More Human Resource Quotes
from Christos Kartalis

- Most jobs are steps towards something else. Some steps are milestones. On those, you stay until you own them and you become known for it. People need to remember you for your milestones, not for your steps.

- People blur intellectual capacity with talent. Talent potential is wrongly predicted from a person’s intellectual capacity and not the person’s ability to use this capacity to perform. Many people’s intellectual talent stays within themselves and never gets translated into business results and performance.

- Don’t waste energy on the wrong things. The passion and pressure you put into a project should be proportionate to the return you expect to receive from it and should be adjusted according to the probability of success.

- When I participate in industry meetings or training programs, I give myself a series of targets. I might seek to go away from the meeting with a result of:

If I have achieved the minimum, my participation has been successful.

- Alignment across geographies and cultures: The longer the distance from headquarters, the more misalignment may exist but the easier and faster it is to realign it.

- There is no single person who does not complaint about his boss. The only time when people are satisfied with their boss is when they don’t have one.

- Employees give you hard time demanding more benefits for the same amount of work, and they can become quite creative at it. They create their “ideal” company in their minds by simply benchmarking against competitors and taking the “best” from each company – the highest salary levels from one, the fat titles from another, the car programs from a third, the highest bonuses from another, the reduced work demand from yet another. What should you do? Go the other way: promise to give employees all of the above if produce results benchmarked in the same way: the highest market share from one, the highest profitability from another, the perfect matrix systems of 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 believes in developing its talent.

- When motivating people and teams, you need to do enough for the head but also enough for the heart

- You need to see people perform in 2 business cycles at minimum before they move on to new assignments.

- You know that it is time to move on when:

- Most companies see culture differences as barriers. I see them as a competitive advantage. For example, most companies are reluctant to see the opportunities in Saudi Arabia due to culture. Where others see cultural barriers, I see nothing but opportunities.