How to Be Seen as Someone with Potential To keep advancing in your career, it’s important for your senior stakeholders and colleagues to see you as someone with greater potential. You want to show you’re someone who can do more than what you’re doing now. Someone who can make a bigger impact for the organization. But when you’re busy toiling away “doing more with less” resources, it can feel impossible to think about anything other than the task at hand. So, how do you get people to see your potential? You have opportunities every day to show you have greater potential It’s about spotting tho ..read more

How to Motivate Your Team When the Company Vision is Vague and General A company vision is meant to energize, motivate and bring people together around common goals. But so often, company visions are vague and general. As a leader, that makes it challenging to get your team to rally around. For example, when I was first starting out in banking, we talked about our vision as, “To be the preeminent investment banking firm”. Of course, I wanted to be part of an organization that strove to be the best. But what did “preeminent” look, feel and sound like? And in whose opinion? As a junior team mem ..read more

5 Compliments You Don’t Want to Get if You Want to Be Seen as Strategic It’s one thing to be a strategic thinker, and another to be seen as strategic. In fact, even the most strategic thinker can be misconstrued as not being strategic. Like my colleague who sat quietly in the corner, never daring to speak up and share his brilliant insights. Or the team member who’s too busy working to attend the key meeting where the results of her work are being presented. The thing is, you’ll find it hard to progress beyond a certain point in your career if your managers don’t see you as strategic. FREE Ch ..read more

The Essential Skill to Survive Disruptive Changes in the Workplace If you’re like most people, you’ve got more things to do than hours in a day Are you familiar with that “hamster wheel” too? By the time you get the essential and urgent tasks done, it’s late and you’re exhausted. Hardly the moment for stepping back and thinking strategically about the bigger picture of your business or career. But being too busy doing to think beyond the day-to-day will ultimately keep you from advancing in your career. Think of it as the “fast food” approach to work – dealing with what’s conveniently right in ..read more

Unlock the Rewards From Stakeholder Management: 5 Reasons to Invest in It Now Whether you’re an individual contributor, manager or in the C-Suite, you have one thing in common. You have stakeholders. Stakeholders are people who have an interest in what you do and a say in how well you do it. And the quality of your relationships with them makes all the difference in your career. You can’t always choose your stakeholders, so it pays to be able to manage them well. So before you give up on plucking up the courage to get in front of your skip-level boss or give in to the urge to lash out at the ..read more

A More Powerful Way to Motivate Your Team Than Saying “Great Job!” When it comes to motivating team members, have you ever praised them for their good work by saying things like, “great job!” or “well done” or “thank you for that amazing effort – we couldn’t have done it without you!”? I know I have, including just last week. But while praising people is better than yelling at them, it’s not the most effective tool in your leadership toolkit to motivate them beyond the very short term. And it might even backfire on you as a leader (more on this in a moment). The better option is to use affirm ..read more

How to Be Intentional About the Year Ahead If someone said, “let’s start the year strong!”, wouldn’t you give it a thumbs up? I know I would. So I was surprised when a friend said, “I don’t want to start the year strong.” She’d had a tough year with several deaths in the family, major surgery and financial pressures. Through it all, she’d had to be strong and “strong” now felt way too effortful. Instead, my friend plans to make a slow start to the year. As one of my mentors says, “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast”. Whether you’ve had a challenging year or a great one as was the case with me ..read more

3 Simple Ways to Get Your Career Off to a Great Start This Year How has the New Year started out for you? My year is starting out with excitement about a project my team and I have been working on for months which we’re about to announce – more on that later! But back to the start of your year… Whether you’re off to a roaring start, feeling underwhelmed, or somewhere in between, this is a natural time to do some thinking and planning for the year ahead. And as my father says, “chance favors the prepared mind.” While having a strategy in place is important for achieving big goals, it can feel ..read more

5 Steps to Achieve Your Goals for the New Year Welcome to the time of year when we set our goals for the new year. If you haven't started yet, don't worry. There's plenty of time. In fact, I'm about to share with you five steps you can take to set and achieve your goals for the new year. I was inspired by a TEDx talk that I watched by Stephen Duneier called How to Achieve Your Most Ambitious Goals. And these five steps are a combination of my takeaways from his talk and some of the things that I found to be useful in setting and achieving goals in the past. 1. Set Big Goals Step one is to set ..read more

How to Fix a Big Mistake at Work and Overcome Negative Perceptions What would you do if you made a mistake that went all the way up to senior management? Whether it’s something minor that got blown out of proportion or a significant error on your part, once word gets up to senior management you’ve attracted the wrong kind of visibility. While there’s no magic wand to make problems disappear, fortunately, there are steps you can take to salvage the situation. If you're in a similar situation or need to overcome negative perceptions, this is for you. One of my readers asked: “I work in accoun ..read more