THE CARPENTER'S HOUSE

THE CARPENTER'S HOUSE

An elderly Carpenter was ready to retire. He told his employer contractor of his plans to leave the house building business and live a more leisurely life with his wife enjoying his extended family.

He would miss the paycheck, but he needed to retire. They could get by.

The contractor was sorry to see his good worker go and asked if he could build just one more house as a personal favor. The carpenter said yes, but in time it was easy to see that his heart was not in his work. He resorted to shoddy workmanship and used inferior materials. It was an unfortunate way to end his career.

When the carpenter finished his work and the builder came to inspect the house, the contractor handed the front door key to the carpenter. "This is your house" he said , "my gift to you".

What a shock! What a shame! If he had only known he was building his own house , he would have done it all so differently. Now he had to live in the home he had built none to well.

So it is with us. We build our lives in a distracted way, reacting rather than acting, willing to put up less than the best. At important points we do not give the job our best effort. Then with a shock we look at a situation we have created and find that now we are living in the house we have built. If we had realized we would have done it differently.

Think of yourself as the carpenter . Think about you house . Each day you hammer a nail, place a board, or erect a wall. Build wisely. It is the only life you will ever build. Even if you live it for only one day more, that day deserves to be lived graciously and with dignity. The plaque on the wall says,"Life is a do-it-yourself project." Your life tomorrow will be the result of your attitudes and the choices you make today.

------------------------------------------Author Unknown

Short Story

The local pastor entered his donkey in a race and it won. The pastor
was so pleased with the donkey that he entered it in the race again, and
it won again.

The local paper read:

PASTOR'S ASS OUT FRONT!
The Bishop was so upset with this kind of publicity that he ordered the
pastor not to enter the donkey in another race.

The next day, the local paper headline read:

BISHOP SCRATCHES PASTOR'S ASS!

This was too much for the Bishop, so he ordered the pastor to get rid
of the donkey. The pastor decided to give it to a nun in a nearby
convent.

The local paper, hearing of the news, posted the following headline the
next day:

NUN HAS BEST ASS IN TOWN!

The Bishop fainted. He informed the nun that she would have to get rid
of the donkey, so she sold it to a farmer for $10. The next day the
paper read:

NUN SELLS ASS FOR $10!

This was too much for the Bishop, so he ordered the nun to buy back the
donkey and lead it to the plains where it could run wild. The next day
the headlines read:

NUN ANNOUNCES HER ASS IS WILD AND FREE!

Alas, the Bishop was buried the next day.


THE MORAL OF THE STORY.

Being concerned about public opinion can bring you much grief and
misery and even shorten your life. So, be yourself and enjoy life. Stop
worrying about everyone else's ass and you'll live longer and be a lot
happier!The local pastor entered his donkey in a race and it won. The pastor
was so pleased with the donkey that he entered it in the race again, and
it won again.

The local paper read:

PASTOR'S ASS OUT FRONT!
The Bishop was so upset with this kind of publicity that he ordered the
pastor not to enter the donkey in another race.

The next day, the local paper headline read:

BISHOP SCRATCHES PASTOR'S ASS!

This was too much for the Bishop, so he ordered the pastor to get rid
of the donkey. The pastor decided to give it to a nun in a nearby
convent.

The local paper, hearing of the news, posted the following headline the
next day:

NUN HAS BEST ASS IN TOWN!

The Bishop fainted. He informed the nun that she would have to get rid
of the donkey, so she sold it to a farmer for $10. The next day the
paper read:

NUN SELLS ASS FOR $10!

This was too much for the Bishop, so he ordered the nun to buy back the
donkey and lead it to the plains where it could run wild. The next day
the headlines read:

NUN ANNOUNCES HER ASS IS WILD AND FREE!

Alas, the Bishop was buried the next day.


THE MORAL OF THE STORY.

Being concerned about public opinion can bring you much grief and
misery and even shorten your life. So, be yourself and enjoy life. Stop
worrying about everyone else's ass and you'll live longer and be a lot
happier!

Ten Uncomplicated Paths to Wisdom

Ten Uncomplicated Paths to Wisdom

December 8, 2010 at 5:00 am
By Taryn Galewind

How can we acquire wisdom as we live our everyday lives? Through
wisdom, we find a way to live our lives without strife or discord. An
age-old prayer goes like this: Grant me the serenity to accept the
things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and
the wisdom to know the difference. Here are ten simple ways to smooth
your path to wisdom as you journey through our Earthly plane:

1. Live in every moment, always. Ram Dass admonished us, “Be here
now.” Every moment you live is worth your notice and worth your effort
to create success in each moment. Don’t waste your minutes.
Shakespeare tells us, “in a moment there are many days.” Your life is
made only of days.

2. Become more capable of handling change. Become aware that change is
a necessary part of personal growth. If you battle against change, or
whine and pout when things don’t remain predictable, you will deprive
yourself of food for the growth of your soul.

3. Educate your five senses. Learn why you have a sense of touch,
taste, sight, smell, and hearing. Hone all of them to their highest
levels of perception, and pay attention to what messages they give
your mind and body. Use that input to teach yourself about your life,
yourself, and your universe.

4. Keep your body, your spirit, and your mind healthy. Feed each well,
care for and nurture each. Pay attention to how you feel every day. If
something feels wrong, seek expert help. Learn to meditate, and do it,
so that you can be inside your own psyche, every day.

5. Be a life-long learner. Treasure and take advantage of every single
learning opportunity that comes your way. Seek out ways to feed your
intelligence. Read as though it’s your job, and learn the wisdom that
has come before you. Enrich your mind so that you are prepared to help
others do the same.

6. Broaden your experience. Set aside fear, and try things you have
yet to experience. Encourage yourself to reach out to people you might
not see eye-to-eye with. Approach people with a heart full of joy, an
open hand, and an open mind. Learn about diversity, and respect the
way that diversity enhances our world.

7. Listen more than you speak. Train yourself to quiet your mind so
that you can take in more than you put out in a conversation.
Encourage others to communicate with you, and express your respect for
their points-of-view.

8. Learn to give out more love than you expect to receive. When you
learn this, you will never want for love. You will never have to plead
for affection. You will seldom feel depressed, lonely, or left out.
Learning to give love unconditionally is, perhaps, the single greatest
way to wisdom.

9. Engage in noble deeds which will strongly affect your karma. When
you give of yourself, you get back tenfold. When you open your life to
giving, you will learn the lessons of the ages.

10. Learn to pray in whatever way makes you comfortable and brings you
enlightenment. Find and bind yourself to whatever iteration of a god
or goddess resonates within your spirit. Make communion with the
higher power part of each in order to create gentle harmony within
your spirit and open your heart to wisdom.

Wisdom is something we learn or attain as we travel through life, but
we may pass right through our chance to see the world wisely if we
aren’t careful. Open yourself, heart, body, mind, and spirit, to
experiencing what life has to show you.

Evolution of Personality Assessment

And Now It's Time for Your Emotional Weather Report

Magazine Issue: Vol. 9 No. 9 - November 2010
Topics: Screening/Selection,

Personality profile exams provide what they always have—and then some.


By Todd Harris

Over the last half century, much has changed—a man has landed on the moon, the Red Sox have won the World Series, and "social networking" is no longer a phrase describing cocktail hours, parties, or even a physical event. The same could be said for organizations and the tools they use—for example, the creation of a formal HR department is a relatively new development.


Interestingly, despite all types of changes within organizations, some tools have stood the test of time, including personality assessments. At their core, assessments are still what they started out as—a tool to measure and index personality characteristics for the purposes of predicting the job roles and functions where individuals can best succeed. However, their popularity has spread rapidly even amidst the economic environment that organizations and their HR departments face today. What accounts for this trend, and why does the tool continue to remain a vital part of organizations?


While the economy presents many challenges and problems for HR departments to deal with, we consistently hear a common request from our customers: How do we get more out of our employees and our current resources? Fortunately, this is one area where assessments can drive bottom-line impact for any organization, in any industry.


The background, history, and spread of personality assessments across the globe provide an ideal backdrop to explore how the refinement and evolution of the tool have made it an indispensable part of organizations across the world.


How the Assessment Grew Up
When tracking the evolution and proliferation of assessments around the world, six key milestones marked the development of personality assessments into a core tool in today's HR arsenal.


First, the U.S. population is increasingly diverse, as are the populations of many other countries. Personnel selection systems that rely solely or primarily on measures of cognitive ability significantly adversely affect most protected groups, especially African Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics. White people are often hired at a disproportionately high rate when typical cognitive ability tests are the primary selection and screening tools. These adverse impacts created substantial pressure on companies to find equally valid, but less discriminatory, selection techniques. Research on personality variables indicates that they have much less, and often no, adverse impact on members of protected groups, a tremendous advantage when dealing with increasingly heterogeneous customer, supplier, and employee bases.


Second, the research findings from the U.S. Army's Selection and Classification Project (known as Project A), a multi-million dollar, seven-year research effort in the 1980s, clearly indicated that the Army could improve forecasts of overall job performance via the addition of personality assessments to its battery of cognitive tests.


Third, the appearance of the Five-Factor Model (FFM) in the early 1960s spurred a large amount of academic research in the area of personality, providing a reasonably comprehensive, yet parsimonious, taxonomy to organize the measurement of personality.


Fourth, influential meta-analytic reviews—in which the relationships between a variety of measures of personality and a variety of job performance metrics were examined—provided further empirical evidence for the predictive validity of personality measures.
Fifth, "real-world" views held by non-psychologists continue to hold that the qualities and characteristics within individuals have a crucial impact on their performance at work. For example, an examination of most job postings indicates that employers frequently seek personality-driven factors such as social skills, initiative, creativity, flexibility, etc. at least as often, if not more so, than specific technical skills, experience, or intellectual abilities. Thus, the view that personality really matters appears to be widely held.


The last factor that may be driving the increased importance and usage of personality assessments in business and industry is the nature of work and the economy itself. The world of work has changed more rapidly in the past 15 years than in the prior 100. Eight fundamental forces are shaping the 21st century workplace:
• Increased technology, especially information technology;
• Increased diversity and globalization;
• Increased prevalence of collaborative, team-based work structures;
• Increased concern for person-organization "fit";
• The importance of work/non-work balance;
• The frequency and pace of change;
• An increased emphasis on learning; and
• New expectations of leadership.


These factors do not function independently, but rather accentuate and multiply one another. For example, leaders who operate in today's global environment have to possess fundamentally different skills than their predecessors did. As a group, these conditions make the explicit consideration of applicant and employee personality factors by organizations more critical than ever before.

Today's Use
The spread in use of personality assessments made the tool a natural fit for modern HR departments. However, today's economic and work environment has accentuated a major shift in the role and function of the HR department. What was once a reactive service center, where employees and leaders within an organization could go to get information, is now a very active department that is expected and designed to align with core business goals.


The use of assessments has certainly followed suit. Today, assessments are used in markets such as retail, finance, and healthcare to align the right people with company roles. Assessments are used to address profitability, turnover, sales, and reputation management.


For example, in the financial industry many banks are using assessments to get more people into jobs that can help drive revenue. A Massachusetts-based bank used assessments to determine department placements for employees and subsequently, which employees may be best-suited for leadership roles. As a result, the bank's executives credit assessments in part with helping to increase net income by 43 percent in 2009—during the economic downturn.


In another example, a South Carolina-based credit union sought to transform its transaction-based culture to an active sales environment. Using assessment tools, the credit union developed "behavioral profiles" of ideal candidates for branch service representative positions and asked current and prospective employees to take an assessment to help identify ways they could improve their sales performance. This combination of an assessment-guided culture shift with a new focus on cross-selling has helped increase loan volume by $100 million to a total of more than $700 million during the past year. Member satisfaction is also at an all-time high: 95.3 percent.


In the retail industry, one franchisee of a personal service chain has used assessment-based strategies to maximize the performance and close rate of sales associates. Just prior to implementing assessment tools, the average sales close rate was 12-to-13 percent. For the three-month period directly following implementation, the average sales close rate jumped to 27 percent. The franchisee firmly believes that 80 percent of this turnaround can be directly attributed to the implementation of the assessment tool and supporting strategies.


The healthcare industry has also turned to assessments to help with a variety of problems, including turnover and succession planning. Since medical personnel are expensive to hire, train, and continually educate, the selection process in hospitals must be effective yet quick, given the amount of staff that are hired each year. An Indiana-based hospital has used assessments to streamline the application and selection process and, additionally, identify individuals who may be able to fill senior roles should those people retire and/or leave. So valuable has the tool become that for talent initiatives like employee and leadership development, the hospital estimates assessments are used about 75 percent of the time.


Assessments: Looking in the Crystal Ball
The above examples illustrate that assessments aren't just psychological tools anymore: The evolution of use has made them strategic business initiatives that organizations across many industries use to address core business problems.


But what does the future hold? Given the slow, if persistent, economic recovery, it's fair to estimate that the focus on using the tool to support business goals like reducing turnover and increasing profitability and sales will continue. However, those most responsible for the overall direction of an organization, the leadership, will likely see an uptick in their use of assessments. While the tool is widely used at lower levels within organizations to identify hires and potential candidates, senior and executive-level positions also frequently rely on assessments. However, as leadership will continue to be under great scrutiny to perform under tough conditions, we expect organizations to use assessments as a way to mitigate risk when hiring a particular executive or promoting from within.
The science behind assessments will likely undergo a transformation at some point.


While a major renaissance occurred in the field during the mid-1990s, academic and applied researchers have continued to refine and extend their understanding of the role of personality in organizations, which means given the last few years of economic uncertainty and instability, more will be in play for researchers to dissect and understand about what types of personality traits are needed for success.


Globalization will be an important driver in the extension of assessments. Currently, for example, about 30-to-40 percent of the work I do is overseas—a number I expect to rise. In terms of industry reach, any market where people are considered the most valuable asset (think consulting, finance, IT) will continue to invest in assessment to ensure their people are in the best positions to succeed.


What most certainly won't change, however, is the strategic importance assessments deliver to organizations across the globe. The evolution of assessments will continue, both in their science and in their use, helping organizations achieve core business goals, as they better understand individuals and the job roles for which they are best suited.

Todd Harris is the director of research for PI Worldwide. He can be reached at tharris@piworldwide.com.