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You’re the boss now. Here’s how to deal

All those years of climbing the corporate ladder have finally paid off: you’re the boss now.

But being the head honcho isn’t easy — just look at Michael Scott, the needy boss in hit TV show The Office, whose bumbling handling of being a leader and a buddy brings no shortage of corporate hijinks.

Enter Kevin Eikenberry, the cheekily titled “chief potential officer” of his own consulting firm and author of “From Bud to Boss: Secrets to a Successful Transition to Remarkable Leadership”.

“If you’re a new leader, often times people say it’s no big deal and they don’t want to talk about it. But I can’t stress enough that having a conversation about it is going to stop it from becoming a much bigger problem,” Eikenberry says.

Reuters talked with Eikenberry about being a leader, the difference between being friends and being friendly, and why you need to have “the talk” with your former coworkers.

Tell me why you wrote this book — has this ever happened to you?

Home market isn’t on rebound yet

Are we there yet? Is the U.S. home market on the upswing?

As Alan Greenspan would say, “there are shoots,” although a true spring in housing is still hampered by a chilly economic climate throughout most of the country.

One positive sign came from new mortgage applications, which jumped to the highest level in three months last week, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

As Congress and state attorneys general wrangle with a number of reforms to seed a housing rescue, most of the country is not out of the woods. Yale Economist Robert Shiller warned recently that housing prices could “slip another 15 to 25 percent”.

Foreclosures and defaults are continuing unabated. Most of the news concerning housing is still frosty. The S&P Case-Shiller Index (for the fourth quarter of last year), showed prices in 19 out of 20 markets surveyed down for December over November. Washington, D.C. was the only major market that rose.

Cities gob-smacked by the bust — Las Vegas, Miami, Phoenix and Tampa — all hit new lows in December. Even markets that weren’t inflated as much in the bubble saw new lows (Atlanta, Charlotte, Seattle and Portland, Oregon).

Although the percentage of distressed sales is still alarmingly high at more than one-third of all sales, according to CoreLogic, they are down from their peak in January of 2009.

Deficit, unemployment top investor concerns: poll

The staggering budget deficit and troublesome unemployment rate are the top concerns for both investors approaching retirement and those already basking in their twilight years, according to a new Wells Fargo/Gallup poll.

Among the more than 1,000 investors surveyed, 71 percent said the nine-percent unemployment rate and the deficit — forecast to reach $1.48-trillion this fiscal year, or 9.8 per cent of GDP — is hurting the investment climate “a lot.”

“The way we interpret that is clearly investors see the burden of debt at the household level and what it means and they’re thinking about it at the federal level and projecting it into their investment outlook,” says David Carroll, senior vice president and head of Wells Fargo Wealth, Brokerage and Retirement.

Among the poll’s other findings:

• 60 percent said they are concerned over the price of energy
• 58 percent cite “the financial position of state and local governments” as a factor hurting the investment climate
• 51 percent cite a “politically divided federal government” as a concern
• 46 percent are concerned about home price values
• 38 percent are concerned about the availability of credit

Despite the grim state of the federal fisc, investors remain confident the economy will turn around. The optimism index rose to 42 in February, up from its all-time low of -64 in February 2009, but well below pre-crisis levels. Overall, 62 percent of investors say it is a good time in invest in financial markets.

“When we had the market bottom in 2009,  people went to the sidelines. Inherently, there is an urge to put money to work, but we’ve had these episodic shocks with the flash crash last year, the European debt crisis and now we’ve got energy. There seems to be a regular drum beat of things popping up that keeps people from engaging,” says Carroll.

Women in America: How far have we come?

American women are making headway in employment and college education, but the nagging pay-gap still exists, a new White House report finds.

The White House today kicked off Women’s History Month with a report on the status of women in America, the first comprehensive overview of its kind since 1963.  The report is intended to be a “guidepost” for moving forward on everything from closing the salary gap to health issues directly affecting women, says Valerie Jarrett, chair of the White House Council on Women and Girls.

“These aren’t just women’s issues,”  Jarrett said in a conference call. “When women earn less than men, it affects the family. When there’s no affordable childcare, it affects the children.”

The study, which highlighted areas including income, family and crime against women, found that women aren’t just getting a better education, but they’re putting off marriage and having fewer children as a result of their career choices.

“One of the things I find most striking is how much traditional roles have changed,” says Becky Blank, acting deputy secretary at the Department of Commerce. But not everything has changed. Despite the rising ranks of women in the workforce,they still do more of the household work than men do, the report found.

Among the key findings:

Careers: How to break out of the 9-to-5 rut

Kristin Cardinale works for herself, balancing at least seven or more titles at any given time: career coach, consultant, technology instructor, adjunct college professor, seminar speaker, columnist and owner of a technical support business. She says she’s happier and better paid now than when she held her previous 9-to-5 “dream job.”

She doesn’t like the reputation that’s hung on freelancing, and she hates the idea that people are stuck in jobs based on fear. So, she wrote a book about her experience (add that to her list of job titles) and offers a guide for people who might want to strike out on their own.

“The 9-to-5 Cure: Work on Your Own Terms and Reinvent Your Life” makes a compelling argument that redefining yourself as what she calls a “patchworker” might be the solution to today’s employment malaise. Reuters contributor Caryn Brooks spoke with Cardinale about her experiences.

Why use the term patchworker instead of freelancer?

Freelancing has been associated with giganomics. Giganomics is defined as a penny ante slug trying to just survive another day and piece it together. Freelancing has been depicted in a very negative light. It’s a focus on desperation, and it’s a myopic view of the landscape.

So by using a new term you’re trying to reignite a new vision for how people see this kind of work?

Yes. “The 9-to-5 Cure” is based on some central components. It’s an opportunity for me to share my career strategy with people who feel there are no alternatives beyond desperate survival mode. “The 9-to-5 Cure” says that you can find enjoyable work in abundance. The book also focuses on two pieces of employment strategy. The first is lifestyle design: deciding what your priorities are and making a commitment to honor those. The second is what I call the patchwork principle, which is a freelancer career strategy.

How worried should government workers be about their pensions?

Bob worked as a firefighter in Arizona until last September, when he was determined unfit to work for medical fitness reasons.

Like most public sector workers, Bob (not his real name) participates in a traditional defined benefit pension plan, this one sponsored by the state’s Public Safety Personnel Retirement System and he’s applied for early medical-related retirement. But he worries about the future reliability of the pension fund.

“My concerns are that since the Arizona state retirement system is only 68 percent funded, and seeing the backlash in the country toward public retirements, I wonder if I should consider taking a lump sum? The lump sum would be $110,000, or I could receive a monthly annuity of $2,000.”

Bob posed his question after I wrote in December that taking a lump sum at retirement is often a bad deal for private sector workers. Most private sector workers take a lump sum, succumbing to a “it’s my money” mindset. Yet most often, they would get more in lifetime payments from an annuity-style pension. And the guaranteed income stream provides valuable insurance against longevity risk –- that is, the risk of outliving your money.

But what about the public sector?

Most government workers still participate in defined benefit pension plans — unlike the private sector, where they’ve become a disappearing breed. Yet state and municipal employees approaching retirement are worried by headlines about rising levels of unfunded pension liabilities.

There’s even been chatter in Washington about a Republican-led charge to revise federal law to allow states to file for bankruptcy to cope with rising debt and pension obligations. While it’s not likely to happen so long as Democrats control the U.S. Senate and White House, allowing bankruptcy could set the stage for states to rip up union agreements and unilaterally reduce benefits — not to mention setting off havoc in the municipal bond market.

Older unemployed workers half as likely to get hired

Older workers are less likely to get laid off, but they’re having a much harder time finding new work than younger job-seekers.

New research by the Urban Institute shows that seniority helps protect older workers from job loss — the average jobless rate for workers over age 55 in 2010 was 7.7 percent for men, and 6.2 percent for women. That’s considerably lower than the national unemployment rate, which stood at 9.4 percent in December. Overall, workers age 50 to 61 were 34 percent less likely to lose their jobs during the downturn than younger workers, the Urban Institute researchers found.

But workers in that age group who have lost their jobs in the recession are one-third less likely to find new work than their counterparts age 25 to 34. And workers over age 62 were half as likely to be re-employed:

What’s more, workers who do find new jobs are accepting lower pay. Median hourly wages for displaced men age 50 to 61 who became re-employed from 1996 to 2007 fell 20 percent below the median figures for their former jobs; by contrast, wages fell just 4 percent for men age 25 to 34.

The findings point to the difficulty of keeping workers on the job longer — an aim of policymakers hoping to reduce pressure on federal spending for entitlement programs such as Social Security.

“We need to get people to work longer so they can help produce the goods and services necessary to promote economic growth and help pay taxes to fund public services,” says Richard Johnson, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and a co-author of the report. “But that can’t happen unless seniors can find work. We need to devote more money to training and employment services for older workers. The federal government has only one small employment program targeted to older people — we need more. We should also consider extending unemployment benefits for older people, since it takes them so long to find work when unemployed.”

How to encourage working longer with a carrot, not a stick

When President Obama delivers his State of the Union address on January 25th, all indications are that he’ll embrace many of the deficit reduction recommendations put forward last month by the co-chairs of his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility & Reform.

A key section of the wide-ranging report offers recommendations to bolster the long-term fiscal health of Social Security — despite the fact that that Social Security has no direct impact on the federal deficit. Among the commission’s controversial recommendations is an increase in the age when workers can receive full Social Security benefits — the so-called normal retirement age (NRA).

The NRA increase would be phased in very gradually — to 68 in 2050 and 69 in 2075. But the higher retirement age would come on top of an increase in the NRA already being implemented under the Social Security reforms of 1983. Under that set of reforms, the NRA is rising from 65 to 67 in 2027.

Supporters of a higher NRA note that the nation’s rising longevity has reduced the relevance of 65 as a symbol of old age. Indeed, the labor force appears destined to get very gray in the next couple decades. Nearly 75 percent of 55- to 64-year-olds will be working in 2018, according to economist Barry Bluestone, a far higher rate than the 65 percent who were working in 2008. Likewise, Bluestone thinks 30 percent of Americans age 65-74 could be working in 2018, much higher than the current rate of 25 percent.

Certainly, there’s nothing sacrosanct about 65, the NRA that was adopted when Social Security was created in 1935. But the trend toward working longer doesn’t justify cutting Social Security benefits.

The program’s benefits already are modest — the average benefit paid is just over $14,000. And another increase in the NRA will impose a lifetime benefit cut for everyone, no matter the retirement age.

What’s more, working longer presents challenges that older workers are ill-equipped to face, says Marc Freedman, CEO of Civic Ventures, the non-profit devoted to encouraging older adults to blaze new career trails.