Are You Executive Level Material? Tip #2

The following is the second in a series of 10 tips to help you become more promotable in your job.

2. Build your confidence.

Contrary to popular belief, confidence is not about self-esteem or self-worth. In fact, someone can have a low level of self-esteem and still become a high-level executive, as the person’s low self-esteem could be driving them to succeed. True confidence is simply the belief that you can do things well. If you doubt your ability to do things well, simply look back at your record of accomplishment. Use those past successes as a way to build your confidence so it’s apparent to others as well.

Are You Executive Level Material?

The following is the first in a series of 10 tips to help you become more promotable in your job.

Any successful executive will tell you that there’s a game in business. If you’re not willing to play the game, you can’t win at it. So while many people aspire to reach the executive level in their company, they won’t. In fact, most people don’t make it past the $80,000 per year income level simply because they don’t play the game.

Why won’t they play? “I hate business politics,” they say. But who said “business politics” had to be a negative thing? For example, if your boss does something commendable in the company, invents something new, or makes a great speech, it’s okay to congratulate him or her. That’s not being political or a “kiss up”; it’s called being gracious and having decorum – two things that will help you climb the corporate ladder.

Aside from your technical skills or job-specific abilities, other big components of the game include your comportment, how you look, how you speak, your attitude, and your daily habits.

1. Claim your space.

When you’re walking in the office, you need to look purposeful and centered. Scurrying, looking harried, or trying to blend into the background will make you appear as though you lack confidence. Instead, walk with your full height and claim the space around you. People need to view you as someone on a mission – a mission to the top.

Employee Motivation

All people are motivated.  Yes, you heard me right.  All people are motivated.  They may not be motivated to do what you want them to do, but they are in fact motivated.

When I was new in management, I thought people would do what I wanted them to do because I said so.  Wrong.  I liked the word boss and I was thrilled to be one.  The only thing I knew about bossing was to boss everyone around.  There’s a word for my old management style – dictatorial.

My bull-in-a-china-closet style eventually forced me to read many books on the subject of management.  I learned that to manage others, I must learn first to manage myself well.  I learned that to be effective, I must set an example, and that people want to be led, not managed.

Many books have been written on management and leadership.  The book that comes to mind as having the most valuable information on management-building skills is The Greatest Management Principle, by Michael Lebouf.  Lebouf taught me what I consider the most important thing a manager must know to be successful.  To be a successful manager, you must know that if you want someone to perform any type of function, you must measure or at least acknowledge the results.

You must be saying, “That sounds way too much like baby-sitting.  No way, not me, I won’t do that.  I hired competent people and I expect them to perform without my involvement.”  If this is exactly how you feel, you will learn this lesson exactly as I did, through turnover.

From reading The Greatest Management Principle, I also figured out that it is a rip-off to ask an employee to perform a special assignment and then not recognize the contribution.  I used to think that a paycheck was the thanks my staff wanted and needed.  Wrong again.  People do want fair compensation, but beyond that, it’s recognition they want.  Some people want standing ovations and some want a verbal pat on the back.  Some people want very little attention drawn to them, so a sealed note would work just as well.  What we all have in common is that we want to feel important.  If you don’t make your employees feel important, they will go to work for someone who will.  Remember, people do things for their own reasons, not yours.

Bad Breath Boss

Dear Jean,

My boss has really bad breath.  When he speaks to me, I almost gag.  What can I do to let him know of his problem?  He is a very defensive person.

Reply:

I know only two options:  Get up your courage and tell him, or stay two arms’ lengths away.

I have a client who was the person with the bad breath.  His secretary kept a bunch of mints in her desk.  As he would be walking out of the office for a meeting, she would say, “Wait, here are a couple of mints.”  It wasn’t too long before he asked her if he had a breath problem.  She told him the truth, and he was thankful to hear it.  She probably saved him a couple of teeth too.  Her courage helped her boss detect early stages of gum disease.

Forget Time Management…Are You Managing Your Energy?

Phrases like “manage your time” and “do more with less” have become the buzzwords for this decade. The idea is that if you can manage your time well, you’ll be more productive in all areas of life. The only flaw in this thinking is that time is finite. In other words, you can manage time all you want and continually push yourself to get more done. But all this managing and pushing tires your brain, drains your spirit, and disengages your soul. That’s when mistakes occur and burnout ensues. The key, then, is not to simply manage your time, but also to manage your energy.

Unlike time, energy is restorable. And when you manage your energy well, you’ll have more energy for your priorities, whether they are personal or professional in nature. If you don’t manage your energy, you can’t manage your time. Sure, you can think about all the things you need to do and you can schedule them, but if you don’t have the energy to do the tasks, you won’t be able to accomplish them appropriately.

Realize, too, that managing your energy goes beyond work/life balance. While many people talk about work/life balance (devoting ample time to all areas of your life), few address those things that make life rich and fun. With so many things competing for your attention daily, you need to give attention to energy replenishment so you can devote the time your life’s priorities demand. This is why it’s important to manage your energy before you manage your time.

The Three Pillars of Energy Management

Keeping your energy in check means giving attention to your brain, your spirit, and your soul. Think of it like a three-legged stool. For the stool to be useful, you need all three legs. Remove one leg from the equation, and the stool topples over and is useless. The same is true for your energy. Therefore, to keep your energy replenished, implement the following suggestions into your daily life.

  • Stimulate Your Brain

The human brain likes control and certainty, and it’s very good at predicting the next thing that is likely to happen based on the information it has. That’s why you often feel better when you perceive you have control over a situation and feel stressed if you think you have no control over events. Additionally, the brain is programmed to fear. This is a good thing, though, because the inborn fear is what has allowed our species to evolve. The only drawback to this natural fear is that the brain will take three pieces of information and make a story out of it—usually a negative one. This negative story becomes your reality until you get another piece of data. Talk about an energy drain on your brain!

In order to replenish your brain’s energy, do the following:

  • Since your brain is part of your body, it needs to be fed the right food for optimum health. Eat three nutritious meals a day, exercise to increase the oxygen flow to your brain, and drink plenty of water to keep hydrated.
  • Reconstruct your stories. You have to purposefully stop the story and seek out the missing pieces of information. For example, if you get an email from your boss telling you not to take part in a task you volunteered for, with no explanation why, you would likely think your boss doesn’t believe you’re capable of the task. In reality, your boss may need you for another task, he or she may think the task is not challenging enough for you, or your boss may simply not need any assistance on the task any longer. But you’ll never know (and never stop the negative story) until you ask.
  • Analyze what helps and hurts your thinking ability. For instance, do 200 emails staring at you first thing in the morning make you exhausted before you even start the day? If so, then don’t do that task first thing. Do the most important things when you’re alert and at your best, as those tasks will actually energize you so you can handle the stressful tasks later.
  • Give yourself two hours a day for focused attention on a key project—the earlier in the day the better. No multi-tasking during this time! Whether you are a night or a morning person, the fact is that your brain is rested after your sleep, so this is the key time for focused attention and productivity.
  • Awaken Your Spirit

The human spirit yearns to soar. The spirit enjoys lofty goals and challenging tasks to accomplish. How spirited someone is often relates to how purposeful he or she is. In fact, it’s common that when people lose their purpose in life, they feel deflated and even depressed. Hence the phrase: “Her spirit was broken.”

An energized spirit is what catapults you out of the mundane and into a new and exciting endeavor. In order to replenish your spirit’s energy, do the following:

  • Do one thing every day that makes your spirit soar. Whether it’s reading poetry or listening to music, if you feel your spirit is fed by that, do it.
  • Think about what you want to do in your life. Dream big! Give planned time to your future in order to nurture your spirit.
  • Read things that stretch your mind. Your spirit wants to reach for the next best thing. Unleash the power of your spirit by exposing your mind to new things—even things that you feel are impossible to accomplish right now.
  • Take time each day to think and concentrate. Many people are in knowledge-oriented jobs and need some degree of quiet time. So even though a particular task must get done, that task often requires planning and thinking. Your spirit can’t gain energy to tackle big goals unless it has some quiet time to prepare. So let people know that you require quiet thinking time, and actually put this time in your schedule. If others know your needs and intentions, they will respect them.
  • Feed Your Soul

The human soul likes the familiar, the deep, and the poignant. The soul likes ritual, doing the same thing at the same time every day. It also enjoys the simple things in life, beauty, and nature. The soul is what connects you to life and to what is deeply meaningful to you.

In order to replenish your soul’s energy, do the following:

  • Clarify your intentions and plan what you want your tomorrow to be like before you go to bed. This allows your subconscious to work on your challenges and big decisions while you sleep.
  • Take time for enchantment. Linger through a museum. Enjoy preparing a simple elegant meal. Go outside regularly and really look at nature. Your soul loves beauty and wants a connection with the earth.
  • Experience the present fully. Focus on the things around you—the colors and textures. Be mindful of your current surroundings and activities rather than always trying to multi-task. Really engage in life in the moment. Feel yourself breathe.
  • Build rituals for yourself and your family. Even something as simple as eating dinner at the same time every day is a ritual. Both your soul and your brain crave ritual and gain energy from it.

Energize!

By focusing on these three areas of your life—your brain, your spirit, and your soul—you’ll gain the much needed energy to tackle life with enthusiasm and zest. With your energy fully replenished, time will no longer be an issue. You’ll feel ready to handle anything that comes your way with ease…and you’ll do it much faster. So make it a habit to stimulate your brain, awaken your spirit, and feed your soul. It’s one investment in yourself you can’t afford not to make.

How to Be a Memorable Leader

If you look back over your career, chances are you can identify one or two people who stand out as memorable leaders. Even if these people didn’t hold an official leadership role, their actions and words rallied people together to achieve a common goal. And whether that goal was large or small, far reaching or contained, you remember these leaders for a long time.

While there are many great leaders in the world, not all of them are truly memorable—that is, they don’t leave an impression that lasts beyond their current accomplishment or focus. But being memorable is essential if you want long-term success. So what makes one leader memorable and puts another in the “out of sight, out of mind” category? It comes down to three key elements. Develop these characteristics in yourself and you, too, can be a memorable leader.

Know Who You Are

Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” While that’s a little harsh, it does make the point that everyone must examine their life. For what? To pinpoint your “moral compass”—your true values. Memorable leaders know their values, why those values are important, and how those values play out in life.

Realize that you can’t have one set of values in your work life and a different set in your personal life. You take your set of values with you everywhere, and a mess up in one area of life can easily affect another. For example, it was a seemingly personal value that distracted and somewhat derailed Bill Clinton’s career, not a business value, which shows that values are not compartmentalized. So if you don’t examine your life and know what you stand for, you can easily get sidetracked.

Getting to know yourself starts with honesty—with others and yourself. While most people have “cash register” honesty, meaning they’d never steal money from their employer, they aren’t always honest in other ways. Perhaps they tell the world they value one thing, yet display something else. For example, some people will tout the value of hard work and claim they work harder than anyone else. Yet when you really look at their work behaviors, you find that they’re spending most of the day on long conversations that have little to do with work or are surfing the Internet—things that don’t advance the company. That’s not personal honesty or personal awareness.

If you’re having trouble knowing who you are and what you stand for, ask a trusted colleague or family member to give you feedback. You can also opt to do a formal 360-degree feedback assessment, which enables others to give objective insight on how they view you.

Know Your Vision, Communicate It, and Live It

A Harvard Business School professor once said, “The only thing a CEO needs to do is communicate their vision, communicate their vision, and then communicate their vision.” Why is communicating the vision so important? Because if you don’t know where you’re going and tell others where you’re going, then you and everyone around you are going to lose the way. With all the things employees have going on in their lives, they’re distracted during some of the week, so it’s easy for them to get off track. Memorable leaders keep communicating the vision so everyone is always on the same page.

Living your vision and your company’s core values means everyone—those you report to and those who report to you—knows the vision as well. If you don’t understand your company’s vision or core values, have a conversation with your boss about them. Without vision and values, both companies and people lose their way—people are floundering, no one knows what they should be doing, and people hide their potential talent. Not a good situation for sure! For example, in a manufacturing company, getting the product out on time isn’t a core value and has nothing to do with the company’s vision. In order to have a healthy and synergistic team, people need to connect to something bigger than a goal of moving product. Vision and values make the difference.

Also realize that communicating a vision does not mean the leader needs to be talkative. Many memorable leaders are quiet and reserved, such as presidents Truman and Eisenhower. People follow memorable leaders because they exemplify their vision, not just tout it.

Be Teachable

Being open to learning new things and admitting your limitations and your struggles give you power; it’s not a weakness. Realize that people don’t want to think they’re following a robot. They want to know that whoever they’re following is real.

Memorable leaders teach other leaders and are interested in the development of people beneath them. That’s why you need to be in touch with your direct reports and learn their dreams, goals, and career aspirations. As the old quote says, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” So the “teachable” part goes in two directions: you have to be willing to learn for yourself and you have to be willing to teach others.

Finally, Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, once said, “Leaders are readers.” That means it’s important you know what’s going on in all industries, not just your own. Staying too focused on one viewpoint of issues makes you one-dimensional. Creativity comes from combining what you know with what other leaders know and then adapting it to your own industry in order to improve or innovate. That’s why “overview” publications like Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Inc. are favorites of memorable leaders.

A Leader for the Ages

While few people are natural born leaders, you can learn to be a memorable leader and have people lining up, asking to work for you. All it takes is a commitment to lead others in a way that reflects your deepest held values, embraces your vision, and encourages lifelong learning. The more you commit to practicing and living these three keys, the more memorable you’ll be.

There’s Not Enough to Do

Dear Jean,

My boss only has enough work for me to keep me busy from about 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m., but my hours are 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.  So I just sit there for half of the day.  I have asked for more work, but she says there isn’t anything else for me to do.

Reply:

How boring!  You are doing the right thing by asking what to do, but go ahead and start looking for another job.  Sooner or later your boss or your boss’s boss will realize that there is not enough work to keep you or anyone else busy in that job.  Once that fact is realized, your job will be in jeopardy.

If you really love the people you work for, maybe you can work for them in the mornings.  That way you can find yourself another job in the afternoon.  However, if you are a whiz kid and you are doing eight hours of work in two, find yourself another job.  You’re too bright for this one.

Change My Personality?

Dear Jean,

My boss would like me to be more of a people person.  Because I supervise five people, this has come up on every review.  It’s not that I don’t like people, but I find many people extremely annoying.  How can I change my personality?

Reply:

I don’t think it’s a good idea to try to change your personality.  It sounds like all you need to do is add some people skills.  And believe me, they can be acquired.  The best training for this in the nation is the Dale Carnegie course.  I have seen a 10-week course dramatically alter a person’s career opportunities.  These skills are crucial.  You will learn such things as how to be a good listener and how to get others to talk about themselves; how to show genuine interest in other people; how to supervise without criticizing, condemning, or complaining; and how just smiling can make people around you feel differently.  As a bonus, Dale Carnegie training (at www.dalecarnegie.com) will enhance your family relationships as well.

There are also life coaches and business coaches that can help. Be sure to get a referral if you go this route.  It can be a waste of time and money if you get a mediocre coach.

I too had to change the way I dealt with people.  To do this, I first made a solemn vow to myself to change, and then I listened to educational tapes night and day.  I listened to them when I got ready for work; I listened to them as I drove to and from work.  It’s amazing how much motivation and education you can get in your car.

This became a lifelong habit, and even though the subject matter of the tapes I listen to changes, I always take along 6 to 12 hours of listening on any road trip.  Head for the public library; see what it has to offer.  My largest source of business education tapes is Nightingale Conant.  You can find them on the web at www.nightingale.com.

Make it a goal to turn on a tape the minute you get in the car.  Before too long, you will have an education equivalent to a master’s degree just from your commute and your driving around town.

How To Be The Star

Dear Jean,

I’m a salesperson with a national firm.  I do pretty well, but the woman they call their “star” salesperson is making me crazy.  She gets all kind of privileges and she looks trashy.  Jean, I always wear a stylish suit or dress and I am careful about my makeup, hair, nails, etc.  For some reason, I sure don’t get a trip to Bermuda.  What should I do?  Shorten my skirts and lower my neckline?

Reply:

I’m assuming that she earned those trips to Bermuda by winning contests.  Something I read recently said that we all wear a pair of magic magnifying glasses.  When we look at something, whatever we focus on increases.  If we look at the problem, the problem increases.  If we look at the solution, the solution increases.

My best advice to you is to look at the solution.  What is it you could be doing to increase your personal production?  Do you need to make more calls?  Do you need a refresher on closing the sale?  Do you qualify your prospects properly?  Do you have excellent time-management skills?  If she can be the national sales star, so can you.  Don’t spend any more time thinking about her.  She is living in your head rent-free.

Qualities of a Good Boss

To be a good boss, you need certain qualities. There are many opinions of what makes a good leader. I believe that leaders are made, not born. Good leaders have these qualities:

• Heart and integrity

• The ability to follow as well as lead

• Vision

• Consistency

• The desire to teach, to coach, and to watch people grow

• A willingness to set boundaries

• A willingness to hire people who are not like themselves