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How to Make “Easy Button” Career Decisions
Finding your core values isn’t just good for guiding your life, its good for guiding your career too. Today’s post is by Tracy Timm, author of Unstoppable (CLICK HERE to get your copy). When it comes to making career decisions, we’ve all been to “the dark side.” Endless pro-con lists. Sleepless nights. Emotional rollercoasters. Circular conversations. Worrying if this is our “one shot” while simultaneously wondering if we’re settling or worth more. Trying to balance the shiny components of the offer, maintain a level head, remember to negotiate, and keep every other generic piece of career advice front of mind. Cue confusion, anxiety, doubt, and fear. But what if there was a way to ensure that every decision you made in your career was in your best, long-term interest? What if you could wade through the emotions and momentary elation and get down to brass tacks: Will this work for me or is this just another distraction? In the moment, it can be so difficult to separate what really matters from how we are currently feeling. After all, no matter if we’re being offered the CEO role or a part-time consulting position, there are so many emotions at play. It’s human nature to feel compelled to pursue something that we’re offered. Even if the offer is coming from left field (hello, Mr. CMO, would you like to design a logo for me?) there’s something about an opportunity showing up on your doorstep that begs the question: Am I supposed to take this?
How robust are the employee mental health resources in your organization?
Our reader poll today asks: How robust are the employee mental health resources in your organization? Very: We have a significant number of high-quality resources available to our associates 33.34% Kind of: We have some key resources available but we could do better 27.17% Not very: We have a couple of critical mental health resources but that’s it 18.51% Not at all: We have no mental health resources available whatsoever 20.98% An absence of resources. Mental health issues impact a significant number of employees yet two-thirds of respondents say their company’s mental health resources are lacking. While mental health issues may be mostly invisible, their impact on employee wellbeing and productivity are substantial. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there. If you’re a leader, see if you can lead the change on making these critical resources available. Your team members and colleagues could benefit greatly from them. Depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and other mental illnesses are no joke. Facing them alone is an incredible challenge for your team members. Show them you care about them as an entire person. Get them the resources they need. They’ll appreciate it and it’s simply the right thing to do. – Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!
How to Set Business Unit Goals
When you go to set your business unit goals, there are a few principles you should follow. Any goals you set should be SMART—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Performance expectations in your organization are probably pretty high. A key to hitting those expectations is a solid goal-setting process. Setting department and business unit goals requires leaders to translate higher-level corporate goals down to the business unit and then break them down further into team and individual goals. This means defining goals, then linking them to strategy, financial results, and incentives. Leaders must also sanity check goals to ensure there are no unintended consequences arising from goals that are improperly set. Going from corporate to business unit to individual goals helps drive alignment of activity with the company strategy. For more on team and individual goal setting, watch my course on that subject. I have one client that was trying to grow internationally. They set a corporate goal for a portion of revenue coming from outside the United States. The business units were each given a target. Functions that supported those business units were given enabler targets, like building a pilot plant in India for the R&D group. If the R&D built that plant, then they could sell product in India, which would help drive the high-level goal of driving revenue outside the United States. Individuals on that project had milestones for their personal goals. By linking the corporate strategy to the business unit to functional goals down to individual goals, the organization had the alignment it needed. When you’re thinking about the goals for your organization, make sure you’re making those clear linkages from the highest-level strategic goals all the way down through your business unit or function down to your teams and down to the individual level. 5 Goal-Setting Principles When […]
What Living in a War Zone Taught Me About Leadership
In Beirut, Lebanon during 1973, five-year-old Elisa A. Schmitz first learned situational awareness—a leadership lesson she says is key to being visionary. Today’s guest post is by Elisa Schmitz, author of Become the Fire: Transform Life’s Chaos into Business and Personal Success (CLICK HERE to get your copy). It was 1973 and I was living in Beirut, Lebanon, when that country was a powder keg before its civil war. I was not quite 5 years old. One day, my siblings and I were on the sidewalk in front of our apartment building, walking with my father toward school. We had recently moved to Beirut, and I was still getting used to the new culture – for example, women dressed head to toe in flowing black, their faces carefully hidden behind fabric – and the unfamiliar language that was so different from the Spanish and English we spoke at home. Ahead on the sidewalk, two women approached – dressed in that traditional garb – but their eyes kept darting to the rooftops. Then they started to run. I saw the fear in their eyes and felt a chill down my spine. In the next instant, I heard gunshots coming from the rooftops. I felt the hair on the back of my neck prickle and a wave of fear crash over me as the snipers shot at a car below. That chill and that tingling on my neck screamed danger to me, and I knew I was not safe. I felt a grownup hand yank me hard as my dad hauled us back to our apartment. Later that night, shots rang out again. I stayed up all night, thinking that if I was the one to be awake and hear the shots, I could warn everyone. I thought my being aware could […]
4 Essentials Every Challenger Brand Must Cultivate
Successful challenger brands know where they stand, who they are, and how prepared they are to go to battle. They identify disruptive strategies, make distinctive promises and statements, and create and use a voice that’s unique to them. Today’s post is by Mike Sullivan and Michael Tuggle, authors of The Voice of the Underdog: How Challenger Brands Create Distinction by Thinking Culture First (CLICK HERE to get your copy). For those unfamiliar, challenger brands are those brands in second place, third place, seventh place, all chasing the category leader. Challengers are smaller, scrappier, and most often are brands where ambitions run high, but resources run low. Challengers cannot outspend their competition, so they outthink them instead. They start with a focused business strategy and look for opportunities to disrupt. Challenger brands don’t win by finding ways to play the game better. They win by changing it. For every successful challenger brand, there are great examples of how they disrupted the status quo. When airlines started charging $25 a bag, Southwest Airlines said bags fly free. When fast food restaurants struggled to get orders right in the drive-thru, Chick-Fil-A built double drive-thrus and staffed them with smiling, helpful, appreciate people who took, checked, and double checked the accuracy of your order with a “my pleasure” at the end. When Blockbuster insisted people loved their neighborhood video rental store and would never go anywhere else, Netflix said we’ll see about that. Disruption is the calling card for successful challenger brands. Take for example Franzia wines, and their beloved Charles Shaw Chardonnay affectionately known at Trader Joe’s and beyond as “Two Buck Chuck.” At the 2007 California Fair Wine Competition, Charles Shaw’s $2 Chardonnay beat out 350 other chardonnays in a blind taste test — some priced as high as $55 a bottle. […]
How to Identify and Motivate Slackers on Your Team
You put in a lot of time and energy into leading slackers, but you don’t get anything back in terms of results. Your job as a leader is to figure out what will motivate them to perform. One type of detractor you might deal with is a slacker. These people are in the lower left corner of the leadership matrix. You put in a lot of time and energy into leading them but you don’t get anything back in terms of results. Slackers have the talent to get the work done. They just done care. They’re not motivated to do it. Leaders spend a disproportionate amount of time managing slackers. They require constant supervision and motivation. What’s so frustrating about them is they have the capability to do the work. They just choose not to. Identifying Slackers There are some easy ways to spot a slacker. They tend to be smart and have a strong resume. They can tend to be very self-promoting. They might be a frequent job changer. They’re difficult to get work out of because they constantly debate the merits of your request rather than doing the work. They might renegotiate their deadlines frequently. They’re more interested in other people’s work than their own work. They can tend to be outspoken. They annoy other team members because they always wander into that team member’s lane instead of focusing on their own responsibilities. Other team members push back a lot of times on covering for the slacker because they know the slacker has the capability to do the work. I know one slacker very well. He was me. I had a role where I had previously been excited about the work I was doing. My boss changed my responsibilities. I was not thrilled with those new responsibilities so I started mailing it in. I just didn’t care. I became very frustrating to […]
Sisters, Service, and Sales
Customer service that is focused on customer relationships will impact your ability to make sales and to improve your business. Today’s post is by Kate Edwards, author of Hello! And Every Little Thing That Matters (CLICK HERE to get your copy). There is a scene in the Tina Fey/Amy Pohler film “Sisters” that is hilarious. The scene takes place in the dressing room of a trendy shop where the eponymous sisters go shopping for dresses for a party they are hosting that night. They go to a boutique and try on a number of party dresses, but they are clearly clueless. Each dress the sisters put on is completely unflattering as they wear the dresses in all sorts of inappropriate ways. The shop clerk watches them in deadpan horror and her face expresses what we are all thinking: each dress is worse than the next. The clerk, however, doesn’t help them put the dresses on correctly or offer them sizes that fit; rather, she says “that looks amaaaazing” in a completely flat tone. This character is the epitome of the lackluster clerk who clearly has been told to compliment the customers. No. Matter. What. Service that is inauthentic, unhelpful or pushy is the stuff of horrible Yelp reviews and comedic movie scenes. But service doesn’t have to be like that. Businesses that take time to connect authentically to their customers will build a client for life. And businesses that ignore service in the sales moment are doing themselves great harm as sales are based on a human connection. Here are some easy ways to connect with your customers that will make the sisters of your business – service and sales – shine. Establish Customer Quotas, Not Sales Quotas Too many businesses focus on the number of sales rather than the number […]
How to Focus Joyriders on Your Team
Joyriders are team members that you don’t invest a lot of leadership capital in, but you also don’t get anything back from them in terms of results. Your Joyriders occupy the lower right corner of the Leadership Matrix. You don’t put in a lot of time and energy but you also don’t get anything back in terms of results. Joyriders can be really tricky to identify. They have a lot of energy and enthusiasm. They seem to constantly be busy. Unfortunately, they seem to work on everything except their core responsibilities. Leaders tend not to spend a lot of leadership capital on joyriders because they seem like they’re delivering results. But at the end of the year they tend to come up short on what was expected of them. Some ways you can spot a joyrider are they’re high energy, they’re enthusiastic, they’re busy, and they’re social at work. They have broad interests in a lot of different areas. They constantly come to you with new ideas. They’re the first person to suggest launching a new special project. They’re constantly volunteering for things outside of their area of responsibility. They also have a very light track record on results. They’re hard to pin down on their core deliverables and their deadlines. Their teammates end up covering for them and doing the work the joyrider was supposed to be doing. It’s easy to miss a joyrider. The key is to look for a lot of activity and not a lot of results. How to Focus Joyriders Leading joyriders involves investing additional time and energy into monitoring this person’s activities and focusing them on their core responsibilities. This means more frequent check-ins and putting more structure and measurement to their work. The additional leadership capital you spend on them is designed to improve […]