Success is 15 percent due to professional knowledge and 85 percent due to “the ability to express ideas, to assume leadership, and to arouse enthusiasm among people,” according to Dale Carnegie. Communication is leadership It’s essentially an opportunity to listen to and engage with the people most important to you and your business.
Growth and success with teams and customers often rises or falls one conversation at a time — in one on one interactions, meetings, in your marketing materials, and in each and every communication with stakeholders.
“How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” – Ernest Hemingway Success happens the same way – gradually, then suddenly. There are no quick wins in your business or leadership development. It takes years of work, setbacks, and even reinventions to achieve the success you imagine. It happens one step and one day at…
Kindness may be one of the least appreciated leadership qualities. Studies show that kindness benefits not only the receiver, but the giver, whether these are companies or people. Companies that value kindness have lower turnover on their teams, lower recruitment costs, and higher productivity. Kind people are healthier and happier. Kindness is expressed in compassion, generosity,…
Asking questions is one of the simplest and most powerful ways to advance your leadership skills and connect with your team. Questions challenge assumptions and encourage us to reach beyond what we think we already know. Good questions lead to innovative products and solutions. Questions build trust. As children, we ask questions easily and often.…
Happy new year and I hope you are off to a wonderful and productive start! My goal has always been to provide you with valuable guidance on how to take small, incremental steps to advance in your career and achieve a life of success and happiness. As we jump into the new year, I’m eager…
For more tips on effective communication, download my free guide, 7 Secrets To Highly Effective Communications When reflecting on your recent communications, have you experienced any of the following? There was disconnect between what you said you wanted from your team and what they delivered. You were denied a promotion that you deserved (and requested). Your…
Talent is the key element, because it solves all other problems. So observed Wendy Kopp, Founder of Teach America and CEO of Teach For All. Throughout my career as an entrepreneur, I’ve seen this firsthand as I’ve worked side-by-side with talented professionals with excellent leadership skills. And my experience has been varied and extensive: I co-founded…
This article is featured in the Pocket Mentor mobile app — Providing leaders with daily advice to grow themselves, their teams, and their businesses. Start your free one week trial today! Every day, you can find a lot to complain about. But, after a bit of venting and acknowledging the problem, I usually start to feel trapped…
This was a guest post I recently wrote for Entrepreneur.com I was a veteran of several startups long before I became a parent. And I continued to invest in and found startups after I became a mother. It’s a different juggle now. Before I had kids, I could literally work nearly round the clock, seven days a…
This article is featured in the Pocket Mentor mobile app — Providing leaders with daily advice to grow themselves, their teams, and their businesses. Start your free one week trial today! Think about the people in your life that you truly admire, or people from your past that you have looked up to. Consider why you hold…
This article is featured in the Pocket Mentor mobile app — Providing leaders with daily advice to grow themselves, their teams, and their businesses. Start your free one week trial today! You are the most powerful influencer in your success. One summer, one of our teenage sons attended the 5-day Duke University basketball camp under the tutelage…
This article is featured in the Pocket Mentor mobile app — Providing leaders with daily advice to grow themselves, their teams, and their businesses. Start your free trial today! In work and life, people are the most valuable, important, appreciable asset. Make the effort to get to know your team all along the career ladder – both…
(For even more tips on how to effectively communicate, download my free giveaway, 7 Secrets To Highly Effective Communications.) High performing people and businesses don’t happen without clarity. Often, this clarity comes in the form of direct feedback. To be an effective manager, you need to be skilled at giving both praise and criticism. Although it…
If you’re like most of the people who write to me from around the world, you aspire to excellence in your work and life and want to learn how to be successful. You recognize that you are a leader and you want to grow in your leadership roles. Many of the articles I write for…
(For even more tips on how to be successful and effectively communicate, download my free giveaway, 7 Secrets To Highly Effective Communications.) Unlike any Presidential campaign in my recent memory, this year’s election season has generated a lot of uncertainty about our future here in the good ol’ USA. Americans have long been known for our…
You know more than you think, and can contribute more than you know. This is one of my favorite observations and a fact that people often forget, especially in the tough times of waiting for a successful outcome. In today’s weekly post, I’m sharing my recent articles (and several from some of my favorite authors)…
(This post originally appeared on Business Insider) Legendary CEO Lee Iacocca says, “You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.” Recently, Business Insider asked me to write an article with advice on how to solve this problem. This topic must have struck a chord, as my…
Have you recently moved to a new level of leadership? Perhaps you’ve moved from the C-Suite to CEO, from CEO to board member, from director to VP, manager to director, or from colleague to first-time supervisor. Or maybe you would dearly love to move to the next level of leadership and but are frustrated…
Recently, several readers have written in about challenges at work. Their team isn’t following through as they had hoped. Or their CEO is sending mixed messages. So many of our challenges boil down to communication failures or snafus. Misunderstandings fester and grow. And while many problems emerge from poor communications, many solutions are readily available…
For more tips on how to communicate effectively, download my free guide, 7 Secrets To Highly Effective Communications Have you noticed that most of the leaders who have influenced you and the ones you admire most are likable? I don’t mean likable in the sense of a high school popularity contest. I mean they have…
For more tips on how to communicate effectively, download my free guide, 7 Secrets To Highly Effective Communications It’s simply impossible to successfully lead – people, teams, or projects – without knowing how to communicate effectively. Some of the “problems” we continue to encounter as leaders day after day originate because of a failure in…
For more tips on how to communicate effectively, download my free guide, 7 Secrets To Highly Effective Communications When reflecting on your recent communications, have you experienced any of the following? There was disconnect between what you said you wanted from your team and what they delivered. You were denied a promotion that you deserved (and…
It’s that time of year when you may be thinking of looking for a promotion where you work, or looking to move up, on, and out of your current organization. You can increase your odds of landing the job of your dreams with a few tips that I have found valuable. I’ve updated one of…
Success is 15 percent due to professional knowledge and 85 percent due to “the ability to express ideas, to assume leadership, and to arouse enthusiasm among people.” Dale Carnegie said this 78 years ago, yet all of us know what research reveals: That many leaders or aspiring leaders miss the mark on communicating ideas that…
A friend recently called me and said she was both thrilled and a little nervous to be invited back for her third interview for a job position she has wanted for over six months. She’s smart and talented, and has obviously done a lot of things right by advancing through two previous rounds of interviews.…
Questions are the secret sauce that lead to big and small successes in your career development. Asking questions can be a pivotal tool in accelerating your trajectory to achieve the impact, influence, and rewards you want. Questions ignite new paths of thinking, challenge assumptions, and encourage us to reach beyond what we think we already…
The emails you write are either helping you move forward and standout, tread water, or worse, an email can diminish your reputation, or embarass you, as the hacked emails from Sony Pictures revealed. Think about it. If you’re like most people you write hundreds (or more) emails each week. Yet most of us believe that…