Английский для менеджеров

major university. Prepare and give a presentation about the company and the career prospects for university graduates.

2.You have seen a list of jobs advertised on the Internet by an international manufacturing company - they want to recruit people for technical, commercial and administrative positions. Write a letter of application, specifying which kind of vacancy you are interested in and mentioning your relevant qualifications and experience.

3.Look at the websites of some well-known international companies. Describe their approach to recruitment using the Internet.

Before you read

Discuss these questions.

1.What are the different methods a company can use to find new employees? Which are you most familiar with? Which do you think are most effective?

2.What are the most common selection methods used by companies and organisations in your country, (e.g. interviews, intelligence tests)? Do you think selection methods vary from country to country?

Reading task

A Understanding main points

Mark these statements T (true) or F (false) according to the information in the text on the opposite page. '

1.Many international organisations have decentralised selection.

2.They look for different personal qualities in different cultures.

3.The 'SWAN' criteria have international validity.

4.The definition of some qualities can lead to cultural misunderstandings.

5.Mobility and language capability are clearly understood across cultures.

B Understanding details

The text states that different cultures look for different qualities when selecting personnel. Match the cultures with the qualities or attributes according to the text.

1.Anglo-Saxon (UK, USA, Australia etc.)

2.Germanic

3.Latin

4.Far Eastern

a)being able to fit in with the organisation

b)having the relevant kind of education for the job

c)having the right intellectual or technical capabilities

d)having good interpersonal skills

e)having attended the 'top' universities in the country

f)being able to carry out relevant tasks and jobs

C Word search

Find at least five methods for testing or assessing a candidate's suitability for a job (e.g. assessment centres) which are mentioned in the text.

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Recruitment and Selection

Approaches to selection vary significantly across cultures. There are differences not only in the priorities that are given to technical or interpersonal capabilities, but also in the ways that candidates are tested and interviewed for the desired qualities.

In Anglo-Saxon cultures, what is generally tested is how much the individual can contribute to the tasks of the organisation. In these cultures, assessment centres, intelligence tests and measurements of competencies are the norm. In Germanic cultures, the emphasis is more on the quality of education in a specialist function. The recruitment process in Latin and Far Eastern cultures is very often characterised by ascertaining how well that person 'fits in' with the larger group. This is determined in part by the elitism of higher educational institutions, such as the 'grandes ecoles' in France or the University of Tokyo in Japan, and in part by their interpersonal style and ability to network internally. If there are tests in Latin cultures, they will tend to be more about personality, communication and social skills than about the Anglo-Saxon notion of 'intelligence'.

Though there are few statistical comparisons of selection practices used across cultures, one recent study provides a useful example of the impact of culture. A survey conducted by Shackleton and Newell compared selection methods between France and the UK. They found that there was a striking contrast in the number of interviews used in the selection process, with France resorting to more than one interview much more frequently. They also found that in the UK there was a much greater tendency to use panel interviews than in France, where one-to-one interviews are the norm. In addition, while almost 74 per cent of companies in the UK use references from previous employers, only 11 percent of the companies surveyed in France used them. Furthermore, French companies rely much more on personality tests and handwriting analysis than their British counterparts.

Many organisations operating across cultures have tended to decentralise selection in order to allow for local differences in testing and for language differences, while providing a set of personal qualities or characteristics they consider important for candidates.

Hewitt Associates, a US compensation and benefits consulting firm based in the Mid West, has had difficulties extending its key selection criteria outside the USA. It is known for selecting 'SWANs': people who are Smart, Willing, Able and Nice. These concepts, all perfectly understandable to other Americans, can have very different meanings in other cultures. For example, being able may mean being highly connected with colleagues, being sociable or being able to command respect from a hierarchy of subordinates, whereas the intended meaning is more about being technically competent, polite and relatively formal. Similarly, what is nice in one culture may be considered naive or immature in another. It all depends on the cultural context.

Some international companies, like Shell, Toyota, and L'Oreal, have identified very specific qualities that they consider strategically important and that support their business requirements. For example, the criteria that Shell has identified as most important in supporting its strategy include mobility and language capability. These are more easily understood across cultures because people are either willing to relocate or not. There is less room for cultural misunderstandings with such qualities.

VOCABULARY TASKS

A Synonyms

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1.The word 'selection' is combined with a number of other words, all with similar meanings . (e.g. approaches to selection). Find four other combinations starting with 'selection'.

2.The word 'skill' is often used in connection with job performance. It can be defined as 'the ability to do something well, especially because you have learned and practised it'. In the text, several other words are used with a similar meaning. What are they?

3.The acronym SWANs stands for 'people who are Smart, Willing, Able and Nice'. Depending on the context, these words can have different meanings. Match each word with one of the SWAN words.

a)	charming NICE	i)	well-dressed
b)	helpful	j)	pleasant
c)	clever	k)	eager
d)	friendly	I) intelligent
e)	sociable	m) beautiful
f)	competent	n) neat
g)	enthusiastic	0)	kind
h)	enjoyable	p)	skilful

4. Which words from the list have exactly the same meaning as the SWAN words in the text?

B Linking

Use an appropriate word or phrase from the box to complete each sentence.

for example

though

whereas

in addition

similarly

1.The Internet is changing the way that companies work; FOR EXAMPLE, some use their website to advertise job vacancies.

2.Some companies use newspaper advertisements in the recruitment process, others prefer to use consultants.

3.With the boom in hi-tech industries, well-qualified software specialists are difficult to find; ………………..in the automotive industry, there is a shortage of engineering graduates.

4.To get good management jobs, an MBA is now often a requirement; .... , knowledge of two foreign languages including English is increasingly demanded.

5.The Internet is being used more and more as a recruitment tool, .......there are few statistics available yet about how successful it is.

C Definitions

Match these terms with their definitions.

	1	assessment	a)	finding out
	2	the norm	b)	noticeable
	3	ascertaining	c)	pay and
				conditions
	4	elitism	d)	evaluation
	5	striking	e)	usual, standard
	6	compensation and benefits	f)	concern for status

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OVER TO YOU

1.Make a list of qualities or skills that you think an international manager should have. Divide your list into technical skills and interpersonal skills.

2.What are the best ways to measure or evaluate technical skills?

3.How can you measure interpersonal skills?

4.Look at the chart showing selection methods in different countries.

Percentage use of selection methods in six different countries

	Method of selection	UK	France	Germany	Israel	Norway	Netherlands	All
	Interviews	92	97	95	84	93	93	93
	References/recommen	74	39	23	30	-	49	43
	dations
	Cognitive tests	11	33	21	-	25	21	22
	Personality tests	13	38	6	-	16	-	18
	Graphology	3	52	-	2	2	24	13
	Work sample	18	16	13	-	13	5	13
	Assessment centres	14	8	10	3	10	-	8
	Biodata	4	1	8	1	8	-	4
	Astrology	-	6	-	1	-	-	2

Source: Robertson and Makin (1993)

Imagine you are an HR specialist in an international company. Use this information to make a presentation about selection methods the company should use in Northern Europe.

TEXT 3

1 Before you read the article, study the three charts below and answer the following questions. Then make up some questions of your own about the charts to ask each other.

1.In which managerial functions can you find the highest percentage of women directors?

2.What are the two main factors which make women feel unequal to men at work?

3.Which sector has the highest number of women managers?

4.What percentage of senior managers in sales and marketing are women?

5.What percentage of women directors feel disadvantaged by domestic commitments?

6.Which three sectors have the smallest-percentage of women managers?

7.What do these statistics say about career opportunities for women?

8.What do these statistics say about gender stereotypes?

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© The Economist

© The Economist

©Times Newspapers Ltd

2 Read paragraphs 1-3 and complete the following statistics.

1 Women make up more than ..................

of the western workforce, but, in

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the US as in the UK, hold just ...............................................		of seats on the boards of
large companies.
2	Women account for ............................................	of recent graduates in the US and
...................................................	of recent graduates in Europe.
3	A survey carried out by Wick revealed that........................................	of women

leaving large companies left not because they wanted to stop work but because

………………………………………………………………………… .

THE SPARE SEX

WOMEN IN MANAGEMENT

Few women get far in business. That is not just their loss, but their employers'. Hire women managers, promote them, create the right conditions to keep them, and companies will see the results on the bottom line. In black

Though women make up over 40% of the western workforce, the firms they work for promote very few of them far. In America and Britain alike, women hold about 2% of big-company board seats. Where women do get to run big companies, it is not by climbing the ordinary corporate ladder. The lone female chief executive of a Fortune 500 company, Marion Sandler, of Golden West Financial, a Californian savings bank, shares the post with her husband. They bought the bank together. Katharine Graham, chief executive of The Washington Post Company until taking the chairmanship last year, inherited the firm from her father.

Talented women are not the only losers when companies fail to hire them or later refuse them promotion. Assuming that most women are potentially as good at filling executive jobs as most men (quite a big if; we come to it later), those companies are limiting their pool of available management talent by around half. Of recent graduates, 52% in America and 44% in Europe are women. The company that fails to recruit them now will find its pool of middle managers inferior to that of a wiser employer in a few years' time; likewise, which matters more, its upper management ten years later, if (as is likely) it goes on displaying the same bias further up the ladder.

A 1990 survey of women quitting large companies, carried out by Wick, a Delaware consultancy, found that only 7% wanted to stop working altogether. The rest planned to join other firms, to work as freelance consultants, or to start their own businesses. When BP carried out a similar exercise among graduate trainees recently, the leading reason women gave for going was not marriage or motherhood, but dissatisfaction with their career prospects. At one Johnson & Johnson unit, departing female managers complained that they had felt isolated from their male colleagues.

Fellows like us

Could it be that this lack of esteem is justified?

Given the chance, would women really be as good at running large firms as men? Most research on the way gender differences affect women's careers lies within the murky disciplines of comparative psychology and organisational behaviour. A lot of what it says is too contradictory or anecdotal (or sometimes obviously biased from the outset) to carry much weight. Yet some findings ring true.

First, people who work in large organizations have an innate tendency to hire and promote those who resemble themselves. 'Our managers are all white, middle-aged men, and they promote in their own image,' says one woman. If looking odd in positions of

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power is women's first big barrier to top jobs, feeling odd in them is the second. 'People come up to you at a party, and say "Aren't you bright?" It isn't a compliment,' says a female director at a London investment bank. Men are expected to be assertive. Women are not, and often do not feel happy being so.

Made to choose between being thought pushy and being actually self-effacing, women tend to choose the latter. Within mixed groups, even highly qualified women put their views less forcefully than men, and listen much more than they talk. Strident counter-examples - Margaret Thatcher is an obvious one - leap to mind just because they are so rare.

In one study, researchers taped seven university faculty meetings. With one exception, the men taking part spoke more often and at greater length than their female colleagues.

Slow change

Senior managers' attitudes to, women's employment are changing more slowly than corporate image-makers would have you believe. Women's employment 'is much like the environment - it's seen as essentially a window-dressing question,' says one senior woman executive about her bosses. If stockmarket analysts or anyone who mattered cared about it, then they would care too.'

Tokenism abounds. Such female directors are disproportionately likely to be found running bits of the firm without profit-and-loss responsibility - personnel or public relations, for instance - that offer little prospect of promotion to the top posts. Alternatively, they may be part-time advisers. Of the 30 female directors on the boards of Britain's biggest 100 companies, 26 are non-executives.

It can be done

If a firm does genuinely want to use the talents of women more effectively, how should it go about it? The watershed dividing different employers' approaches is positive discrimination. Some use quota schemes. At Pitney Bowes, an American officeequipment manufacturer, 35% of all promotions must go to women, 15% to non-whites. Some companies even tie managers' pay to their fulfilment of such schemes.

Positive discrimination can hurt the women it is designed to help. Bosses compelled to hire women to fulfil some quota are unlikely to take them seriously. 'If you feel people are just there because you had to have them, then you work around them, not with them. Then they feel under-utilised, because they probably are,' says Nancy Gheen, a personnel manager at Monsanto.

Organise accordingly

The real change in the way companies think about women managers will come when they change the way they think about jobs.

Most women want to have children. Raising a family requires time off, and shorter working hours, for somebody, either husband or wife. To keep good women, firms need to find ways of giving them those things, yet using them efficiently. That normally involves letting women with small children work flexible hours, not requiring them to relocate or travel at a moment's notice, or even letting them share their jobs with someone else.

In exchange, women may have to accept lower pay, or slower promotion, until they return to full-time work. Such programmes have been dubbed 'mommy-tracks'.

Companies exist to make their shareholders money, not to engineer social change. Though mommy-tracks are to firms' ultimate advantage, since they help keep good staff, in the short term they will sometimes prove to be inconvenient and expensive. In the irritation of having to change their ways, employers should not forget to take into account the costs of turnover among employees. Part of the money spent training those who leave

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has gone down the drain.

And back-of-the-envelope calculation of the costs of replacing a manager of ten years' standing, earning $70,000, suggests that the time it takes the new manager to get fully on top of the job is worth $25,000. If a replacement has been sought from outside, headhunters' fees, advertising and interviewing could double that.

Sisters, chief executives, your interests coincide. One day your identities might

too.

3 The rest of the text is divided into four sections, each with a separate heading.

Read each section in turn, noting the main points in the following chart. When you have finished, compare your notes in small groups.

FELLOWS LIKE US

SLOW CHANGE

IT CAN BE DONE

ORGANISE ACCORDINGLY

Presentations

How does the position of women in the US/UK compare with the position of women in your country? How do you feel about opportunities for women? Working in pairs, make mini-presentations to each other on one of the following topics. Feel free to state your personal opinion and use your notes from Text 2 to help you.

The role of women in management.

Managerial prospects for women.

The employment of women - past, present and future.

LISTENING 1

You are going to hear John Lawrence, Human Resources Manager at Ilford Ltd., talking about Impact. From what you know of the programme already, try to predict how he might answer the following questions. Then listen and note what he actually says.

1.What are you trying to change?

2.How are you going about this?

3.How far have you got?

LISTENING 2

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Listen to the second part of the interview with John Lawrence and make notes under the following headings.

the immediate and long-term future

the current position

the process of change

the Ilford culture

WRITING

Use your notes from Listening 1 and 2 to write a brief follow-up article to Text 1, updating readers on developments at Ilford.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1.What do you think? How far do you agree with the following statements?

1.People are the most important resource a business has.

2.Management should always use the negotiating machinery of union to make organizational changes.

3.Changing the pay system of a company will usually be resisted by the unions.

4.Length of service not ability/responsibility should determine an employee‘s salary.

5.Most country neglect the talents of women in the workplace.

6.Business should do more to encourage women employees.

2.Answer the following questions. Then discuss your answers in small groups.

1.What do you know about union-management relations in Britain?

2.What are industrial relations like in your country?

3.Do women have equal employment opportunities in your country?

4.How easy is it for women to reach senior positions in your country

Headhunters

1.Discuss the following questions.

1.What is a 'headhunter?

2.Do you react in the same way to the term 'executive search consultant?

3.What other recruitment methods can you think of?

4.What are the advantages and disadvantages of each one?

2.What do you think?

1.How would it feel to be 'headhunted?

2.Is the poaching of senior personnel from a company simply part of executive life, or is it an unethical activity?

3.In western countries, executives tend to switch jobs several times in their careers, whereas in Japan, with its policy of lifetime employment, most executives stay with one company throughout their working lives. Which system is better for the employer? And for the employee?

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TEXT 1

1.Before you read the text look at the title and subtitle. What do you think the article is about? Choose the best answer.

a)how to attract the attention of headhunters

b)what to do if you receive a phone call from a headhunter

c)how to become a headhunter

2.Read paragraphs 1 and 2 and summarise the trends and statistics quoted in your own words.

Bait for the headhunters

That unexpected phone call offering a plum job with another firm isn't always just a matter of chance. Given a little planning, the talent scouts can be directed to your door.

Stephanie Jones explains how.

"NATURALLY, I was headhunted into my present job," a typical City whizz-kid boasts. "Headhunters ring all the time. During Big Bang they phoned us so often that we put their calls over the office loudhailer. Then we'd have a laugh when * the headhunter said: 'Confidentially, I have a uniquely exciting opportunity that might just interest you...' "

Being headhunted is not only for young bloods and famous chief executives. Almost 90 per cent of the top 1,000 companies use executive search consultants to find senior people. In the last few years they have been joined by smaller companies, accounting and law firms, chartered surveyors, architects, private hospitals, the media, and even local authorities and Government departments.

So how do you attract those ego-trip phone calls which spell a new career opportunity?

John Harper, 33, has been headhunted three times. His first job was as a graduate trainee with Procter & Gamble where, after five years, he was a brand manager on Pampers, which he had launched in the UK market.

He was invited to Kenner Parker (the American toy and games manufacturer responsible for Trivial Pursuit, Monopoly and Care Bears) where in five more years he rose to be European marketing and operations director.

Then he was lured away into Avis, the car-hire giant, and two years later headhunted again into the job he started last week as international marketing director for Reebok, the sportswear company. He won't quote figures, but each time he moved his salary and benefits showed substantial improvement.

Not one of these positions was advertised. Indeed, before his latest move he was not considering a career change at all.

So his advice to those hoping to hit the headhunt trail is born of experience:

First, start out with a large international company. Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Shell, IBM and Mars, for example, offer not only excellent training but a readymade network of contacts around the world, arguably more helpful to a career than being a Harvard alumnus.

Secondly, ensure you are noticed by superiors. Headhunters frequently find people through referrals from a source, usually a more senior person who suggests suitable names. Successful and highly-respected mentors should be cultivated, so that they will think of you when approached.

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