Human Resources Quotes
from Christos Kartalis

 

  • There is a price to pay or a ticket to purchase whenever you play anywhere worthwhile.
  • If you don’t open your mouth, people will assume you are voiceless and possibly brainless.
  • Define who works for whom. Don’t direct front-line, commercial resources to work on internal projects. Ensure your front-line people are facing customers.

More Human Resources Quotes

  • When you are wrong, accept responsibility and apologize. Apologize sincerely only once.  Apologizing more than once makes you look like you are begging for mercy.
  • Don’t overplay a good card. If you have a sponsor, decide when and how to use it. Overusing it will weaken the sponsorship or lead to its loss.
  • Good and impressive questions usually lead to good and impressive answers.
  • When people see comments as criticism, they have already reached perfection in their minds and need to shape up or go.
  • Directness is okay as long as it’s not given too soon, too late, or too impersonally. Direct feedback needs to be easy to understand.
  • Measure directness not by the strength of the message, but by its quality.
  • Watch whose shadow you stand under. As soon as the sun comes out and the shadow fades away, you may just disappear.
  • Kindness should not be misinterpreted as weakness.
  • When resolving conflicts, leaders need to decide on rightness, not fairness. Leaders should not act like judges but like generals.
  • Learn while you contribute. You cannot be in training forever.
  • Personal happiness is not a state of mind but a condition of success.
  • Sometimes it’s worth taking some wild shots even if you don’t know where to aim. You need to hear your gun go off.
  • If you want to put a tigers in a box, make sure it is either a very big one or a very smart one. Remember that tigers cannot be boxed in for long.
  • Don’t put aprons around worriers’ waists.
  • Don’t hang heavy armor around a maid’s waist.
  • If want to box in managers, don’t hire tigers, hire monkeys.
  • Don’t be afraid to over-communicate good news.
  • Headquarters are not bad. They are bad only when we approach them convinced that nothing constructive will take place when they are involved.
  • Watch out for career flashers. They are likely to become career splashers.
  • Accessories are extensions of one’s need or lack of it in the same way that cars are extensions of a man’s private parts… or lack of.
  • If you can’t own the message you are conveying, don’t convey it.
  • The more you forward messages without owning them, the less attention you will get from the people you are asking for responses from.
  • Anytime you have a conflict that logic cannot bridge, put a bottle of wine between the people in conflict.
  • In business there is always some company that will pay more to get a good manager. The issue is whether it will be better.
  • “Lock” people in and create winning teams. The strongest relationships are formed in jail, in the army, in school, in places where one needs alliances and cannot get out of.
  • Obligations: great minds should not feel they have the potential to succeed but an obligation to themselves and to their environment.
  • Credibility is gained over time but can be lost overnight.
  • Be careful when you are overconfident and believe you are unbeatable. Sometimes, the bull wins…
  • People confuse intellectual capacity with talent. Talent potential is not based exclusively on a person’s intellectual capacity. It is based as well on one’s ability to turn capacity into performance. Many people’s intellectual talent stays within themselves and is never translated into business results and performance.
  • When I hear managers say that they “empower their people” fully and “leave them alone,” I get worried. I start sensing loss of productivity potential. For empowerment to produce result, it needs to be managed, not ignored, and people still need to be pushed to achieve maximize productivity.
  • Other things being equal, be soft on people and hard on issues when things go badly. When things go well, do the opposite.
  • Most jobs are steps towards something else. Some steps however are milestones. On those, you stay until you become known for it. People need to remember you for the milestone accomplishments, not for the little steps.
  • Don’t lose energy on the wrong things; The passion you put in a project should be proportionate to the return you expect to receive from the project. Adjust your energies according to the probability of your success.
  • Everyone complains about their boss. The only time people are satisfied with their boss is when they don’t have one.
  • Employees give you a hard time demanding more benefits for the same amount of work, and they can be quite creative. They create their “ideal” company in their minds by simply benchmarking with references of competitors and taking the “best” from each company–higher salaries from one, fat titles from another, cars from a third, higher bonuses from a fourth, or less demanding work from a fifth. What should you do? Promise each employee all of the above if they produce results for the company through the same benchmarking: Higher market share from one, higher profitability from another, perfect matrix systems from a third, etc. The discussion does not last long after that …
  • Show me a company with a Succession Plan that works and I will show you a company that develops their talent.
  • When you motivate people and teams, you need to motivate both their heads and their hearts.
  • See people perform during two business cycles at a minimum before they move on.
  • It is time to move on when:
    • You are constantly late to work, and you take most of your sick days on Mondays.
    • You start thinking about Friday beginning around Wednesday noon.
    • On Fridays after 10 AM, you start behaving like it is Saturday.