How To Appear More Authoritative On The Job When it comes to being more authoritative in your job, the work comes in long before you "act" a certain way. While acting with authority is crucial, eliminating your own limiting beliefs that will show up in your actions is really the key.
Updated Thu Jun 23, 2011
Spare Your Future Employers. Ditch The Digital Drama! Now that your digital dirt is cleaned up, an important but often ignored next step involves ditching your digital drama! Before you begin your job search, make sure you examine your online presence and clean up your act by following these simple tips.
Updated Tue May 10, 2011
Revitalize Your Job Search: Dust For Digital Dirt Many career coaches are encouraging job candidates to clean up their digital dirt. As the number of job seekers grows, so does the competition for each job. A minimal standard of simply removing your party pictures from Facebook or fixing a misrepresentation on your background check is no longer enough.
Updated Wed Apr 27, 2011
Charlie Sheening It! How to Avoid "Warlock" Tendencies and Recover From Being Fired Do you find yourself competing in a saturated market of job seekers, at a time when employers are taking longer than ever to fill positions AND you were fired from your last position for cause? While this may feel like the ultimate challenge, it is also a fabulous opportunity to ditch the drama, stop whining, and set yourself apart as the candidate who has grown the most!
Updated Mon Mar 28, 2011
Want to Be a Success? Burn Your "Party of No" Membership Card In today's workforce, people are increasingly becoming members of the "Party of No," choosing to be resistant to change all the while offering few, if any, options for how to move forward and progress as an organization.
Updated Tue Jan 18, 2011
Please Kill the Open Door Policy, the Drama Is Killing Us As I work with leaders to ditch the drama and turn excuses into results, I am shocked to see the number of leaders who still tout an open door policy! I feel the urge to apologize on behalf of all of us who have ever suggested that an open door policy would lead to results--we lied.
Wed Nov 17, 2010
Would You Rather Be Right or Happy at Work? There are two distinct camps in the business world today--leaders whose teams have failed to measure up and instead do nothing more than deliver excuses, and leaders whose teams have delivered results in spite of the same difficult circumstances. The difference between the two? The path that the leaders chose to take.
Sat Sep 18, 2010
Want to Attract the Best Employees? Make Work Addictive Like a Game With the some signs of the recession coming to an end, many CEOs may be beginning to worry about how to retain the top talent they have attracted. What if we stop trying to change the obvious motivators of the next generation and begin instead to create a workplace that replicates the most attractive qualities of gaming?
Tue Jul 27, 2010
Game On My Little Friends, Game On! Don’t let your parents ruin the future of business… As I continue on my trek to challenge conventional wisdom and current thinking – mostly because it obviously isn’t leading to success in most businesses – I am going to focus this blog on parenting … or, as I believe, leading future employees before they hit the work scene.
Mon Apr 12, 2010
Job descriptions: ammunition for resistant employees I have become convinced that it’s high time to rid the world of job descriptions. Job descriptions are impossible to keep current, have outgrown their usefulness, are no longer relevant and are being used for evil – not good in the workplace. Worse yet, job descriptions are enabling leaders to fall back on the “written word” rather than truly leading their people, directing work and having those uncomfortable, but clarifying conversations on a regular basis.
Mon Feb 15, 2010
Termination notice: You’ve been replaced By Google! Human Resources gospel has always been to make employees feel as if their opinions counted. After all, this is America, and democracy is a good thing, right? Not always.
Fri Jan 15, 2010
Attention all leaders: New criteria for raising issues in the workplace, no solution necessary! Each and every day I work with leaders to try to help them understand that much of what they have come to accept as “best practices” or “solid beliefs” in leadership philosophy are not only untrue, but keeping them from creating far greater results in their organizations.
Posted Tue Dec 8, 2009
Leaders, There Really Are Some Stupid Questions! Over this past year of presenting the concepts of Reality Based Leadership at conferences nationwide, I have often heard leaders unconsciously, routinely spouting off cliches that not only remain untested but that are absolutely false. Worse yet, they are encouraging a huge waste of scarce team resources. A favorite cliché of mine to bust right in front of their eyes is, “There are no stupid questions.”
Posted Mon Oct 26, 2009
Leadership Cliché Challenged and Busted – There is no “I” in TEAM replaced with There is definitely an “I” in WIN. Have you ever noticed that many of the leadership clichés we live by are not living up to their reputation? Leaders flippantly throw around sound bites of so-called “wisdom,” picked up at conferences or from leadership books and use them without truly questioning whether or not they are true or even useful. Bit by bit, these clichés have reached the status of “conventional wisdom” – widespread beliefs that are not only untested but untrue – also causing havoc in the workplace.
Posted Wed Oct 7, 2009
Leaders, beware: the hottest new excuse for lack of results – “trust issues” Recent research has cited that employees who trust their senior management bring back 108% value to their shareholders. On the other hand, employees who do not trust their senior executives only bring 66% back to their shareholders.
Posted Tue Aug 25, 2009
My advice to leaders: Play favorites and get results! In our quest as leaders to be respectful of legitimate differences our employees have, it appears that we have become a very careful, hesitant, and nearly comatose group. A great number of “leaders” have begun to pretend that all employees are created equal and are delivering equal results and value to the organization – when the reality is actually quite different.
Posted Fri Aug 14, 2009
Does taking a sabbatical equal job sabotage? You probably heard of them in college – many of your favorite professors took a semester off to travel the world, do research or write a book. Now that you're in the real world, you could use a sabbatical, too – but is taking one a good move for your career? From an HR perspective, sabbaticals are a creative and kinder strategy to survey the workforce for those who are able and willing to volunteer for time off in order to avoid being forced to furlough unwilling workers. Is a sabbatical right for you?
Posted Fri Jul 31, 2009
How Does GPA Stack Up in the Real World?
You might ask yourself, how important is my grade point average when searching for a job?
In some aspects – it is not to be overlooked. If the applicant has recently graduated, is seeking entrance into a top corporation, is in a highly competitive job market or in a highly technical field, then GPA (grade point average) remains extremely important even though it is not always the best predictor of future performance. For other opportunities, GPAs are being valued less, with the candidate’s potential for valuable future contributions weighted far greater.
Posted Mon Jun 29, 2009
Fighting Back Against the Office Bully You remember in grade school when the bully left you in the dust on the playground without a lunch? You’d like to think that now that you’re an adult, all of that drama was left on the playground. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Those bullies on the playground are now working with you in the corporate world.
Posted Thu Jun 18, 2009
A guide to dealing with resistant employees
Where, oh where has my willing employee gone? And where did all of these irrelevant and resistant employees come from?
The No. 1 question I hear from managers and leaders is, “How do I deal with resistant employees?”
Posted Wed Jun 10, 2009
