I was sitting in a book editing retreat to learn the best ways to edit my book a few years ago. It was a small group event held in a beautiful resort in upstate New York to teach all the future authors in the room how to edit our books. During one of the first days of the event, each of us was supposed to take a turn reading a small selection of one of our chapters to the rest…
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I was presenting to a women’s employee resource group the other day about the impact that communication can have on an organization. Things will run smoothly when people have the right information and they can trust that what they have been given is accurate. The challenge is that not all leaders are the same. Some operate with information close to their vest and don’t want to share what they know. Others are very transparent with information to allow their teams…
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Are you paying attention to your personal brand? Some people may refer to a personal brand as your image. If you aren’t familiar with the term, here is a great definition from Laura Morgan Roberts in an article titled, Creating a Positive Professional Image. She was quoted to say, “Your professional image is the set of qualities and characteristics that represent perceptions of your competence and character as judged by key constituents (i.e. clients, colleagues, superiors, subordinates).” You will see that at times, the…
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When someone first told me that I should “slow down to speed up,” I couldn’t even process what that would mean for me. There was too much to do and no time to get it all done! If I slowed down, then I would fall behind even further. What I came to realize though, is that slowing down is what is needed to prepare for what is ahead. Taking the time to reflect, be strategic, plan, create new ideas or…
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Have you ever shared a situation or story with someone and you can tell by their response, that they have no idea what you said because they weren’t listening to you? We have all experienced this at one time or another, but why does it happen? Did they not find the topic interesting, were they thinking about something else, or maybe they were distracted? Any of those may be true, but something else to be aware of is that when…
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What are the top experiences that you have had in your career? Think of some project or team that you were a part of that made a huge impact on you. That experience helped you gain knowledge, learn a lesson, grow as a leader, bond as a team, or perhaps you made the impossible, possible. So are you going to keep that all to yourself or are you going to share what you learned? Every person that I work with…
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Which leader in your life made a difference for you in your career? I can think of several throughout my career, although they may not have even known it. They didn’t see what they did or said as anything special. To them, they were just doing their job and what they thought was right for me. If I had to narrow it down, I would say there were 5 key things that they did for me: Stretched me out of my…
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What does a leader who develops their people do, that other leaders don’t? I am sure that just like me, you could look back over your career, and see leaders that you enjoyed working for and some that you did not. What were the differences between those two groups of people? In my own experience, there were 4 things that made a difference: Did they actually take the time to connect with me? Did they care about my development? Did…
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“Is there such a thing as too much visibility?” This is a question that I get in nearly every speaking engagement that I do. When I press them for more information, it is usually a response similar to this one: “I don’t want to be seen as someone who brags or who takes up all the space in the room. I am afraid that I would be seen as that kind of person if I am being visible and I…
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It’s time to check in on the perception of your personal brand. What perception do you think that you have and is it the one that you want? Your personal brand is judged by people each and every day, usually in the first few seconds. As soon as they meet you they are looking at your appearance, listening to what you say and also how you say things. Their brain automatically creates a perception as they measure you against an…
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