— Leave a Comment

Engineering Human Performance

How can business leaders engineer higher performance?

People assume the qualities of the roles they’re assigned. People who wear surgical scrubs, judge’s robes, or uniforms understand this. Uniforms create a feedback loop from bystanders – even a tentative rookie will step-up under scrutiny from a crowd that expects them to succeed or to perform in a predictable way.  People also routinely commit the fundamental attribution error – they assign values and assume expertise where none exists. Best demonstrated each time someone asks a Doctor how to invest their money. This question flows from an assumption that high achievement and domain knowledge in one area translates to other domains.

Alternatively, self-confidence can overcome negative bias, since it can be difficult to identify an expert out of context – someone wearing tattered clothes who walks up and declares – “I’m a Doctor” will get everyone’s attention. Think about the Holiday Inn commercials when self-confident people tackle a challenge they would otherwise be unprepared for – at the end revealing they have no qualifications except that they “stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night.” Alternatively, consider how people treated Frank Abagnale Jr. when he forged checks as a nineteen year old pilot for Pan Am Airways. Countless examples were acted out by Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2002 Steven Spielberg film, “Catch Me If You Can.”

Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, was famous for driving an old pickup truck and wearing unassuming clothes. Sam’s been used as an example to sales people in luxury-goods industries as the reason they should treat everyone who walks through the door as a potential customer.

Our bias is predictable and easy to uncover. The day after Martin Luther King was assassinated In 1968, Jane Elliott, a third-grade teacher in Riceville, Iowa, divided her class for an exercise about discrimination. Students were arbitrarily divided into two groups – blue eyes, superior, and brown eyes, inferior. The blue eyed group was placed in charge, and brown eyed students were not allowed to use the playground equipment or the drinking fountain. Students were told that blue-eyed students were naturally better at math, English, and other skills, while brown eyed students were told they were not as good. The next day, Jane announced she had made a mistake and the roles were reversed.

Immediately, previously low-performing blue-eyed students were producing better work – they were trying harder, while high-performing brown-eyed children started to perform below their previous levels. Jane Elliott’s impact on education is significant, her experiment in Riceville created the foundation for her work as a speaker and coach about discrimination, and diversity training for corporations and colleges around the world. In 1970, her third group was filmed and a documentary was released called “Eye of the Storm.” In 1985 Frontline created a program about the experiment, based on a book by the same title, “A Class Divided” and it includes footage from the 1970 documentary. You can watch it here.

Jane tested her students regularly and found that scores went down during the time a student was part of the low expectation group, and up during their participation in a high performing group. But another effect was more surprising. After their participation in the experiment all students’ scores increased. Researchers at Stanford reviewed the results and concluded that the brown eyes, blue eyes experiment led to a dramatic change in the students performance – the act of believing you could do better showed the kids they were able to achieve more, to perform better, and evidence presented during their time as “high performers” increased their self-confidence and performance.

Jane Elliott already demonstrated how discrimination is manufactured. In 1971, Dr. Philip Zimbardo and other researchers at Stanford, wanted to measure how role expectations could change behavior, outlook, and self-esteem, in a study about prisons sponsored by the U.S. Navy. They devised an experiment where young men were randomly selected to be guards or prisoners in the 1971 Stanford prison experiment. Twenty-four students participated in the mock-prison; guards quickly asserted control over the prisoners, and subjected them to various forms of psychological torture. Most of the prisoners accepted their treatment, but a few resisted, only to be attacked by other prisoners who helped guards keep everyone in line.

“Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended prematurely after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress.” Philip G. Zimbardo

Both experiments offer important lessons for us. It’s a small leap to recognize that leaders and managers who encourage and support their teams, will generate higher performance, while the reverse is true too. People will perform to the expectations others set for them, and knowledge about their situation does not automatically reverse the effects.

Engineering human performance – or how to create a pre-determined outcome. When you put someone in charge, they’ll step up to perform well, make sound decisions, and generally do the right thing. In most businesses, when the boss is away, subordinates need to find another senior leader to sign documents, approve budgets, expense reports, and other decisions to operate the business – this is the ‘disposition attribution‘ theory at work; businesses incorrectly assume that sound decision-making is a function of the employee’s level. The military operates using the ‘situational attribution‘ theory; decision-making authority rests with the senior person present. When the boss is gone, the next person in line has the authority to make operational decisions required to complete immediate tasks. This quality causes soliders, sailors, and airmen to view leadership as a condition of their circumstances rather than their pedigree. They are not paralyzed by the loss of a leader, because even the lowliest Army of one has someone in charge.

The military experience provides evidence to support conclusions by Jane Elliott and the Stanford researchers, but those lessons have not yet penetrated business leadership principles in a meaningful way. Now you have a chance to make a positive, lasting difference, and as you do, think about how what you’ve just learned influences leadership rotation programs, recruiting practices, and B-scale pay plans.

Coaching
— Leave a Comment

Babies and Billionaires are Assertive

The most assertive people I know are babies and billionaires. Babies demand attention when they’re hungry or have a dirty diaper, and great wealth isn’t acquired by those who think about questions but never ask them. I have an example – during the opening-night reception for the King Tut exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art the hushed crowd flowed into the signature room containing the King’s greatest treasures. An older man wandered in, and in a loud, familiar voice, asked, “Where’s the Mummy?” I turned around and found Ross Perot standing in the doorway.

In business, speaking, presenting, selling, and networking are common sources of stress. When a leader reacts calmly, and confidently to a stressful encounter, their emotional intelligence and leadership strengths shine.

Self-confidence is about overcoming fear. Fear motivates us, but it can also disable us, through panic, or over longer periods through the corrosive effects from elevated stress. Inoculation is a process to induce immunity from panic. Inoculation increases our ability to manage fear and to operate effectively when we’re exposed to the fear-inducing thing. Stunt pilots are trained to fly an airplane upside down, just a few feet off the ground, without engine power, while Firefighters learn to navigate hazards in the dark during simulations in a “burn tower.” Paramedics and ER physicians don’t panic when they have two minutes left to stabilize a trauma patient.  All of these people were exposed to conditions that simulated their worst-case scenarios to teach them how to respond. They developed reflexsive responses to save themselves and others from serious harm.

Good leaders know that you can reduce fear by pushing rising-stars in front of an audience to speak or being tasked with a presentation for the Board of Directors, or leading a project for a Senior Vice President. Inoculation against our fears expose courage, and assertiveness is the way we demonstrate it every day. Fear is in our minds most of the time.

Here are a few actions you can take that will increase your courage, and innoculate you against fear – be polite, but be assertive:

  1. In situations with lots of people including conferences, conventions, and large internal meetings – reintroduce yourself to people you should know. And if you can’t remember their name lead with this “Hi – my name is…, I know we’ve met, but I’ve forgotten your name!”
  2. Always let someone know if their out-of-office message has expired. When you check in to a hotel ask, “Is there anything I can do to receive a complimentary upgrade?”
  3. Stop eating food that wasn’t prepared the way you asked, and send it back to the kitchen.
  4. Spend time with a few people who seem to be fearless and watch what they do.

And if you’re still looking for something to really push your limits try a ToughMudder race – they offer great confidence challenges.

Over time you’re self-confidence will increase and situations you once viewed as stressful will become normal parts of your day.

 

Coaching
— Leave a Comment

Deciphering Performance Reviews

Learning how to decipher the code managers use to rate employees empowers you to improve your results and elevate your performance in the review system.

What does a hiring manager really want to know when they call your boss to ask about you? How you work? How effective you are? How much coaching you’ll need? Where you rank against your peers? Essentially – are you an asset or a liability, and to what degree? Performance reviews create anxiety for employees and managers alike. Even the best systems are imperfect, but they’re especially troublesome when used as the only feedback employees receive. Given that written feedback is rare, It’s helpful to understand how your supervisor applies precise language to rank you against your peers and other employees across the organization.

As a matter of principle reviews shouldn’t hold surprises. Negative comments should only appear on your performance review if they were shared with you previously. Managers who are afraid to provide coaching,  guidance, and feedback, outside of the formal review process, need training themselves and are less likely to help advance your career.

Performance reviews contain descriptions about three qualities, while the employee’s rank is encoded within the text:

  1. Performance.
  2. Potential.
  3. Fit.

Review systems force managers to rank their direct reports. Across regions, and divisions only a select number of employees can be assigned the highest rating. This causes managers to compete against each other to capture their fair share of the top ratings. Employees who know about this are in a better position to provide a comprehensive list of accomplishments to share with their managers – to use during the “trading” process. The process concludes with scores and descriptions for areas the company requires managers to focus on. Many employees share the same scores, but language sets them apart. High performers should strive for their narrative and scores to match; disconnects between a score and the narrative can create problems. This is often the case when a high performer is new to a group and bonuses are tied to the score. The new employee may be well-regarded and likely to be promoted, but the management team doesn’t want to reduce the bonus payout for an experienced employee. The path of least resistance is to give the new employee a lower score and a glowing review. Conversely, mid-tier scores coupled with a scathing review spell trouble. The score is used to avoid a difficult conversation about poor performance, but the language will reappear when layoffs are announced.

Adjectives provide clues about relative performance: marginal, acceptable, good, great, best (superlative). When superlatives are used, like the “best,” comparison groups are often added to give readers information about the employee’s overall performance score. Notice the size of the group used for the comparison. The best salesperson on the Los Angeles team (top 20%), the best salesperson in the California region (top 10%), the best salesperson in North America (top 5%), the best in the company (top 1%).

Superlatives, combined with the comparison group size, and a time component can give you a very accurate picture about how your score ranks against your peers. Another “time” to focus on is language that puts timing into a discussion about your next promotion. “Ready for promotion” is not as strong as, “Promote now”, but both are stronger than a lot of other comments you might receive.

It’s impossible to guess at the meaning or motivation behind vague language, but phrases to watch for include: “intense curiosity” (gets into other people’s business); “frequently offers unsolicited suggestions” (not a good follower); “frequently debates ideas with peers” (argumentative, or know it all); “serves on numerous boards and committees” (not focused on job). You get the picture, and it’s not good.

Let’s move on to typical language; consider these example reviews:

“Mike is a seasoned account manager, and the best on his team. His performance frequently exceeds expectations and Mike usually reaches his sales targets by the end of each month. Mike routinely volunteers to help new employees, and he fills in for absent co-workers whenever requested. Over the next year Mike will attend new leader training and is expected to perform above his peers.”

Team Diagram

Here’s a stronger version:

“Mike is the best account manager in the Western Region. He always exceeds his sales targets and frequently volunteers to train new employees. Mike  is ready for a promotion.”

Regional Team

And now the strongest possible language:

“Mike is the best account manager at ACME company, and has held the top spot for several years. He’s a team-player, respected by his supervisors and peers, and his knowledge and experience are sought by employees and customers alike. Mike should be promoted at the earliest possible opportunity.”

Team Venn Diagrams

 

When it comes to understanding performance reviews, a little knowledge goes a long way.

 

Coaching
— 3 Comments

Work-Life Balance

We’ve all tossed around expressions about work life balance, and they have different meanings to different people. But how many of us actually keep track of our balance in a systematic way? What if you could measure your balance on a regular basis to uncover insights about your happiness or career satisfaction? Or learn how problems with your kids, partner, or other factors affect you in other areas of your life?

The “wheel of life” has a long history; it’s originally from the Indo-Tibet region – as the Bhavacakra. It’s a powerful way to identify areas in your life that require attention and help you move up the satisfaction food chain. Kevin Burgess describes four states people are always in: Survival, Sustainment, Success, and Significance. Where are you? As you fill out your wheel of life think about how problems in one area affect the others. You can create a simple radar chart in excel or download this chart here.

Life Wheel

Consider each category and assign a score.

1. Health

Are you generally healthy, other than the normal aches and pains that accumulate over the years? Do you get enough sleep and exercise? Are you comfortable with your weight? or battling habits and addictions like caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, or obsessive eating?

2. Family

Is your family supportive, available, and healthy? Are they a source of strength and encouragement or a drain? Are you caring for someone who is sick or disabled? or coping with a troubled child?

3. Friends

Do your friends push you forward or demand support? Are they coaches and cheerleaders or emotional vampires?

4. Finances

Are you doing well and saving for retirement, or does your income just cover your bills? Conversely, are you battling with medical bills, late fees, and home and auto repairs that threaten to swamp you? Give yourself a high score if you’ve paid off debts with a windfall.

5. Recreation

Do you have time for yourself and spend it on activities that you enjoy and look forward to, that energize you, and increase your satisfaction?

6. Personal Growth

Do you have written goals and a plan to achieve them? Is formal training part of your day-to-day life or something you avoid?

7. Career

Are you satisfied with the three “R’s” Responsibility, Recognition, and Rewards provided by your job? Is there a clear path to achieve your goals? Do you have the support you need to reach them?

8. Workspace

Your office space or work space should be ready for you to do your best work. Does it help you or get in the way? Is your space clean, and workable or cluttered and disorganized. Do you have to hunt for things when you need them, or are they ready for quick use?

9. Romance

Is your romantic life satisfying? Do you feel loved, and receive attention, affection, and support? Does your partner feel that way?

Once you’ve recorded your responses plot them on the wheel and add a score to describe your happiness, satisfaction, optimism, and choose which of Kevin’s four phases you’re in now – put the date on it and keep it at your desk. Revisit the wheel again in six months to learn how happiness, satisfaction, and optimism ebb and flow as multiple dimensions in your life change.

Coaching
— Leave a Comment

Master Your Future

Several years ago I was trying to master cross-wind landings in an especially under-powered airplane on a gusty springtime day in North Texas. It was ugly. I was all over the runway – at one point even touching down with the nose pointed 30 degrees to the left of an enormous strip of concrete at Alliance Airport. I was frustrated and exhausted when my flight instructor broke in with encouragement I’ve found useful many times since. He said, “It’s your pony to ride.” He meant own it, make the plane do what you want it to do, when you want it to do it. Don’t let the wind knock you around – be the boss. Said another way, when in charge, take charge, and when you’re not, act as if you are. That’s great advice for anything you do – and it applies to leadership and self-improvement.

Have you ever tried to measure how much you’ve learned since your last graduation? Did the internet exist? Smart phones? Twitter, Linkedin, Salesforce.com, 3D printers, LEDs, SAP, Prezi, Dropbox, Office, Word, Excel, and all the other technology tools, gadgets and Software as a Service applications you’ve mastered? What have you learned about managing people, HR rules, federal regulations, tax laws, environmental regulations, and everything else you’ve focused on?  I’ll bet your working knowledge has increased at least 3% every year – if not more, and many skills seem to multiply the benefits of newer skills and information. There’s a cumulative effect. But what does that look like, and how would it impact you to find ways to be more efficient and to adopt new technology or processes before your peers? I’ll show you after a brief discussion about success.

High School reunions provide lots of material about how we predict and measure success. Yours and others. When you graduated it’s likely that you had an idea about how successful or unsuccessful your classmates would be. In most cases you had little information about your peers’ personal growth strategies so it was difficult to predict that the “C” student in your social studies class, the one who spent summers roofing new homes, would go on to own a $100 Million construction company, or the quiet kid in your English class would earn a law degree from Yale and end up as a Federal Judge. In High School, and beyond college, it’s too early to observe the cumulative effects of exponential growth. Over time skills and knowledge acquired outside the classroom will dominate. It can take many years to rack up the score that other people use to measure progress. Successful people share a drive to learn new things and take risks. And many learn that failure doesn’t stop you unless you let it. Everyone fails, but some people keep trying.

It doesn’t matter what you measure, income, wealth, efficiency, knowledge, employees – pick your yardstick. Comparisons among three exponential growth rates 1%, 3%, and 6% lead to obvious difference over several years. A 6% improvement starts to bend up and away from the 3% line. Separation is evident over fifteen years, but the “Bend” is clear over twenty-five years.

15 year line

 

25 year line

Again, It doesn’t matter what you measure, what counts is that learning something new provides enormous benefits over many years.  Look at the same graph over thirty years – the 6% line bends upward in an increasingly obvious way. But what if there were opportunities for giant leaps? A promotion, a degree, a company started, a skill mastered? How would leaps impact the line for a life-long learner?

30 year line

In the next chart two 50% leaps have been added to the 6% line in early years. Maybe the leaps were generated by an advanced degree, but what if they flowed from starting a business that failed, or a second business that failed? You would be far smarter and wealthier from the experience. It doesn’t matter how your axis is labeled, the point is to see how gains can have a huge impact over years.

Performance Leaps

Obviously leaps have an enormous impact – especially when they occur early – but leaps create bends any time they happen – and that’s what you need to know to develop a plan that will separate you from the crowd. A final example – what happens to someone who catches a lucky break or a gets an unexpected promotion, while avoiding new skills or knowledge? Take a look.

Performance Crossover 1% and 3%A 1% annual improvement with a 50% leap in year 12, climbs past the steady 3%-er, but the effect isn’t long-lived, and slow and steady outperforms. This begins to look like a study in luck – or the idea that lucky people make themselves lucky. You’ve already seen how much separation occurs when the 6%-er received the lucky break – was that person lucky? or did they create the situation? Undoubtedly these charts demonstrate that meaningful progress to develop new skills can lead to big performance differences. Get a plan and start something to bend your line.

Coaching
— 1 Comment

Paul Laherty’s LinkedIn Tip Sheet

Linkedin is the primary tool recruiters, fans, employers, colleagues, customers and friends use to learn about you. It’s a powerful application and an open-book. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel – review what other people in your profession have done and use their profiles as a benchmark to measure your story. You should even ‘borrow’ ideas that represent you from anyone who says it better than you think you could.

This isn’t everything but it will give you a good start. Even a brief profile can be effective and allow you to generate thousands of relevant connections.

Linkedin is one-part of a complete brand-building strategy. You’ll learn a lot by becoming an expert user so it’s worth focusing on it as a starting point.

1. Getting started – You need a starting point to measure your progress so create a network map of your connections before you make other updates and changes. Visit Socilab.com to create a report about your network. It’s even better than inmaps, as long as you have fewer than 500 connections, since it shows your network ‘developing.’ Capture a screenshot to use later (save it as a pdf, jpeg, or other photo file – most computers have “Paint”, just “Paste” the screenshot into it, and “save as”).

2. “Turn off notifications” as a courtesy to your connections (since you’re about to get busy). From your thumbnail photo select “Privacy & Settings”, then, in the lower-center choose “turn on/off your activity broadcasts.”

3. Select groups to join and companies to follow. You should choose associations and groups you have in common with your co-workers, colleagues, friends, family, and classmates. Once you’ve joined a group, you can manage visibility – many groups should be public on your profile, but “connection generators” should be hidden. Consider turning off notification messages from the groups you join, but you should allow members to contact you.

4. Join the following groups (you can join 50):

A. Ten trade associations in your profession.
B. Your school alumni associations.
C. Military and veteran groups.
D. TED: Ideas worth spreading (400K+ members).
E. Another 20 that are specific and important to you. E – J (below) should be hidden from view (you can select this option in ‘Manage Groups’
F. Jobs (+750K members)
G. Linkedin:HR
H. Linkedin Residential Real Estate
I. Linkedin Accounting
J. Linkedin Entertainment
K. eMarketing Association Network.

5. Follow companies and organization (not included in the 50 “groups” you can join):

A. Your employer
B. Previous employers
C. Competitors
D. Your suppliers
E. Local colleges/universities
F. Local companies

6. Follow influential people and trend setters:

A. Elon Musk
B. Mark Cuban
C. Tony Robbins
D. Seth Godin
E. Nassim Taleb
F. James Rickards
G. Influential people in your industry

7. Add 10 skills: Leadership, Management, Strategy, Venture Capital, Startups, Procurement, Product Development, Marketing Communications. Keep this list small so you can hit 99+ endorsements for each one as soon as possible. Once you have many endorsements for those, then add new skills.

You’re on your way with a more complete profile.

8. Add connections.
Do not send blast emails. Personalize connection requests – it doesn’t need to be sophisticated, but you should show recipients that you care enough to personalize the note. Here’s an easy example. John – I hope you’re doing well. I’d like to add you to my network on linkedin. Regards, Dianne. Short, easy, personal.

Tips: This fact is a goldmine: you don’t need to know someone’s email address if you are connected to them through a group.

Another nugget for your consideration: Linkedin prevents spamming through sophisticated algorithms that keep track of how many invitations you send out, how quickly people respond, and the percent that accept your requests. This is why personalization is crucial. You want quick ‘yeses’ to keep going. This means your friends’ parents, or kid’s soccer coach plays a role – they’re likely to say yes, so when your CEO sits on hers for a few days you don’t get locked out.

Find people who are well connected – they will give you exponential reach. It’s better to have ten connections that each have 5,000+ connections, than a thousand people who have 10 connections.

Look for LIONs – Linkedin Open Networkers (they have a circle logo next to their profile). These are people who encourage others to connect with them. Authors, speakers, consultants and senior executives are more open to connecting if you send them a good argument. As your work advances It’s a great idea to search for people who are similar to you or have the same title. In the search box type “Product Development” or “Sales Manager” to find the highest ranked people. Look at their profile. What groups do they belong to that you could add? How did they write their job descriptions? What skills have they listed?

Now – do the same thing for the current and former trade association Presidents and Board Members… how can you incorporate information from their profiles into yours?

Search Engine Optimization – This is a book by itself. To get started, select five words or phrases you think describe you or the roles you’ve had and are looking for. For this example use “Software Developer” – next, use http://www.google.com/trends to search for your term. You’ll find that it’s not a great search term, but a similar term is, “Software Engineer.” So if you decide to stick with “Software Developer” you should also seed your profile with “Software Engineer” to maximize the number of times you will appear in Linkedin Searches for one of those terms. It doesn’t matter what your key words or phrases are, what matters is what other people think and how often recruiters use those terms, so embrace “Google Trends” and use it to guide you towards relevant, high-frequency key-words to give you the best advantage.

Have fun and share what you learn.

Coaching
— Leave a Comment

Optimize your linkedin profile

So it’s time to refresh your profile… where to begin?  Said another way, where do you get the most bang for the buck on your profile? The answer depends on your goals, but generally, it’s useful to acknowledge that your linkedin profile is “content”, while Linkedin is a content “host” and “data-aggregator” that powers search results with a proprietary algorithm hidden from the user’s view. So how do we measure something that’s invisible? Easy, identify the search terms you expect people to use to locate your profile.

Here’s how you do it. Open the “Advanced” search window in Linkedin. Put four or five of your keywords or phrases in the “Keywords” field (separated by commas). Then move down to the “Postal Code” field and type in your code; next, select a distance in the “Within” field. Then hit “Search” to see the results sorted by relevance. Record your position and note the page your profile shows up on. Then expand the distance by changing the “Within” field and repeat until your profile doesn’t appear in the results. Now hit “reset”, a link next to the “Search” button. Re-type your keyword list to perform a worldwide search.

At this point you should examine profiles that appear at the top of the search results on the first page, since these profiles have the highest relevance score in Linkedin’s algorithm. Pay close attention to variations of your keywords that appear in multiple high-scoring profiles. Once you’ve created a list of phrases and keywords the top performers used edit your profile to include two of the new keywords or phrases in several relevant places throughout your profile to test their effect on your ranking. Rerun the search with the distance filter to measure your profile’s performance against peers near you compared to your starting point.

Your keyword strategy starts with description words about your job-level, functional area, and industry: Hotel Sales Manager, Software Developer, Hospital Administrator, Author, Speaker, Product Strategy Manager, Inbound Marketing Director. You know what they are, but what you don’t know is which words and phrases are favored by the recruiters, customers, and partners who might be looking for your profile. Fortunately there’s a multi-million dollar tool freely available to you to uncover insights about how most people search for the terms you think best describe you. Google trends.

Go to google.com/trends and type your first keyword in the search box. When the results appear they will include “Related Searches” below the fold. Scroll down to look for similar keywords that might outscore the one’s you’ve selected. Compare the new keywords and phrases to the list you captured from high scoring profiles? Use google.com/trends to evaluate the new phrases too – and update your list powered by this new information.

On to your profile – great profiles have a lot in common. They include high quality profile photos – and no photo is complete without enhancements in photoshop. It’s a photo…a representation of you…it’s not you… so you should have perfect hair, and gleaming white teeth… and you should not have a beer in your hand, an arm around your shoulder, red-eye, or any variety of crazy accessories. Don’t use any picture that could be included in a “caption contest.”

Do ensure that your profile is 100% complete – Linkedin leads you through steps required to get there.

Do put your contact details at the top of your profile, and in the section marked “contact details.”  Make it incredibly easy for people to reach you.

Do put schools, organizations, affiliations, and hobbies in your profile.

Do join at least ten groups in your industry, and another ten groups in your functional area, and five or more groups for your level. Along with alumni associations, athletics, and religious organizations above, groups will increase the number of items you have in common with other people. It will humanize and personalize your profile. These touches will increase your likability, accessibility, and approachability, all characteristics that will enhance the probability that others will reach out to you proactively.

All of this can be achieved without more than a sentence or two about each position or job. Leave the detailed scope and accomplishments light and focus on keywords and your profile completion score, then fill-in the remaining areas when you have more time.

In his book, Bounce, Matthew Syed pointed out that expertise requires “Meaningful Practice” – I agree, and this article should help you get there with Linkedin.

Coaching
— Leave a Comment

How to Conduct a Salary Negotiation

Salary negotiations are something most people think about related to executives. Not true. They go hand in hand with “will” and “will not.” The important list everyone has about what they’re willing or unwilling to do in any job.

During my “Career Transition” course, I’ve met people who are surprised when I show them how to negotiate for a new position with their current employer. Negotiation covers more than your salary – time off, flexible work hours, flexible work days, your cube location or anything else that matters to you and the time to bring it up is right after you’ve been offered a job.

Your “Will / Will Not” list is important – it’s critical – but the time to refer to your list is after you’ve been made an offer. Here’s why. By the time an organization has completed the steps to identify their top candidate for a role, they’ve already imagined what life will be like with you on their team. Even if the job required a candidate to move. They think you’re amazing – that’s why they’re willing to hire you. So if you really are amazing, wouldn’t they rather let their new “amazing” employee work from home in Dallas, than an office in Charlotte? Maybe, but you’ll never know if you tell the recruiter on day-one that you’re not willing to move. Once you have the offer in-hand you have something that didn’t exist when you were a candidate – now you’re the selectee and selectees have leverage because hiring managers and recruiters don’t want to be wrong. They picked you because you’re the best.

On to the negotiation. Never accept an offer before you have seen all the details in writing. Thank the recruiter or your new boss for their call and say politely, “Thank you for your offer – I’m delighted, and I’m looking forward to reviewing the details in your written offer.” Review the offer once it’s received – most companies will send it via Fedex, so they know when you’ve received it. They’re ready to move forward so you may get a call asking when they’ll receive a signed acceptance letter. That’s when you kick off the negotiation. Here are the steps:

  • Thank them for the offer and their work and effort to get it to you.
  • Tell them you have a few concerns and would like to address them.
  • Ask the caller if he/she has the power to negotiate with you about the offer?
  • If they can negotiate, point out that you will accept their offer if they can make a good faith effort to resolve your concerns.
  • Share your concerns (you want a window office, salary too low, bonus structure insufficient, you can’t pull the kids out of school until May, etc…).
  • Stay positive and keep it light, and give them a chance to respond.

Live the life you want not the one others try to give you.

Coaching
— 1 Comment

Great Answers to Tough Questions About Your Salary During a Job Search

Salary conversations are one of the most difficult steps in any career transition. You don’t want to leave money on the table or be under-paid relative to your peers, but too often it’s a lop-sided conversation – the HR manager has much more information than you do – and the imbalance is getting worse. Armed with information about the recruiter’s point of view and their resources can help.

At some point during your job search a recruiter will ask you an uncomfortable salary question – when they surface late in the process you may be ready to answer, but when a salary question arrives early, and unexpectedly, it creates stress and uncertainty.

Salary bombs come in many shapes and sizes, but often sound like this,

  • “How much do you make?”
  • “How much did you make in your last job?”
  • “What are your salary requirements?”
  • “How much do you expect to earn?”

Recruiters will ask because they want to increase their success rates. There are two issues – the first is your salary and benefit expectations for the current role; the second, and less important, is your salary history. Most people assume previous salaries will be used to negotiate a lower offer. That may be the case with unprofessional or inexperienced recruiters, but you should assume you’re negotiating with a professional, and tap into their competitive drive to find a great candidate in their price range. There’s no point to pursue a candidate who would never accept a low offer, so the question about salary requirements is an easy way to vet the candidate pool, improve the recruiter’s success rate, and reduce workload. When it comes to questions about your salary history the problem is your previous role and responsibilities may have little correlation to the job you’re interviewing for now, and your current salary is irrelevant.

Your response matters; mishandle this and you’re no longer a candidate. Handle it well, and you could be on your way to an offer for your next great opportunity.

Rehearsing your response will give you an edge. Try turning it around on the person who asked:

  • “Rather than answer your question I have one of my own. How much have you budgeted for the position?”
  • “In my previous role, I managed a ten-member team, and this position has eight direct reports and thirty people – it’s very different than my current job.”
  • “How much do you think it’s worth?”

In another approach you could point out that given your skill-set, the job description may expand substantially by the time you’re finished with the interview process. If the recruiter can confirm that the company’s salary and benefits are competitive in their industry for that location, then you’re confident you can work something out once the details are known. This shelves the conversation and lets you pass through their “screen” to move forward in the process.

Sometimes nothing works, they hold their ground and don’t allow you to deflect. When a recruiter insists you provide an answer about your current or previous salaries, as long as you asked them to clarify how the information will be used, you can be confident that you’ve done everything you could to help yourself. It’s time to provide factual details. Don’t offer a compensation number, then add medical, 401K, bonus, and other perks, to give them an inflated value…like $200K when your base compensation is $130K. Recruiters have access to a powerful tool – the Equifax Verification Service, theworknumber.com, a subscription service that many companies use to verify employment history and salary information. You can’t lie about your salary and get away with it. You should tap into a source of power for job seekers – Glassdoor.com. Although salary ranges published on Glassdoor are self-reported, it could be very helpful to ask your recruiter to explain the numbers and ranges for similar positions found there about the company you are interviewing with now.

Whatever you do, once you’ve given them an answer don’t negotiate against yourself – only negotiate once a formal offer has been delivered.

Human Resource professionals want to be successful partners to the companies and organizations they support – stay focused on your value and let them be your champion to explain why you’re worth more than everyone else.

Coaching Featured
— Leave a Comment

Armored Attitude

Attitude is the most important ingredient for your survival and security. Survivors share a realistic belief about their capabilities and likely outcomes. Survivors have an “Armored Attitude.” Don’t confuse this with unbridled optimism from pom-pom waving cheerleaders. An Armored Attitude is a rare approach to adversity, but it’s extremely effective.

Awareness is another powerful ingredient. Awareness is the preparation and the dynamic evaluations people make as they move through space – often called situational awareness. Awareness isn’t sufficient to find a solution in high risk situations or events. Awareness is a starting point. High awareness gives you an edge and allows you to consider alternatives as risk increases, meanwhile attitude is the motivation layer that guides you to safety.

Survivors thrive because they understand that 9-1-1 is never immediate – it’s only a back-up. Survivors with an Armored Attitude understand that Police and Fire Fighters are Second Responders. You must be your own First Responder. Remember the Cheerleaders – they’re the one’s who let their guard down when the Cavalry shows up. Survivors don’t stop fighting while there are still choices to make.

In Tim Larkin’s, How to Survive the Most Critical 5 Seconds of your Life, he offers a thought experiment that asks how you would feel if a muscle-bound 300 pound man was paid to harm you? Tim doesn’t ask if you could defeat this opponent, only if you could “touch” him. It’s easy to imagine that you could put your hands on this guy, but harder for most people to envision walking away from the encounter. Tim teaches you how. It’s that attitude that gives you an edge. His program, TargetFocusTraining, teaches exceptional skills to average people and can help you develop an Armored Attitude.

Another great resource to help you develop an armored attitude comes from Tim Schmidt, the founder of U.S. Concealed Carry. Tim is an expert who knows how important attitude is. He has been a strong advocate for Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) Dave Grossman’s “Bulletproof Mind.” Dave’s program educates people about personal defense techniques and ideas. Between the two of them, you’ll get a terrific education in the power of attitude.

Case studies demonstrate how planning can build an environment to create winners with an Armored Attitude. Southlake, Texas, a city with 35,000 residents has an incredible record in High School football. Southlake Carroll High School has won the Texas state 5A football title five times in the past ten years and three former Dragon’s suited up for the 2011 Superbowl. In the late ’90’s the Dragons outgrew their existing facility, but rather than divide their students between two High Schools, Carroll ISD kept 9th and 10th Graders together in the original building, while 11th and 12th grade students moved to a new “Senior” High School. From kindergarten to graduation students in the Carroll School District are Dragons – a unified mascot across Southlake established an enormous fan base. Dragon’s symbolize the entire city, not just their football team, and residents have high standards and higher expectations.

Another example may answer the question – Why are Marines so tough?  Organizational marketing drives their confidence and attitudes. Marines benefit from the same ingredients that make Southlake Carroll so tough. Individually Marines are evenly matched against US Army Infantry soldiers, but Marines have a different belief system. Every Marine is a Rifleman first, and that expectation is drilled into them from their first day. Marines are indoctrinated to feel like they’re part of an exclusive, neglected, and scrappy organization that can’t depend on anyone else for survival, and their mission profiles and history provide ample evidence to support those attitudes. Meanwhile, the Army lowers expectations and motivation by dividing its forces into three broad groups: Combat Arms (Infantry, Armor, Artillery, Cavalry, Engineers), Combat Support (Chemical, Military Police, Military Intelligence, Signal), and finally, Service Support (Medical Service, Quartermaster, Logistics, etc.). Expectations are stratified by design. Many Support soldiers believe they will not be needed to perform combat operations – “we won’t need to use our weapons” is a common attitude in the support ranks and contributes to lower motivation and performance in combat skills. Unarmed civilian contractors hired to perform many duties carried out by support units contribute to that belief system by serving as an existence proof that those thoughts are accurate. Army Warfighters are professional high achievers, but on balance, it probably takes fewer Marines to put more rounds on a target.

Violent weather, mechanical failures, bad luck, criminal mischief, and civil unrest swallow targets everyday on any part of the globe. No matter where a threat comes from or what form it may take, an Armored Attitude combined with good situational awareness will give you an edge that may be the difference between an interview with you than an interview about you.

Coaching Risk Management