Mike Figliuolo – Page 86 – thoughtLEADERS, LLC: Leadership Training for the Real World

About Mike Figliuolo

This author has not written his bio yet.
But we are proud to say that Mike Figliuolo contributed 1284 entries already.

Entries by Mike Figliuolo

One Simple Question That Keeps You from Falling on Your Sword

June 13, 2011 /6 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career /by Mike Figliuolo

I love passionate people. People who throw themselves into their work with every last erg of energy they have. To them, everything about their work is important. It’s serious business and they drive hard to form the world in an image they’re proud of. With passion, however, comes peril. If everything is important, you tend to get worked up over every issue no matter how large or small. You feel it necessary to stand up for what’s right in every instance. You might even seek to transform situations by injecting yourself into them even if you don’t really have a say in the matter. The result is repeatedly diving on your sword for many issues or sticking your beak where it doesn’t belong and getting involved in problems that are larger than you. As usual on this blog, I’m going to give you a helpful little tool to help you avoid all those nasty sword gashes. All you have to do is ask and answer one simple little question:

Respect: It’s Time to Get Dirty

June 6, 2011 /12 Comments/in Books, Leadership /by Mike Figliuolo

This is one of my all-time favorite stories. It even has full feature coverage in my upcoming book One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership (that’s the cover there on the left). You can even pre-order a copy of the book now and get a ridiculously large discount on Amazon (CLICK HERE TO BUY) or Barnes & Noble (CLICK HERE TO BUY). Not sure how long those discounts will last so… you know… Anyway, on to the important stuff. My platoon was out in the field on training exercises. We had been out there for about two weeks so we all smelled kind of “ripe” at that point. One of the more senior officers in my battalion came to my unit’s area to see how things were going. This “gentleman” personified the term – he was an “officer’s officer” (versus being a “soldier’s officer” which we’ll explore in a moment). He sauntered up to my 18 year old driver (a brand new buck private – the lowest ranking man in the Army) and said “Where’s Lieutenant Figliuolo?” My driver pointed toward our tank. A pair of boots was sticking out from underneath the vehicle. The officer in question became irked. Then things got really interesting…

Gurus, Ninjas, and Morons: Losing Credibility One Business Card at a Time

May 31, 2011 /22 Comments/in Communications, Entrepreneur, Sales /by Mike Figliuolo

Titles matter. A lot. So do email addresses and signature blocks. As unfortunate and as shallow as it is, people make a first impression snap decision about you and your business in an instant. If that instant includes your title it can make or break your business opportunity. Yes, CxO, Vice President, Director, Manager, Analyst, and other vanilla titles are boring. They’re not edgy. They don’t have panache. That said, they quickly convey a certain level of skill and experience that the majority of the business population can interpret. Your contact isn’t left scratching their head wondering what the heck you do. Then there’s the other end of the title spectrum: Guru, Ninja, Overlord, Grand Poobah, Super Hero. They sound wicked awesome. They get people’s attention. But you have to realize not all attention is good. On top of that, these titles are usually paired with a cool signature block quote or catch phrase and they have sweet email addresses too. Unfortunately all of these things can undermine your credibility and cost you business. Here are a few of the biggest mistakes I see people make when it comes to the arena of titles and personal branding:

Are You Ready for the Next Apocalypse?

May 23, 2011 /0 Comments/in Balanced Lifestyle, Career /by Mike Figliuolo

In case you missed it, the apocalypse happened this past Saturday. The end of days. The reckoning. It was a time to take a step back and reflect on all you’ve accomplished or failed to accomplish in your life. Even though the world was not torn asunder by explosions, the reflection on what life means can be meaningful. I for one was excited that the rapture was coming because I figured i wouldn’t have to figure out how to find the time to write this post. Yeah. That didn’t really work out. For as funny as the apocalyptic predictions were, there are some sobering thoughts that should come of that moment of reflection when you’re looking to the sky to see if the meteor really *is* headed your way. Think of this as one of my balanced lifestyle posts. It’s sort of a checklist for the next apocalypse. I’d like to ask you to reflect on a few important things:

Ditch the Rules and Grab the Guidelines

May 16, 2011 /5 Comments/in Leadership /by Mike Figliuolo

Today’s post is an excerpt from the cutting room floor. It was in an early draft of my upcoming book One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership (pre-order your copy by CLICKING HERE). It covers how to lead through guidelines rather than leading through rules. We need guidance during challenging times. We need something to keep us within healthy and productive boundaries. We are human and make mistakes. Having personal guidelines that we live our lives by will remind us how we want to behave and keeps us safe and on track. This does not have to be a detailed list of do’s and don’ts. A laundry list of rules and regulations is not practical. Instead, a judgment-based approach that can be broadly applied to any situation is much more flexible, manageable, and applicable. Every situation is different and each decision we face will have a variety of new and unpredictable factors involved. But if we have judgment-based guidelines to govern our conduct, we can apply them to any situation we face instead of having to frantically search a list of do’s and don’ts only to find that particular situation is not covered. The simpler the guidelines, the more powerful they can be.

Great Leaders Get Regular Reality Checks

May 11, 2011 /0 Comments/in Books, Guest Blogger, Leadership, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

Today’s guest post is by Donald Van de Mark, author of The Good Among the Great: 19 Traits of the Most Admirable, Creative, and Joyous People. You should go buy a copy of his book by CLICKING HERE. It’s good reading. Here’s Donald: After over 20 years of interviewing some of the top business leaders in the world, I have learned that nimble business leadership requires acute reality recognition – the ability to accurately perceive the business climate in which your organization operates. No less a business icon than Charlie Munger, vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, says that the one quality that he and Warren Buffett look for when hiring CEOs is “reality recognition.” Perceiving reality may seem like a pedestrian task but it’s not – for any of us. And when you’re at the top of an organization with hundreds of messages coming at you daily, practicing it takes daily discipline. In my experience, the most realistic business leaders share key qualities. Andy Grove, cofounder of Intel, is one such case study. I interviewed Grove when he was CEO of the microprocessor giant. In the 1980s and early 1990s he bet his company on the rise of a device hardly anyone believed would become commonplace – the personal computer. How did Grove come by this seemingly magical, predictive understanding of where the market was going, and how did he fortify himself to take the necessary risks to lead his company one step ahead of the future? Here are five tips I’ve learned from my interview with him:

How to Lead Like a Coxswain

May 9, 2011 /8 Comments/in Leadership /by Mike Figliuolo

Anyone who has ever seen a crew team rowing down the river has likely wondered why one person is a passenger and everyone else in the boat is rowing like mad. It would seem the coxswain has the easiest job in the boat. It’s actually incredibly difficult and my 16 year-old daughter (who is a coxswain) has taught me a few great leadership lessons as I’ve watched her cox over the past few seasons. As you run your organizations there are a few lessons you can take from her and apply to be better leaders of your teams as well. They’re counter-intuitive approaches to leadership but if you apply them well I think you’ll be very pleased with the results. Those lessons are: – Know your team’s needs at any given moment – Small tweaks can have a big impact – Being small doesn’t mean being weak – Demand a lot from your team – they’re up to it Here’s how those lessons can be applied:

How to Handle When Someone Else Takes Credit for Your Work

May 2, 2011 /30 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career, Communications, Entrepreneur, Social Media /by Mike Figliuolo

We’ve all had that experience where we work really hard on something and instead of getting recognized for our contribution, we have to sit there and choke back bile when someone else takes credit for the work. It’s infuriating to think about how hard you worked and how much effort you put into a project only to see some other glory-hound or charlatan pass all that effort off as their own. Heck, I got a taste of that this week. I saw a bunch of traffic coming to my blog from Dr. Shailesh Thaker’s blog (UPDATE: security software now indicates his blog is a virus attack site – DO NOT GO THERE). At first I was psyched. Here was a self-proclaimed “Management Thinker, HR Guru, and Corporate Coach” telling his fans my content was good. Then I saw it. It was my blog post on shutting your cake hole. The ONLY thing that was different was the author. Apparently that article was now written by Dr. Thaker himself. Hmmm. I wonder if Thaker rhymes with faker. That’s right folks. Blatant plagiarism. Here’s my original post and here’s his post (UPDATE: he finally removed all posts however his site is now showing up as an “attack site” in my antivirus so I’ve disabled links to him). Unfortunately he wasn’t bright enough to disable the hyperlink back to my blog and that’s how I found the content. It turns out he ripped off several of my articles, a few from SmartBrief on Leadership, some from Kevin Eikenberry and others. So what can you do when you’re in this situation? What do you do when someone else passes your work off as their own? How do you handle it when someone else takes credit for work you did? Here are a few thoughts:

4 Failure Lessons You Should Learn from Google

April 27, 2011 /3 Comments/in Guest Blogger, Innovation, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

Today’s guest blogger is Tim Eyre. He’s a loyal reader of the blog and when he teed up a topic for me to write about, I turned the tables and asked him to write about the topic himself! You can read more about Tim at the end of the post. Google must be the world’s failure leader. But how can that be, when Google is widely known as the world’s most successful search engine? How can that be, when Google has become such a powerful corporation that some people worry about the privacy implications of letting Google handle their email, keep their credit card information in an online shopping profile, monitor and forward their newsfeed subscriptions, and keep tabs on all their searches? Google’s power has become so notorious that The Onion regularly targets the search giant for its parodies. “We would like to extend our deepest apologies to each and every one of you,” announced CEO Eric Schmidt, teased a recent Onion front page story, “Clearly there have been some privacy concerns as of late, and judging by some of the search terms we’ve seen, along with the tens of thousands of personal e-mail exchanges and Google Chat conversations we’ve carefully examined, it looks as though it might be a while before we regain your trust.” Is that the Google I want to crown as the king of failure? Yes, yes, and yes. You too can (and should) learn to fail like Google.

How to Innovate Like Captain Jack Sparrow

April 25, 2011 /7 Comments/in Innovation /by Mike Figliuolo

Is your organization struggling to be more “innovative” and create new ideas? There’s an “Innovation Agenda” but all that’s on it are status meetings to review the “idea pipeline” which is nothing more than a stale list of ideas that make the business incrementally better? Yeah. That. If you really want to innovate and shake things up, you can learn a thing or two from Captain Jack Sparrow. Aside from being some of the coolest movies ever made based on a lame amusement park ride that now kicks butt, the Pirates of the Caribbean’s star anti-hero can teach you a few things. Sure – it seems everything Captain Jack does works out. All his crazy ideas end up looking brilliant even though at inception they’re a bit hare-brained. It’s a movie folks. Realize not all your ideas will work out well. You will have failures. That said, if you’re truly serious about being innovative, you have to accept some risk if you want the rewards that go with it. Here’s what I think you can learn from Captain Jack Sparrow:

Getting Your Risk-Averse Boss to Take a Chance On Your Ideas

April 20, 2011 /0 Comments/in Books, Business Toolkit, Communications, Guest Blogger, Leadership /by Mike Figliuolo

Today’s guest post is by Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D, author of Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals. You can read all about her at the end of the post. Here’s Heidi: A good friend of mine, “Tom,” recently brought a product to his boss’s attention that would allow his company to take its social media efforts to a whole new level, and might significantly improve their image. It would be an industry first, and not entirely without risk, but with huge potential payoff. After hearing his pitch, his boss asked, “Are any of our competitors using this?” “No,” Tom replied, feeling that this was a strong selling point – a competitive edge. “Well,” his boss responded, “then I don’t think we want to stick our necks out and be the first, do we?” Huh? Tom was disappointed, but not at all surprised. For every manager out there trying to encourage innovation, there seem to be ten standing squarely in the way of it. I spend a lot of time talking to people about motivation and growth, and everywhere I go, I hear complaints like: I just can’t get my boss to take the risk. There’s a huge opportunity here, and we’re missing it. We just follow trends, we don’t ever create them. It’s incredibly frustrating to know you have a real winner of an idea on your hands, something that could really shake things up, and not be able to get it past your Nervous Nelly of a boss. Not that the cautious, conservative approach doesn’t have its place – but ultimately an organization cannot grow without embracing some risk. The recent recession has only made matters worse. People don’t want to rock the boat at a time when jobs are hard to find. Unfortunately, they forget that without […]

3 Reasons You Should Shut Your Cake Hole

April 18, 2011 /16 Comments/in Communications /by Mike Figliuolo

Sometimes the best thing you can do is simply shut up. Simply put a big pair of socks in your mouth and plug up your cake hole. There are plenty of situations where shutting up is the right strategy. There are also plenty of benefits to doing so. It’s no secret – sometimes I open my mouth when I should be doing exactly the opposite and before those of you who agree start spewing “I can’t stand when he talks” just realize at least I’m self aware – are you? Hmmm. Hello Pot, this is Kettle… Anyway, there are three reasons you need to simply hush. Shutting up can build relationships (or prevent destroying them), improve negotiations, and make you smarter. This is a difficult skill to master especially in a world that encourages us to share MORE of our thoughts than ever (hello Twitter, Facebook, blogs – oops). I’ve talked about other benefits of shutting up before in this post – CLICK HERE to read it. All that said, here’s the argument for keeping quiet: