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Check out a few of the great posts from the myGreenlight blog this week:
How to Become the Big-Idea Creative - Read Tahl Raz’s post on his Social Capitalist interview with Management Guru and Fast Company Co-Founder Bill Taylor. Boost your creativity and stand out in your industry.
Meghna heads up the High Impact Teams consulting practice at Ferrazzi Greenlight with Keith. She is based in New York City. If you have questions or want to increase your team's impact, contact her at mmajmudar at ferrazzigreenlight dot com.
Economic change is in the air. I just finished a series of interviews with HR executives from around the country and there was one message – the economy is turning around, companies will be hiring, and people will be moving. After a couple of difficult years, people are ready to try out those greener pastures.
So how do you make sure you make it to those pastures without burning bridges?
1. Make sure the decision comes from an objective and grounded place. We all have our moments when we feel under-appreciated and not paid well enough where you just want to storm off and not look back. But it’s important to realize that there’s a story being written about your career. Are you telling a story of learning and growth? Or are you telling a victim’s story? As this blog describes, job-hopping has its dark side.
2. Find the time to TELL your boss when he or she can focus on the conversation. An e-mail late at night, a voicemail? That can leave a bad taste. Tell them clearly that you’re leaving, where you’re going and if they ask, what can be improved. You don’t have to share the gory details of your decision-making. But the broad brush strokes, in a conversation, will suffice.
3. Apply the lessons of candor, accountability, generosity, and intimacy in the conversation and before your final day. How can you best be in service to your boss and your company before you leave? Transitioning important projects, transferring knowledge, or helping to hire your replacement will go a long way.
I’m curious - what’s worked for you in making a graceful job change?
People like people who are like them – it's built-in to the most primitive parts of our brain. Here’s how to get past this reptilian tic: mirroring, observing your conversational partner’s body language, tone, and level, and mirroring it with your own behavior.
It works: In one Dutch study, an interviewer talked to participants and then dropped a bunch of pens. The participants who had been mirrored were 2-3 times more likely to help the interviewer pick up the pens! Mirroring increased their good will and their “pro-social orientation in general.” You could use that, right?
Your mission: Try mirroring today. As you speak with a colleague, friend, or stranger:
• Watch their movements. Wait 10 seconds, and then shift your body to match theirs.
• Use the same hand gestures they use, but only when it’s your turn to talk.
• Match their facial expressions instantly. If they raise their eyebrows, raise yours.
• When they nod their head, nod yours instantly to signal agreement or affirmation.
Whether you want to drop pens after you try this out is up to you. :-)
History remembers Thomas Edison as a lone genius. Wrong! He created his most famous invention with a team of 30.
Machines systematize; people innovate. And so it’s no surprise that relationships are a major factor in producing those innovative ideas that lead to better, faster, more elegant solutions. Remember, Thomas Edison didn't invent the lightbulb alone - he was part of a team of 30!
Why does innovation so often boil down to relationships? Here are a few reasons:
1. Greater Risk Taking: Trusting, caring relationships help people feel comfortable taking risks. Without those relationships, people don’t open their mouths to voice potentially good ideas because they’re afraid of looking stupid.
2. Creative Collision: When candid exchanges between people collide, the fusion generates entirely new insights, new ideas, and new approaches that might never have been considered independently. But people need to feel comfortable “colliding” with colleagues. That requires a deep base of trust and mutual respect.
3. Less Rigid Hierarchy: Strong relationships help communication flow beyond traditional hierarchies. A boss who truly cares about and respects his employee is more likely to listen to new ideas, not reject them out of hand.
So leaders: Give employees time, space and structure to build deeper relationships! Individuals, make it your responsibility to make your work relationships deep. Don't wait for the company cocktail hour!
According to Tom Rath’s Vital Friends - great book by the way, I cited it in Who's Got Your Back - only 18 percent of people work for organizations that provide opportunities for social bonding in the workplace. And many of the companies who do provide those “opportunities” don’t structure them in a way that really serves the goal of deeper, stronger relationships. Throwing people in a room with chips and booze does not make for a productive event!
If I could wave a wand and change just one thing this year in the landscape of American business, that would be it. The results could be incredible.
I love this week's links, so I'm just going to launch right into them:
Shut the lizard up!Great advice from marketing tribe leader (and author of Tribes) Seth Godin on moving past fear to be creative and PRODUCE.
Improve Your Team's Progress: Zynga CEO Mark Pincus talks about venture capitalist John Doerr's "OKR" routine, a "simple organizing principle that keeps people focused on the three things that matter — not the 10." We like it and are going to try it out around here.
The Art of Presentations: I got a lot out of Jon Thomas' free ebook, "10 Techniques for More Effective Presentations" (get it on his blog). In fact, I found myself quoting it on the phone as I gave a freelancer notes on the slides he's creating for me. One tip I especially liked was "Understand the Cognitive Load Theory" - the idea that the amount of information presented to the brain must be at a minimum during the learning process.
Bloggers, send me your best relationship-success related links! Readers, send me the best thing you've read all week. I'd love to share it here. I'm at sgrace at ferrazzigreenlight dot com.
Also, if you go check out any of the above, I'd like to hear your thoughts and discuss in the comments.
The image is one thing and the human being is another. - Elvis Presley
Fame breeds fame. The fact is, all my prowess for reaching out to other people would be far less effective if a few of those people in my Rolodex weren’t well-known names. Problem is, while we’re excited by the idea of meeting “celebrities,” they are often not all that anxious to meet us. So how can we get close to them?
Yes, it helps to be at the right places and invited to the right events. But the fancy weekends and invite-only conferences aren’t the only ways to meet important people. In America, there is an association for everything. If you want to meet the movers and shakers directly, you have to become a joiner. It’s amazing how accessible people are when we meet them at events that speak to their interests.
Here are a few more places that I’ve found particularly rewarding when looking to find people on the rise or who have already risen:
Young Presidents’Organization (YPO)
This organization is for executive managers under the age of forty-four and has regional chapters across the United States. If you’re running a business, or want to, there are plenty of entrepreneurial organizations that will put you in front of the corporate chieftains of tomorrow. Similar professional organizations exist for the entire range of vocational pursuits. When you join such a group, and become a central figure in that group’s activities, you’ll become someone whom other powerful people will seek to deal with.
Political Fundraisers Politics is the nexus of money, passion, and power. In politics, the unknown person you help today is the political heavy that can help you tomorrow. Join a local campaign. Host a fundraiser, or attend one. Become an outspoken advocate on a particular issue; if it lights your fire, it’s sure to light the fire of others: Find them and work together!
Conferences When you have something unique to say and become a speaker, you momentarily become a celebrity in your own right. Networking is never easier than when people are coming to you. There are thousands of conferences that indulge any number of interests. If you develop a side expertise or passion, you can find out which well-known people share your interest and attend the conferences that these people will likely attend.
Nonprofit Boards Start out by finding four or five issues that are important to you and then support them locally. Successful nonprofits seek out a few famous people to sit on their boards to help them get publicity. Eventually, the goal is to become a board member yourself and sit side by side with these people. But be sure you care and indeed want to help the cause.
Sports (Especially Golf) Sports and exercise are terrific areas where you can meet new, important people. On the field or court, in the gym or on the track, it’s a level playing field. Reputation means little. What does matter is the skill you have and the camaraderie you can create.
There’s nothing wrong with looking for ways to spend time with people who have accomplished more and have more wisdom than you. Once you put yourself in position to connect with the famous and powerful, the key is not to feel as if you’re undeserving or an impostor. You’re a star in your own right, with your own accomplishments, and you have a whole lot to give to the world.
If you pursue celebrities in a sincere manner, with good intentions, you’re not being manipulative. And if you are emboldened by a mission and you’ve put in the time and hard work to establish a web of people that count on you, then the time will come when your growing influence will put you in a place where you’ll be face-to-face with someone who can help you make a difference.
Question: Have you ever truly connected with a celebrity or person of influence? What worked?
Recently I received an advanced copy of The Leap, a thought-provoking and inspiring new book by my friend Rick Smith. I met Rick through his work with World 50, the uber-influential executive networking company he founded a few years back.
The Leap is most powerful when it pushes readers to bust through their own personal glass ceilings, to use one of my favorite phrases. To use Rick’s phraseology, we get stuck in a “Now Trap” because our brains are constantly trying to protect us from an uncertain future. So instead of leaping forward toward our dreams, we get mired in psychological warfare between our creative and reactionary aspects.
The key idea here is that the very idea of “potential” is created in our minds. The limits to that potential are created in the very same place. WE are the biggest thing holding us back from greatness. Not only do I agree with that, I’ve experienced it on a profoundly personal level, part of the story I told in Who’s Got Your Back.
As the following exclusive excerpt from The Leap illustrates, it is our willingness to tackle head on the forces that hold us in place that allows us to achieve our greatest potential. Rick dispels the myths that hold us back, and challenges us to once again dream big. Enjoy!
Excerpt from The Leap: How 3 Simple Changes Can Propel your Career from Good to Great, by Rick Smith
At first glance, we humans would seem to be built for innovation and entrepreneurship. We’re the species that dreams big things, the one that imagines a different future for ourselves, and it all begins with our neural architecture.
For 500 million years, the human brain (and the proto-human one that preceded it) did little more than poke along, not changing materially in size or shape. Then, beginning about 2 to 3 million years ago, our gray matter started to explode. Today, in what amounts to a wink in geological time, we have doubled our average brain volume from that benchmark break point.
But volume is the least of it. Cranial studies and other evidence show conclusively that what grew most dramatically in the brain over the last several million years was the frontal lobe, the part of the brain that allows us to visualize the future and anticipate coming events.
Today, we spend on average 12 percent of our time—3 hours each day, or roughly 10 years in an 80-year life span—contemplating what is to come. This is what makes us different from every other living thing: We live in the present but keep a foot in the past and the future.
Put another way, a cheetah or a great white shark or even our close DNA cousin the orangutan has to prove itself every day. We don’t. We store up canned goods and water in case the power goes out; buy homes on time, via mortgages, in anticipation of rising values and future earning power; save money for our kids’ college education so they can have a better a life than us; and invest in IRAs, Keoghs, and 401(k)s to help feather our own old age.
Torn Between Opposites The planning-dreaming-poet side of the brain, the part that’s ready to leap toward wherever opportunity might wait, is one facet. But there’s another, older, survival-driven part of the brain that works in almost exact opposition.
Encouraged by our huge new frontal lobe, we envision big things to come, but when push comes to shove, our older brain fights like mad to defend the current state of our lives. We court risk in our imagination, then run from it in our daily lives. We are almost compelled to plot out alternative story lines for our lives and careers and families, but we are compelled even more powerfully to avoid what we imagine. That’s the great irony of humankind: we are at once the animal capable of dreaming and the one that holds itself back from achieving its dreams. True, we are wired to think about the future, but in critical ways, we are wired to think about it incorrectly.
Stuck in the present, we fret over how far up the corporate ladder we can climb, whether we will ever make VP of Sales, or what our compensation will be a dozen years out, when we really need to be asking ourselves is what we should be doing with the rest of our lives. If we’re not fulfilled, if we’re not in touch with what we intuit our potential to be, the rest—titles, offices, salary—is all window dressing and empty calories.
The frontal lobe speaks loudly enough in our private daily counsels that we all know this to be true to some extent. We long for the change that will make us fully in touch with out essential selves. We ache for work that will leave us fulfilled and content. But the rest of our brain, conditioned by millions of years of human and prehuman experience, anticipates failure, not success. And because it does, it sends a very different message: The upside of dramatic change isn’t worth the effort and exposure involved.
In effect, we imagine the future not so we can embrace it, but so we can avoid it.
Buying into Your Own Status Quo In effect, you have created a status quo and bought into it; studies have consistently shown that the bigger the bet and the more you fretted over it, the more certain you are that your reasoning is sound and the outcome you have predicted highly likely. That’s the way the brain works. It makes us sweat and strain over our decisions like a crew of ditchdiggers; then, once the decision is made, the brain invokes a psychological defense clause that says, Well, that sounds like a great bet to me. I’ll stick with it through thick and thin.
So it is with jobs and careers and even life patterns. We often invest so heavily in them, and buy into the logic of our investment and decision making so thoroughly, that we see abandoning them at the one extreme as a kind of psychological suicide and at the other as an unnecessary dare, given that the future (as our flawed brains paint it) is so likely to re-create the present. Rather than face up to the potential of positive, dramatic change, we silence the argument within ourselves, and in doing so, we spare ourselves the pain both of a difficult contemplation and of potentially realizing that our assumptions about the future have been fundamentally flawed.
In various branches of science, this is known as a closed system. In more everyday terms, it’s like walking into a dead-end alley. Maybe we should think of it as the “Now Trap.” What is closes in around us. What could be seems impossibly distant. And the space between them appears far too risky to navigate. No wonder our personal ruts seem so hard to escape—they are, in fact, Now Traps every one.
The Roads Not Taken
These are the pranks the brain plays on us. This is the way it builds the Now Trap that holds us in the ruts of our lives and careers. The brain provides us with a massive frontal lobe to imagine the future, then tricks us into believing that whatever lies out there for us will not be all that different than the present. The brain gifts each of us with enormous potential, then convinces us that the risk of pursuing our potential is greater than the reward of achieving it. It allows us to envision what we might become, then tells us we lack the talent and skills to get there.
We can’t help longing after the choices not made, the roads not taken, more than the choices we do make and the roads we do take. That again is part of what being a human being is all about. We’re the decision-making, decision-regretting animal; we have the capacity to rue as well as to anticipate and to envision alternative futures for ourselves. But unlike the poet Robert Frost, we can’t quite bring ourselves to take those roads less traveled, the ones that make, in Frost’s words, “all the difference.”
Our psychological immune system is poised to jump. It wants us to make the Leap. It can deal far more easily with too much courage than with too much cowardice. It’s more comfortable with our stumbling forward than with our hedging our bets. But the brain won’t let us do that without a fight that most of us are not prepared to make.
Thus we wage psychological warfare on ourselves. But—and this is the critical point—we don’t have to. The Now Trap is formidable, but it’s not Houdini proof. We simply have to start looking at life through a different lens. The fact is, the woods are full of ordinary people, everyday Joes and Janes, who have broken free from the Now Trap and transformed rut-stuck careers into deeply fulfilling callings—work that not only has brought them great personal satisfaction but has also had a great and lasting impact on others.
Above all else, remember this: whatever traps we may feel stuck in are largely of our own making. What we have built we can also undo. What we can dream we can achieve.
Question: What fears are stopping you from achieving your full potential -- and to what degree can our relationships help us escape the Now Trap?
The thought of being obligated to another hundred or so people—sending birthday cards, dinner invites, and all that stuff that we do for those close to us—seems outlandishly taxing.
Only, for some, it’s not. These people are super-connectors. People like me who maintain contact with thousands of people. The key, however, is not only that we know thousands of people but that we know thousands of people in many different worlds, and we know them well enough to give them a call.
So here’s the good news for those of you who aren’t so aggressively social: Once you become friendly with a super-connector, you’re only two degrees away from the thousands of different people we know.
Connectors can be found in every imaginable profession, but I’m going to focus on seven professions where they most commonly congregate. Each of these kinds of connectors provides me with a link to an entire world of people, ideas, and information that, in a very significant way, has made my own life a little more fun, helped my career along, or made the businesses I worked for more successful.
1. Restaurateurs
Being a true-blue connector is a requisite for most people who own restaurants. The success of their enterprise depends on a core group of regulars who see the restaurant as a home away from home. And it’s quite easy to get to know a restaurateur: Become a regular.
2. Headhunters
Recruiters. Job-placement counselors. Search executives. They are like gatekeepers. Instead of answering to one executive, however, the really successful ones may answer to hundreds of executives in the field in which they recruit. Headhunters are professional matchmakers, earning their wage by introducing job candidates to companies that are hiring.
Can anyone contact a headhunter? To be honest, headhunters prefer to be the one contacting you. But if you’re careful about not trying to sell yourself and instead offering them access to your network, they’ll be receptive
3. Lobbyists
Well informed, persuasive, and self-confident, lobbyists are generally impressive networkers. By virtue of their job, they are intimately familiar with the ways of large organizations and how local and national government work. They are almost uniformly passionate people whose goal is to sway politicians to vote on legislation in a way that favors the interest they represent.
How do they work? Lobbyists will often host cocktail parties and dinner get-togethers, allowing them to interact with politicians—and their opponents—in a casual atmosphere. Their more grassroots efforts involve long hours spent on the phone and in writing letters, trying to rouse the community to get involved behind an issue. All of which makes them a rather easy group to please. Can you hold an event for them? Volunteer your services? Refer other volunteers to their cause? Introduce them to potential clients?
4. Fundraisers
“Follow the money” are words fundraisers live by. They know where it is, what it will take to get it, and most important, who’s most likely to give it away. As a result, fundraisers, whether they work for a political organization, university, or nonprofit group, tend to know absolutely everybody.
5. Public relations people
PR people spend their whole day calling, cajoling, pressuring, and begging journalists to cover their clients. The relationship between media and PR is an uneasy one, but at the end of the day, necessity brings them together like long-lost cousins. A good friend who works in PR can be your entrée into the world of media and, sometimes, celebrity.
6. Politicians Politicians at every level are inveterate networkers. They have to be. They shake hands, kiss babies, give speeches, and go to dinners, all in the name of gaining the trust of enough people to get elected. The stature of politicians is derived from their political power rather than their wealth. Anything you can do to help them gain power with voters, or exercise power in office, will go a long way to ensuring you a place in their inner circle.
7. Journalists
Journalists are powerful (the right exposure can make a company or turn a nobody into a somebody), needy (they’re always looking for a story), and relatively unknown (few have achieved enough celebrity to make them inaccessible).
These are seven different professions tailor-made for superconnectors. Reach out to some. And there are others—lawyers, brokers, etc. Become a part of their network and have them become a part of yours. Seek out ideas from people you don’t ordinarily talk to who inhabit professional worlds you don’t ordinarily travel in.
In one word: Connect. In four better words: Connect with the connectors.
Are we raising a nation of teenagers who r omg totally gr8 texters, but total dopes when it comes to managing face to face communication?
Your teenage child sends and receives 2,272 texts a month and spends 9 hours a week absorbed in social networking sites. According to this Wall Street Journal Online op-ed by an English professor at Emory, there’s major collateral damage: a rising generation who’s deaf and dumb when it comes to real-time interaction and the subtle language of nonverbal cues – tonality, facial expressions, posture, and the like. He’s concerned: His book is called The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.
The professor’s both wrong and dead right.
Jeopardizing our future? Wrong. There’s so much more to celebrate than to gripe about in the Digital Age. The online revolution has wildly expanded our opportunities to share, create, and do more of all the things that tribes have done since the dawn of time – and now at the speed of light. We’re getting more human every day. I’m excited, not afraid, to see what new competencies Gen-Y and Gen-Z bring into the culture.
Here’s where he’s right: While the desire for relationships is innate, building them requires a skill set – one that can and must be learned. I know it can be learned, because I’ve made a lot of money, and my clients a lot of money, by teaching them those very skills. Nonverbal communication is an important part of that skill set, and it’s entirely possible that the professor’s right in worrying that it’s not going to be your kid’s strong suit.
It’s up to you, as parents, to fill the gap in that skill set. Push them toward activities that will develop those abilities that they miss out on while glued to their PC. Here are six tips to kick start your thinking.
6 Tips for Raising a Relationship-Savvy Child - Video Summary
1. Don't be a hypocrite! If you, like the professor, are worried your kids aren't skilled communicators, make sure you’re skilled at their preferred modes of interaction. Technology-facilitated communication is likely to become more, not less, important in the future, so make sure that you’re not overly focused on what worked in the past – you know, back when you had to walk a mile in bare feet in snow to get to school.
2. Set the example: As parents, your social life shouldn’t take place entirely remotely from your children. You’re wasting an opportunity to share with them your own special recipe for the good life – warm times with close friends. So find time to entertain at home. Host a dinner or a holiday party. Without making your kids the center of attention, give them time to interact with guests and “play grown-up.”
3. Set the table: The reality of your life may not make daily family dinners possible – but certainly you can make shared meals happen several times a week. A study reported in the 2003 Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine found that adolescents who frequently sat down to family meals had better grades, less depression, and were less likely to drink alcohol, smoke, or use marijuana than kids who ate with their families less than twice a week.
4. Take turns toasting: This is a must for special events, but also a great tradition even for casual Sunday night dinner. That way yours kids grow up watching and practicing impromptu “public” speaking – and learning to celebrate the small stuff.
5. Activities, activities, activities: Get your kid involved early on in an organization that promotes and rewards offline social interaction – think Boy or Girl Scouts, local theatre, sports clubs, or even a local nonprofit or political campaign. At a certain point, your kid will do what he wants to do, and unless you’re really lucky, it won’t involve the Glee Club. But if you’ve laid the foundation with years of marshmallow roasts and musical theatre, he’ll have the skills at the ready when he’s done being a disaffected teenager.
6. Enforce No Cell Phone/Blackberry family outings: Yes, your kids will hate you. And it you’re hooked on the Crackberry yourself, you’ll probably mean it when you say, “This is hurting me more than it’s hurting you.” But it’s good for everyone to take a break. For a few hours, anyway.
Those who are the best at building relationships will always have a competitive edge. Relationships drive success; everything we do in life is with and through other people. That’s not changing.
Now let's hear your take: How are you approaching these issues with your kids? Or maybe you're a teenager - are all these grownups worried about nothing?
Meghna heads up the High Impact Teams consulting practice at Ferrazzi Greenlight with Keith. She is based in New York City. If you have questions or want to increase your team's impact, contact her at mmajmudar at ferrazzigreenlight dot com.
Recently I received an advanced copy of 
The thought of being obligated to another hundred or so people—sending birthday cards, dinner invites, and all that stuff that we do for those close to us—seems outlandishly taxing.
