Tag Archive | "Strategies"

College students across the county are rejoicing: after several years of reduced post-college career opportunities for the emerging workforce, the college graduate class of 2012 has more job prospects. Companies across the country are trying to gobble up the brightest and most creative minds in the graduating class through company branding, perks and outreach strategies. The War for Talent is back on.

One of the best investments you can make as a manager, executive, or business owner is in making your employees successful. Companies focused on making their employees happy and successful are more innovative, productive and create exceptional customer experiences. Put simply, happy employees make happy customers. A sure way to make your employees successful is to provide them with consistent, direct and real time feedback. It’s also a great way to reinforce a culture of excellent customer service and keep your employees engaged.

Erase the phrase “it’s just a job” from your vocabulary. Putting minimal effort into a job is only doing you a disservice. Even the smallest job should be treated as if it is a stepping stone to something else… because it might be! Every job has the chance to wow someone, to lead to an amazing recommendation or to expand your network.

Leadership is the most studied of all psychological phenomena – a reality that puzzles researchers of more quotidian behaviors. I believe this owes to the fact that some part of us believes that we can be a leader, even if our current behaviors and station may do little to suggest that latent potential.

In 2011, the digital landscape underwent a significant shift that will have profound effects on business in 2012. The challenge is that hardly any business leaders noticed. That’s not their fault however. Although the impact of technology on business and consumer behavior was widely reported, in-depth reports on what to do next or how this will affect their business specifically were scant at best. What the social media gurus aren’t telling you is that the landscape for business isn’t changing because of social media, it’s changing because consumer expectations are evolving.

Don’t sell any deal until you know what can and should be sold. Listen with your ears instead of your mouth, and don’t interrupt. Also listen with your body and your mind. Challenge your assumptions and take note to see what’s missing. After you listen be Sherlock. Prepare to respond to questions that you do not want to answer. Prepare to say no and explain why. Provide solutions, not just problems. Remember that how you say something can have more impact that what you say.

Mobile is an opportunity to differentiate; but more than that, it’s a transformation to our professional world that we can no longer ignore. Just as the internet changed the way we attracted candidates from newsprint to online; the mobile phone is revolutionizing the way employers must market to candidates. Close to 80% of job seekers use mobile applications to look for a job and quite frankly, the stats on speed and retention of mobile recruitment messages by candidates vs. traditional recruiting methods is stunning.

The key to personal branding, like any good marketing, means telling a story, but things like personal websites, Twitter profiles and Facebook pages are just the beginning. Every story needs a middle and an end. To get to the happy ending of a successful job search, however, means finding that middle ground between personal objectives and professional experience. While your story should be written with an external audience in mind, selling yourself externally requires looking internally.

As organizations increasingly expand across the nation and globe, remote work arrangements have become a common part of day-to-day business. This poses a challenge for managers, who are often left struggling to engage employees they cannot see. In my book The Virtual Manager, I detail the benefits of targeting the Key Drivers of Employee Engagement with initiatives tailored for the remote workforce. Here are a few of my top recommendations: