction is usually one of two: either they talk about how addictive it is, or they talk about how little time they have and how they are too busy to be on Facebook.

The difference is interesting — because Facebook does make networking easy. In fact, it makes almost ALL aspects of networking easy, effortless and it saves a great deal of time and effort.

It defies explanation to those who don’t understand it, but I am coming to realize that those who don’t have the time to be on Facebook are probably also the ones who don’t have the time to network. In other words, they are willing to leave their networking to chance. They are willing to squeeze the activity in a little here and there.

What they don’t know is that they would get a much bigger bang for their buck if they were to use a networking tool like Facebook. It is an extremely high-leverage activity.

Also, it is easy to see that on Facebook, the number of people using the free service is indirectly proportional to age. In other words, younger people have networks in the hundreds, while older people can hardly find ten.

The fact of the matter is that younger people are better networked than older people, and are using tools to give themselves a tremendous advantage over their older peers. They understand that they are always networking, whether they are thinking about it or not.

Their profile in Facebook is doing the work for them, and their presence in their friends’ networks speaks for who they are in an efficient and time-effective way.

Those that “don’t have time” to network are stuck with the old practices — attending functions, giving out business cards, etc. — that all take time, money and paper and they just have no idea what they are missing.

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Networking vs. Building a Network

It seems that people who get caught up in the idea of “networking” can get confused about the goals of their efforts.

It’s easy to think that it has something to do with socializing, selling, making friends or liming. These activities all have their place, but they don’t accomplish much in the long term.

Instead, the purpose of the activity is to “build a network.”

The word “build” is important here. It implies the slow but steady expansion of something that starts off small, but eventually turns into something substantial.

Of course, once the network is built, it must be carefully pruned, fed and maintained to help it thrive. In this way, a good networker is more of a careful gardener than anything else, who has the patience to allow small actions to produce large results over time.

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The Young Future Business Leader: An Endangered Species? part 1 of 2

This discussion was triggered by the following Facebook.com group forum question: “What do you think of the 80% of the UWI graduates that leave Jamaica???”

I think after receiving an email from an executive on the island in response to my search for a postgraduate job so that I CAN move back home, I can understand why the UWI graduates leave…he reports plenty of bachelor degree-holding intelligent young people answering phones in call centers or stuck in positions that pay US$17,000 a year, because there are just not enough positions at the post-graduate entry level for them.

Then I see another trend as I survey SplashJamaica and other Caribbean job banks, where there are a lot of higher level roles that are empty and the companies are DYING for people to fill them, to the point where they hire expatriates, foreigners who need work visas.

There is obviously a disconnect there…and I know one immediate issue that causes it: the putting down of roots in the years following graduation from college. In the 5 years between graduation from college and the accumulation of enough experience to qualify for the higher level positions, people are not going to stop living their personal lives, and the ties that develop and the roots that are planted become the ties that bind. I for one wanted to reach back ASAP after graduation, and among other reasons, it was so that I would NOT encounter Mr. Right up here, and end up attached to someone whose career and immediate ties are with the U.S.! In those 5 years, people’s lives become more complex at a faster rate than at any subsequent point in their lives…between 25 and 35 is the prime time that people are meeting, marrying, and laying the groundwork for advancement up the career ladder.

It becomes so much harder to successfully move back and reintegrate once those roots are set (especially if the other person is not from Jamaica, or at least from the Caribbean), versus the relatively simple shift when you are single, and fresh out of college (read: no roots implanted yet). Even without the relationship and other attachments naturally developing, there is the concept of getting “Americanized”…becoming so comfortable with the American way of life that it becomes hard to adjust to, or even understand any longer, the Jamaican way of life. (And this concept can be generally applied to becoming “foreign-minded” in any other destination country). Think of the analogy of a tributary flowing from a pond out to an ocean: The longer Jamaican companies leave Jamaica’s pool of talent spread out in foreign oceans, the more they assimilate and the harder it becomes to remove them from the masses and return them home.

EARLY BIRD RECRUITMENT (FIRST-MOVER ADVANTAGE)

So that 80% that leaves, leave because they have no job waiting on them in Jamaica, and end up staying where they have gone because by the time they are qualified for the decent-paying positions, they have set down roots and become less flexible than they were as new graduates…in the U.S. companies are recruiting on my campus NOW for graduates in December 2007, April 2008, August 2008, and some are even recruiting now for as far out as December 2008! They jump on talent from EARLY. Success for a college program here is measured by what percent of each year’s graduates, on average, are placed in a job relevant to their academic level within six months of graduation. What is the measure of success for the University of the West Indies and other Caribbean institutions of higher learning? Are these institutions being drawn into a commitment to do their part to keep the majority of the brains of the Caribbean IN the Caribbean?

Are Jamaican companies providing relevant, detailed internships for college students with progressive levels of responsibility that give them exposure to the business, the normal duties of the position, and to the executives? Are companies in Jamaica, and across the Caribbean, developing leadership programs to develop talent from early in the way they want that talent to go? One of the places I am interviewing with has a 2 year rotational leadership development program that gives you 6 months in each major facet of the business, which is crucial knowledge that would take way too much time (years-wise) to accumulate by working up and laterally through the ranks! Is anything like that happening in Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, or anywhere in the Caribbean?

To Be Continued…

By Michelle Graham Day
Contributing Business Writer

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HR Trend #2 — Social Networking

CEO: “We need a social networking site in this company to enhance our CRM efforts and to enable knowledge sharing.”

VP-HR: “A what?”

Last year, a friend of mine shared with me the fact that he was joining a new company that specialized in social networking in companies.

I had an idea of what he meant in theory. I thought I knew what Facebook, MySpace and the all the rest of these sites were all about.

That is, until I joined Facebook — and I was amazed. Not only did was it interesting, and addictive, it actually fills an important business need that I have always had to stay in touch with a large number of people.

I discovered that it makes the effort easy, efficient and that it saves ALL sorts of time. It has not only come, it is bound to stay.

Now, what my friend said to me makes perfect sense. Facebook, and social networking sites are coming to companies near you. And the larger the company, the more it is needed, especially for those companies in the region that are geographically dispersed. Here is a link to the company he works for: SmallWorldlabs.com

For the HR professional, it is a good idea to get into the swing of things NOW, before the conversation listed above happens. In fact, it would be a good idea for HR professionals across the region to pioneer the idea and demonstrate some leadership in implementing a tool that will be taken as a requirement (I think) in just a few years time.

To folks on CaribHRForum — this is a great application that we could use to deepen our current level of networking. People have often asked me for a list of contact information for people on CaribHRForum and it just does not exist. Their idea was that if they visited another country it would be great to arrange to have lunch with a member here and there.

Great idea! A tool like Facebook would be quite helpful to all of us, even if only a half were to use it.

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Caribbean CRM and Facebook

Here is the genesis of new possibility…

In an earlier post, I mentioned the idea that doing CRM properly here in the region would benefit from a way of finding out who are the people in a prospect’s network.

Funnily enough, I am discovering that Facebook is precisely and exactly the right solution to the problem of finding out who is in one’s network. Here in the Caribbean, this equates to opportunity, as everything important is done through “who you know” and for the first time, you can find a LOT of people that are known and trusted by each other without asking them directly.

I am amazed that no-one seems to have taken advantage of this in any way that I can see.

Amazed.

But I am sure it’s just a matter of time before someone sees Facebook as more than just a cute application, and an addictive pastime, and starts using it to get into the world of influential people.

Actually, maybe the folks over at Boom Networking may have gotten the right idea. They have opened up a page on Facebook to advertise their next event this weekend. If I weren’t on Facebook, I wouldn’t have heard about it, and I have been trying to attend one of their events for the longest time. (Once again, I’ll be missing out, too.)

Stay tuned for more on this topic.

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Discovering Facebook

Recently, I checked out Facebook (and also Myspace) to find out what the fuss was all about.

Something about the whole social networking thing left me feeling like it was too close to match.com, and too far from something that had a serious business application.

Well, my initial suspicions were terribly wrong.

Here in the Caribbean, Facebook is a excellent way to maintain business contacts, given the geographic distance that we have to overcome, Ironically, in recent speeches I have been giving on the power of using the internet for networking, I never imagined that these tools would have a regional use, but they sure do.

As I experiment some more I’ll probably be writing about how users are able to get to know someone on all sorts of levels at the same time. Knowing someone in business terms is only a part of the overall picture that one can have, and the truth is that we in the Caribbean rely as much on social connections as we do on those related to family and business.

I am sure to get into this topic more in the future, especially as I am writing an ebook on the very topic of regional networking. More on this to come.

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Following the Lines of Trust

What is the most effective way to hire an executive in a different Caribbean country?

Is it a matter of finding the right newspaper to place the best advertisement in?

Or does it have something to do with finding the best online employment job board to use?

I have found myself giving a different kind of advice to different companies across the region.

The reason why an advertisement might work in-country is that there already exists a certain amount of trust between the reader and the company. The company that tries the same approach, however, will easily run into problems when they apply it to a different country.

What should be done?

My hypothesis is that Caribbean professionals change jobs when they believe they can trust the company, board and the executives that are doing the hiring. I think that there is a threshold of trust that must exist for a top executive to change jobs, and the better the executive, the higher the threshold.

The two exceptions are not attractive ones. A desperate executive might take an job that looks half-decent. A greedy one may take be willing to work for anyone who bids the highest.

(This is where Jamaica may be very different from Trinidad and Barbados, both now and in the foreseeable future. Both Barbados and Trinidad are virtually at full employment, and there is no shortage of executive opportunities given the barriers to entry that exist for professionals. Jamaica’s economy remains in the doldrums, yet it remains a relatively easy country to gain entry to work.)

I have been advising clients and colleagues who are engaging in job searches to conduct the search through warm channels, using people that they already know, and friends of friends. In other words, follow the lines of trust.

These lines of trust run through each of our countries, and in the smaller countries, they play an even more important role.

Perhaps hiring the right executive is all about following the lines of trust until they reach the right person.