PUT the kettle on and make your colleagues a cuppa. Offer them a biscuit. And would the occasional smile kill you?
If you want to be a corporate success it’s time to hide your claws and sound as if you care about your fellow humans, says Management Today (Jan). Richard Reeves, the director of Intelligence Agency, an ideas consultancy, admits that keeping track of employees’ birthdays and the recovery (or not) of their sick grandmothers is time consuming, but says that in the long run it will pay off in the shape of increased support and loyalty.
But it’s not always easy to convince newly-minted managers to play nicely if they’ve had to eye-gouge their way to mahogany row, MT says in a separate article. One way to break determined competitors of their colleague-biting habit is to make sure that their pay is linked to their team’s performance rather than their individual success.
It’s an approach that GCap Ideas, a creative agency, has taken to the next level of forced friendliness, reports MediaWeek (Jan 10). There, teams are paid according to their success at hitting personal, regional and group targets. All for one, boys.
A bit of high-level business-to-business friendliness could reshape Google’s kneecaps in 2006, suggests BusinessWeek (Jan 23). If (there’s always an if) old media companies such as Walt Disney, News Corp and NBC got together and developed a free-content website that no outside search engines could access, they might just halt the new media googlenaut.
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Friendliness with a side of nice is an important but perhaps unexpected factor in the advertising, media and marketing industry. Jonathan Durden, the president of PHD, writes in MediaWeek that the success of “the good people, the real human beings . . . coupled with the privilege of championing the very best young people, is the buzz”. He’s also made friends for life through his industry contacts — both with his colleagues and his competitors.
While being buddies with the opposition is accepted within the media world, some parts of the US security industry don’t even like the idea of intra-office chums, according to hrreporter.com. One firm has prohibited workmates from seeing each other outside working hours. So that’s no shared lunches, no after-work pub sessions . . . not nice.