Self-Help

• Advice for Visitors Who Need to Get Along With Their Bosses. These tips may be useful for those having trouble getting along with their boss. (The Happiness Blog.)
  
  
• An Informal Approach To Solving Problems: ‘Ombuds’ Help Organizations Deal with Conflicts, Complaints ‘Ombuds’ help organizations deal with conflicts, complaints.
  
  
• Bullying more Harmful than Sexual Harassment on the Job, Say Researchers. Workplace bullying, such as belittling comments, persistent criticism of work and withholding resources, appears to inflict more harm on employees than sexual harassment, say researchers who presented their findings at a conference today.
  
  
• Career Advice - 10 Tips for Junior Faculty. Daniel S. Hamermesh urges those starting on the tenure track at research universities to have a tight focus on their publishing and their time.
  
  
• Critical Factors for Effective Negotiation Expert negotiator, Herb Cohen (who settled the NFL player strike and advised two presidents), says there are three crucial variables for every negotiation. Without these (power, time and information), you are likely to lose.
  
  
• Defining Academic Freedom: What it does do and What it doesn’t do - Cary Nelson is president of the American Association of University Professors and professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author, most recently, of No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom (NYU, 2010).
  
  
• Don't let the toxic boss get you down - advice for dealing with toxic bosses from The Economic Times
  
  
• Handling a Tyrant Boss - Lynn Taylor, a workplace expert and contributor to Business Week magazine offers suggestions book on how employees can manage difficult bosses
  
  
• How to Apologize - Over at Mediate.com, Vivian Scott says that an effective apology has four elements: 1.explicit details, 2. a demonstration that your regret is about your actions and not his reactions, 3. a promise that it won't happen again, and 4. an offer to make up for your behavior.

• How to Survive When You Hate Your Job  - Expert advice on how to improve your experience and your relationships at work
  
  
• Is There A Bully In Your Department?  How can you identify or mitigate bullies in academe? Jason B. Jones reviews Leah P. Hollis’s Bully in the Ivory Tower.

• Mediating disputes on the job Advice from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School: http://www.pon.harvard.edu

• Online Conflict Management Coach   This website is designed to help you understand, plan and manage conflict with one or more members of a workgroup, a classmate, roommate, etc.
  
  
• Responding To Research Wrongdoing: A User-Friendly Guide was developed under a grant from the National Institutes of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and the HHS Office of Research Integrity, No. R01 NS049573.  This is a free resource, and you are invited to share it (and this web site) with others interested in research ethics and academic integrity. They published an opinion paper in Nature on July 22, 2010 describing the results of the study that lead to creation of the Guide
  
  
• Signs It's Time to Leave Your Job  Molly Peckman advises attorneys on law firm life and professional development. Her recent article for The Legal Intelligencer on recognizing when you are miserable in your job and perhaps it's time to leave.
  
  
• Study Shows That Ridicule Undermines Workplace Performance  - Research published in the Journal of Management Studies finds that perceived workplace injustices directly affect employees' ability to cope with workload demands and performance-related expectations
  
  
• The Economy of Forgiveness - Some thoughts on this subject from the book Brain Power: Improve Your Mind as You Age by Michael Gelb
  
  
• The Ombudsman: The Best Conversation That Never Happened. Dora Farkas, who earned a PhD at MIT and did post-doc work at Tufts, writes an advice column for BenchFly a resource dedicated to providing researchers with the laboratory techniques and advice for life both in and out of the lab. Her latest column addresses the concerns of an anonymous graduate student considering the university Ombuds office. The article's title is one of my favorite descriptions of Ombuds work, "The Ombudsman: The Best Conversation that Never Happened."
  
  
• The Power of Emotional Detachment  When Ombuds are consulted by people targeted by a bully, Ombuds try to identify a range of options for responding. Oftentimes, the visitor may choose to cope with the situation by disengaging. Author Bob Sutton seems to agree that emotional detachment is an important job skill.
  
  
• Tips for Dealing with Workplace Bullying More than a third of U.S. workers have experienced workplace bullying, the repeated mistreatment by a boss or co-workers, which includes verbal abuse, threatening conduct, intimidation, harassment or social exclusion, according to the Workplace Bullying Institute.
  

• Turn Your Adversary Into Your Advocate: The Benefits of Seeking Advice  The latest post on the Harvard Program on Negotiation Blog reflects wisdom many Ombuds share with their visitors.  "Turn Your Adversary Into Your Advocate: The Benefits of Seeking Advice" suggests four benefits generated by requests for advice during negotiation: collaborative problem solving; increased likability; shifted perspectives; shared responsibility.

• University of Miami Ombuds Offers Guidance for Students in Conflict. The student newspaper at the University of Miami published an interview with Dr. Gail Cole-Avent, who serves as the Ombudsperson for non-academic issues. She explained that Miami relies on a network of "University Troubleshooters" to triage student concerns and refer more significant issues to the Ombuds office. Cole-Avent offers students in conflict five pointers.

Special thanks to Tom Kosakowski, University Ombudsperson, Mediator, and Attorney in Los Angeles for suggesting these sites in his blog – The Ombuds Blog.