Archive for the 'Branding You' Category

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They don’t teach this in management school, but learning how to build and maintain friendships in the workplace is a skill that can take you a long way in your career.

Just ask the founders of Google and Yahoo! But then again, when friends ‘break-up’ at work, whether it’s a legal partnership, two chefs at a bistro, or heads of a public company such as Disney, it can cause a permanent rift in the relationship. The truth is it’s risky to work with friends.

Yet it turns out that working with friends - or befriending co-workers - can enhance your job performance. Nearly two-thirds of employees believe that office productivity improves when co-workers are friendly outside of the office, according to a recent study by Accountemps, a staffing company for financial services professionals.

For many of us, friends are magnets that lure us to a new job and the ties that bind us when we might otherwise break away. Yet balancing the chemistry of friendships on and off the job is often a bit of an ordeal.

Archives for Branding You

Do you ever get the feeling that you’re writing graffiti in cyberspace?   

I get this disconnected feeling when I post a status update on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. There’s certainly an art to writing a one sentence blurb that expresses something about your life, perspective or the world around you. But is there a point to status updates? Is it merely a social convenience or could it advance your career?

The basic idea of a status update is to say something of interest about your life, or about the world around you to your social network contacts. Sure, it’s easy to write, “Headed to lunch in the city.” But that’s not going to interest your “followers,” who prefer to read witty or insightful comments, links to compelling articles or hot new websites.

Is anyone getting ahead in the social media world by offering status updates? I asked several savvy social networkers why they update their contacts more than once or twice a day. What’s the ROI on status updates?

Archives for Branding You

If you interact with customers, suppliers or co-workers located in other countries you can appreciate the sublime challenges of navigating a global career. In between rare moments of exhilaration and fear lie the everyday challenges of mastering the virtual workplace.

Fuzzy communications. Time zone gaps. Cultural differences. Puzzling global standards. Complicated logistics. These are among the daily concerns of global workers.

“It is much more common today for companies to have distributed teams, and a lot of them are international,” notes multicultural consultant Colleen Garton, author of Managing Without Walls. “Managers who maybe only five years ago would be managing team members in the same building are managing people in different time zones who speak different languages. You’re dealing with a lot of different communication tools and problems than they would have had to deal with a few years ago.

Archives for Branding You

When a couple gets into a rut, they sometimes enter counselling to get a fresh, outsider’s perspective and, hopefully, reinvigorate the romance.

Similarly, a company seeking a surge of renovation can turn to the outside world by setting up a diverse team tasked with a particular focus.

Not slowed down by corporate bureaucracy, this multi-disciplinary group is, theoretically, agile enough to affect change and deliver innovation.

So contend the authors of a new book, “X-Teams: How to Build Teams that Lead, Innovate, and Succeed.” Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman who conducted their research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, say that we live in an “era of open innovation.”

They contend that more “radical innovation” comes from smaller organizations and that universities are increasingly forming partnerships with industry to market independent research.

Archives for Branding You

How much do you know about the corporate culture of a prospective employer? Until you work there, you’re in the dark, right? By reputation, a manufacturing company might be known as a meat grinder or a large law firm as a cold and unfriendly place. Yet how much of this reputation is true and how much of it is sour grapes?

It’s imperative to discover the true nature of corporate culture before you accept a job offer. If the company likes go-getters, but you’re a slow-starter, look elsewhere. If the company likes consensus builders, but you shoot from the hip, maybe it’s not a good fit for you.

Unless you’re equipped with science-fiction powers of precognition, your options for evaluating the culture as a job candidate or job seeker appear limited to talking to people and power-reading on the web. The obvious place to start, the careers section of the corporate site, is usually a dead end. There you can read the type of gloss that belongs on a Hallmark greeting card. If reading about the CEO’s family values melts your heart, so be it, but I’d rather know if the company nurtures or chews up its young. And to get that kind of information you have to dig - deep.

Archives for Branding You

Just a quick note of gratitude to Guy Kawasaki for including My Global Career on Alltop.com, a cool new portal that showcases and samples the best of the web.

I met Guy several decades ago when he was an Apple Computer evangelist and I was a fledgling tech reporter in Silicon Valley. He was always a good sport about educating the press and fact-checking story details. In recent years Guy’s star has ascended as an author, blogger and venture capitalist.

Guy’s blog offers excellent career advice, particularly to budding entrepreneurs, inventors and executives. All the best tech & management gurus keep a sharp eye on leadership & talent management issues because without strong people skills, your chances of successful execution are nil. But then you knew that!  

Let me know how you like Alltop.

 

Archives for Branding You

When you go above and beyond the call of duty at work, you expect a reward for your efforts. But the payoff is often delayed - or worse - and it’s rarely what you were expecting.

What’s typically at stake for employees is a cash reward and heightened organizational stature - a big step toward a promotion. If the organization fails to come through even star employees head for the exits.

Unfortunately, HR experts say two pervasive problems undermine employee trust in rewards programs. First, there is often a lack of transparency into the rewards process and second, there is fuzziness about what it takes to qualify.