When you're contacting an employer for first time by e-mail, custom is to not include a cover letter but instead to provide an introduction in body of e-mail itself. Your resume can be attached in Word format. The introductory text you include in body of e-mail has same goal as a cover letter: to establish a personal relationship. But it is less formal than a cover letter.

Now for a brief word about what a cover letter should not be: it is not a summary of your resume and should not look like a form letter (even if it is one). Also, a cover letter should not include information that's not in your resume. Some busy managers and recruiters simply skip cover letters and don't read them. However, sending a resume to an employer without a cover letter will give them impression you're randomly sending your resume to lots of companies and don't really care in particular about their firm. Unfortunately, you'll create same impression if you send a cover letter that looks like a form letter and isn't customized at all. Even worse though, person reading resumes may have spent an extra 20-30 seconds reading a letter that did not provide them with any additional information than was in your resume and did not take advantage of opportunity to start a personal relationship with person.

An exception to all of this is if you're posting your resume on a job board. In this case, recruiter bears some of responsibility in starting relationship. Here's an analogy to explain this: if you're looking for a date and you approach a woman (or a man) at a bar with a canned pick-up line, they'll probably respect you less than if you said something original. On other hand, if they were to approach you at that same bar, they would be ones who'd have to come up with a way to introduce themselves.

Too often what we think we're rewarding, and what we are, are not same. Too often we've set up reward systems that create work problems we face. And too often, behaviors that exasperate us are ones we're unknowingly reinforcing.

Say a local pizza company decides to reward drivers for on-time delivery. Sounds good, but in actuality, they'd be rewarding speeding and reckless driving. Here's an example from Management Review, "A freight company that based its reward system on number of packages shipped thought productivity was way up until an internal audit revealed that only 45% of containers were shipped full."

How about Texas school system making recent news? It thought it was rewarding teachers for raising test scores. But, it was rewarding numbers over methods. So, one school held back 75% of ninth graders so lower achieving students would not participate in tenth grade tests, and school's staff was rewarded for achieving their goal.

If you want to be winning at working and stop Workplace 911 behaviors from affecting your results, do two things: first, model behavior you expect from others. Respect comes from giving respect and trust from giving trust. Second, look beyond desired outcomes to behaviors that lead to them. Reward that behavior, since whatever gets rewarded gets done. When you find and reward right behaviors, you'll get right results.

(c) 2005 Nan S. Russell. All rights reserved.