Check out a few of the posts on the myGreenlight blog this week:

• How to Advance Your Career, Stand Out as a Leader, and Like Your Life
• Be Honest About What You Want and You Just Might Get It
• Fifty Shades of Success
• 7 Ways to Develop Employees into Digital Storytellers to Boost Their Skills AND Your Company's Resources
• Relationship Roundup - scientific insight into our boastful nature, and some tips for calibrating our creativity, productivity, and leadership skills.

Enjoy!

0 comments // In Site News and Happenings

Candor has long been an interest of mine. I make no secret about why: the most influential people in my life and career have been those who told me straight-up what was on their mind, even when what was on their mind hurt—as in, hurt me to hear and probably hurt them to say. Honesty can be uncomfortable.

Most corporate structures don't encourage frank conversation. In fact they actively discourage it. If it's a hierarchical, command-and-control type of culture, subordinates will take pains never to upset a boss. If it's an overly political and competitive culture, people worry that candor will come back to haunt them. Even in collegial office environments, people still worry that candid critique of someone's performance will be seen as overly blunt. It's almost as if they would rather see someone repeatedly fail than speak up and hurt their feelings.

Cultivating the kinds of professional relationships that can withstand candor is incredibly important. Studies have found direct links between:

• strong relationships and revenue growth;
• workplace camaraderie and productivity;
• group candor and effective problem-solving.

To get you started, here are 10 tips for creating the kind of environment in which everyone feels enough safety and mutual commitment to say what they're actually thinking:

1. Make the first move.
The person who initiates the move toward greater candor and transparency has to give a preview of what it looks like. This does not mean launching into immediate criticisms but rather using intros like, 'This is hard for me, and I'm a little worried about how this is going to go over, but because I care about the work we're doing, I want us to start having more meaningful conversations."

2. Do it in person.
If at all possible, begin the move toward greater candor in person, when you can see how the other person is responding to what you're saying. Email is better for follow-up, and a perfect way to affirm someone by thanking them for their time and willingness to listen.

3. Encourage pre-meeting reflection.
Giving a brief “heads up” as to what you’ll be discussing can produce greater insight, help avoid groupthink, and lays a groundwork for fruitful conversations that culminate in action items. No one feels blind-sided, and concrete next steps are formulated more quickly. It's a time saver and builds trust. Read more →

10 comments // In Communication

Check out a few of the great posts on the myGreenlight blog this week:

• Christine Comaford Explains How What You Wear Can be an Act of Generosity
• The Road to Good Relationships is Paved with Communication
• Contact Management Report: Connected
• Relationship Roundup - some suggestions for getting relationships off to a great start, managing relationship priorities, and picking the right atmosphere to develop them.

Enjoy!

0 comments // In Site News and Happenings

MyGreenlight friend and contributor Michael Margolis is offering a cool (and free) 5-part video series as part of the run up to his virtual Reinvention Summit 2, the world’s largest online conference on storytelling on April 16-20 - check it out.

Storytelling is an indispensable skill that goes hand in hand with building your network. You can use it to reposition and grow your company, champion a cause, or reboot your career.

Remember my advice in Never Eat Alone to "be interesting" as you build new relationships? Stories are one of the best ways to do that. From the book:

Virtually everyone new you meet in a situation is asking themselves a variation on one question: “Would I want to spend an hour eating lunch with this person?”

Consultants call it the airport question. In the lengthy interview process that that industry had become famous for – a peppering of complicated case studies and logic-testing puzzles – the one question consultants use to choose one person over a pool of equally talented candidates is the one question they ask only of themselves: “If I were trapped in John F. Kennedy Airport for a few hours [and all travel-weary consultants inevitably spend too much time in airports], would I spend it with this person?”

Have you worked on telling the fascinating story of your career, both verbally and in resumes, bios, and online profiles?

4 comments // In Personal Branding

Check out a few of the great posts on the myGreenlight blog this week:

• Ad Sales Executive Puts Never Eat Alone/myGreenlight Tactics in Action
• Jodi Glickman's "Learn Strategy" to Get Noticed and Get Ahead
• Identify and Uplevel Your Social Identity
• Relationship Roundup - Managing email, the happiness factor, apps that save you social time, trips for content strategy, and spring cleaning your network.

Enjoy!

1 comment // In Site News and Happenings

Did you read the recent New Yorker piece on brainstorming? Jonah Lehrer, the author of Imagine: How Creativity Works, took on the orthodoxy of the “brainstorming session” as the best way to generate innovation and creativity. Every day I see companies whose leaders want people to think outside the box, and most of them have come to rely on brainstorming as the way to do it.

“Brainstorming” dates back to 1948, when Alex Osborn first developed the idea in his book, Your Creative Power. For Osborn, and for brainstormers ever since, the most important ground rule is to suspend criticism and negative judgment. In the safe space of the brainstorm, any idea is good, so goes the gospel.

The problem, as Lehrer points out, is that this doesn’t really help generate new ideas. Research conducted since the ‘70s shows that allowing criticism and debate reliably generates more ideas, and more of the ideas are truly innovative and practical. “It is the human friction that makes the sparks,” Lehrer writes. Read more →

11 comments // In Communication

Check out a few of the great posts on the myGreenlight blog this week:

• The One Factor that Ensures Your Kid's College Success. And Now Yours.  - Tahl Raz's post on his interview with John Hagel & John Seely Brown.
  
• An Unlikely, and Enjoyable, Networking Guide - A review of MWF Seeking BFF: My Yearlong Search for a New Best Friend.
  
• From Renewable Energy in Ukraine to State-of-the-Art Airport Parking in Seattle - Your responses to Keith's question: "What's the coolest think you're working on?"
  
• Enter-Prize 2.0 - How much easier would it be if you had free-flowing information within your company?
  
• Relationship Roundup - Tips for advice that aren’t useful, extreme intimacy in the workplace, the power of LinkedIn for job seekers, more on relationship marketing, and expert insight for doing business in the social era.

Enjoy!

0 comments // In Site News and Happenings

JOEL A. GARFINKLE is recognized as one of the top 50 coaches in the U.S., having worked with many of the world's leading companies. He is the author of seven books, including Getting Ahead: Three Steps to Take Your Career to the Next Level. View his books and FREE articles at his Leadership Coaching website.  You can also subscribe to his  Leadership Development newsletter and receive the FREE e-book, 40 Proven Strategies to Get Promoted Now!

According to a survey conducted by U.S. Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) in 2010, approximately 18% of corporate directors are women and 14.5% are minorities. To put this into perspective, the number of women and minorities on corporate boards is less than half what would be expected based on their proportion of the general population.

The fact that there is a discrepancy is indisputable, but the reason for the shortfall is not so clear. Is it blatant discrimination, or is there something else at work here? The answer is probably a combination of both.

I have worked with many women and minorities in my executive coaching business and I have found that when they apply the principles of perception, visibility, and influence—what I refer to as the PVI model—they are able to advance their careers faster and further than they previously thought possible.  They do this by earning the respect of their colleagues and bosses, becoming known throughout the company as someone who can be depended on to solve problems and deliver quality work, and learning how to exert their influence at all levels of the organization.

Many of the challenges faced by women and minorities in the workplace can be attributed to cultural differences and differences in the way boys and girls are raised. These challenges can be overcome if you are aware of them and adapt your behavior to change the way you are perceived.

Here are three challenges women and minorities might face, along with strategies you can use to overcome them. Read more →

0 comments // In Coaching

Check out a few of the great posts on the myGreenlight blog this week:

• If You're Not Networking, You're Not Doing Your Job
• How You Communicate Matters -- So for Pete's Sake, Let the Customer Choose
• Mark Magnacca Shares the Two Questions that Tell You Everything
• Relationship Roundup

0 comments // In Site News and Happenings

Ready for this month's master's mission? If you try it, you'll benefit not only from "vuja de" but from the opportunity to connect with two members of your network. Enjoy! - KF

On this month’s myGreenlight Social Capitalist webinar, agenda-setting writer, Fast Company co-founder and entrepreneur Bill Taylor explained what he calls “vuja de.” We all know what déjà vu means: the feeling that a new situation already happened. Bill flips the term to describe the experience of examining the industry you've been in for so long -- and suddenly seeing it differently.

The need to continually self-evaluate and evolve is necessary to be truly successful, especially in this economy. We all get into routines in every aspect of our lives and find ourselves doing things a certain way because that is how they’ve always been done. Don’t let your expertise get in the way of innovation.

Your Mission: Pick a current professional challenge you're facing. You can make this as big (raise company’s sales revenue) or small (payroll went out late) as you want. Instead of going to your staff or coworkers for advice, call two contacts in different industries and ask for their input. Have they had similar problems with solutions that could be adapted to fit your scenario? Note how these conversations change your perspective. Did they produce new insight you couldn't have come up with on your own? That's the goal.

What practices do you use to get a fresh perspective on something

3 comments // In Giving Feedback