Sanjeev Nanda on How to Speed up on a New Job

Asking for Help When You’re New to the Job

Start a new job with a positive attitude

When you transfer to a new division or start a job with a new employer, it’s natural to want to demonstrate mastery of your position from day one.

Many bosses make the irrational assumption that by merely breathing the air of the cubicle farm, you’ll absorb all the information you need.

Against that daunting background, how can you meet the challenge of getting the help that’s required to get up to speed on a new job?  Approach the task the way a journalist would get the story — by asking the five W’s.

Why?

If your company has effective training and orientation programs, why do you have to ask for further help?  The only way to become a savvy journalist or to succeed at your hedge-fund firm is to ask a lot of questions.

You also must demonstrate the rationale for your inquiries to the people whose time you take up. Your attitude and presentation are key; you must project confidence that your requests for information and guidance are reasonable and necessary.

Do ask about training, documentation and other resources you can use to educate yourself without taking up people’s time.

What?

You can demonstrate your respect for other people’s time by being careful about what you ask. When you ask, you want to be very specific and share what you already know.

But don’t confine your queries to the procedural; seek out what makes your new workplace tick. Ask a peer, “What are some things that you wish you’d known before you started working here?’ Try to get at the subtle culture issues. “Is this an email culture or an IM culture?”

Ask questions like you were born to ask them

Who?

You will quickly build a reputation as a thoughtful worker if you carefully consider who in your organization is best-suited to answer your questions and otherwise render aid. Create your own map of who does what in your organization, a sort of annotated version of the standard organisation chart.

You’ll also need help in your initial efforts to jump-start your information-collection system. A key tactic is to pose this meta-question to your boss or other ranking manager: “Who else could I go to with this sort of question (so that I don’t have to take up your time)?”

Where (and How)?

Just as important as asking the right questions of the right person is choosing the optimal communications medium for your inquiries.

Ask your coworkers and boss what typically goes out on email; you just want to know what the norms are. That email is never the most effective medium when a dialog is required.

When you ask a question of a superior, let them know that you’ll be happy to take their response in whatever form is easiest for them. If they choose to answer your detailed email with a brain dump to your voicemail, just be grateful for the information.

When?

One way to alienate coworkers and superiors from the get-go is to ask too many questions too soon, before you need the answers and can absorb them.

Of course, you’ll still have plenty of legitimate questions in the early going, and that’s a good thing. Ask early and often. “If you ask often, people will see you as curious.”

As you move past the first stage of your tenure in a new position, consider giving back to your company’s next generation of newbies by volunteering to put together documentation of key information for new hires, whether it’s a company glossary, a guidebook or an intranet page that indexes internal resources.

Finally, if you ever get discouraged by any friction you create by asking for help, look at the big picture. You have to remember that you’re asking questions not just for yourself, but to advance the goals of the organization, So you can be as forceful as you need to be.

Sanjeev Nanda tips on Signs of Attraction

In today’s society, beauty, physical attraction, and sexuality are all commonly misunderstood as some transcendent inevitable fact; falsely interlocking the three makes it seem doubly true that in order to initiate attraction between a man and a woman, both sexes should be beautiful to be sexual.  That of course is not true at all. The definitions of beautiful, attraction, and sexual constantly change to serve the social order, and the connection between the three ideas is a recent invention.

In a survey conducted by an “evolutionary psychologist,” from 10,000 individuals who were interviewed, it was found out that men have high-regards to physical attraction in their budding sexual mates, while women attach importance to prominence, goals, and monetary sources.

No wonder why most cases of attraction are all based on sexuality and physical attributes. This is because men and women would rather have their significant others physically and sexually capable of giving them their necessities.

How can the individual identify the clear signs of attraction?

There are many probable actions that might suggest attraction. However, the real signs include but not limited to the following:

1. Visual contact

This is when both a man and a woman gazed upon each other and instantly prolonged the moment as they look at each other longer than the typical glance.

Eye Contact - 1st step of attraction

Both are completely immersed on each other’s anecdote, and every word will impress them both. All eyes are glued to each other that send a message that they are drawn to each other.

2. Preen

Preening means to adorn oneself carefully or to groom oneself with particular attention to details. Hence, attraction sets in when both would try to instantly make a quick fix and conquer each other’s space.

3. Flirting

Flirting - 3rd Stage of Attraction

Teasing could have been the more appropriate term for it. This is when both sexes converse in a relaxed manner, with bodily actions associated to their thoughts and feelings, where, most often than not, sexual tensions and arousal are the primary upshots.

4. Physical contact

This is when a woman leans to wards the man and places a modest hand on his hand or arm. In this way, the woman is trying to tell the other person that she is attracted to him and that she is open to possibilities that involve the concerned person.

All of these things are boiled down to the fact that the asymmetry of the correlation among beauty, attraction, and sexuality that tells both men and women lies on how they both perceive each other’s physical attributes. This is inevitable because the lack of it will definitely keep them sexually estranged.

Attraction is generally focused on imagery that is exclusively on the physical attributes of both men and women, where the society has created a very important role. This goes to show that the signs of attraction indicate the clear identification of desirability.

Given all that, both men and women should make the choice, by and large, to take each other as human beings first and not just mere sexual objects.

It should be well noted that these signs of attraction may be well confined on the premise that both men and women send out these signs as a ticket to conquer each other’s space so as to start the “getting-to-know-each-other” stage.