Tag Archives: coaching

Overcome Your Reluctance and Start Negotiating Your Salary

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by Judith White

fullrpoNegotiating your salary can reap huge, long-term benefits, and negotiating deals with internal and external partners can create value and advance your career. So what’s stopping you from doing it? Throughout my 15 years of teaching and coaching negotiations, I hear the same three excuses over and over: “What if they get upset with me for asking?” “What if they say no?” and ”It’s not like me to ask.” In this post I’ll describe why we make these excuses and tell you how to overcome them.

First, prepare. Check that your reluctance isn’t simply due to a lack of preparation. If you’ve read a book on negotiation, taken a course, or paid close attention to a good negotiator, you know that the secret to having the conversation go the way you’d like is preparation. Let’s assume you’ve prepared but you’re still putting off the conversation. Which of the following excuses sounds familiar? Continue reading →

7 Rules for Job Interview Questions That Result in Great Hires

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by John Sullivan

Some of the long-held ideas about how to conduct interviews are no longer accurate. For example, there’s no such thing as a surprise interview question anymore. With sites like Glassdoor.com, candidates can identify each of your likely interview questions and expected answers ahead of time. With that information, candidates now routinely prepare and video their practice interviews to the point where their responses are universally impressive, if not genuine or accurate.

It’s not just surprise questions that are a thing of the past. Research at firms like Google has proven that “brainteaser questions” can contribute to a costly miss-hire, that having a candidate meet any more than four interviewers doesn’t increase new-hire quality, and that for many jobs, factors like grades, test scores, and schools attended don’t predict success in the position. Continue reading →

Leadership: can you learn to communicate and embody it?

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Arthur JosephBy Arthur Joseph

 

In the “Education Life” section of the New York Times this past spring, Duff McDonald asked the questions, “Can you learn to lead?” and “What does one learn at graduate business school?”

He went on to point out that the biggest topic in business schools today is “leadership,” then quoted a few of the lofty goals such programs espouse. Examples? “Leaders who make a difference in the world” (Harvard Business School), and “Brave leaders who inspire growth in people, organizations and markets” (Kellogg at Northwestern).

Duff then described various approaches to teaching leadership, citing Ann L. Cunliffe’s advice to include “challenges” like “thinking critically, seeing situations in new ways, being able to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity, learning from experience and mistakes, knowing yourself . . . being passionate about what you do.” Continue reading →

7 Things That Make Great Bosses Unforgettable

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by Travis Bradberry

Some bosses are harder to forget than others. While bosses can be unforgettable because they make life miserable, the most memorable bosses stick with us because they change us for the better.

When I ask audiences to describe the best and worst boss they ever worked for, people inevitably ignore innate characteristics (intelligence, extraversion, attractiveness, and so on) and instead focus on qualities that are completely under the boss’s control, such as passion, insight, and honesty. Continue reading →

Create a Conversation, Not a Presentation

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by John Coleman

When I worked as a consultant, I was perennially guilty of “the great unveil” in presentations—that tendency to want to save key findings for the last moment and then reveal them, expecting a satisfying moment of awe. My team and I would work tirelessly to drive to the right answer to an organization’s problem. We’d craft an intricate presentation, perfecting it right up until minutes or hours before a client meeting, and then we’d triumphantly enter the room with a thick stack of hard copy PowerPoint slides, often still warm from the printer.

But no matter how perfect our presentation looked on the surface, we regularly came across major issues when we were in the room. These one-sided expositions frequently led to anemic conversations. And this hurt our effectiveness as a team and as colleagues and advisers to our clients. Continue reading →