Guest post by Great Leadership monthly contributor Beth Armknecht Miller:  I recently had the opportunity to have a conversation with the president of a privately held company as part of research for a book I am writing on talent management and development within small to mid-size companies. During our conversation he shared an event he had early on in his career that intrigued me. He was clearly a high potential early on and was tapped by his CFO to create and lead the new internal audit group for a public company. One day the CFO asked him to attend a board meeting so that he could answer any questions that might arise regarding the internal audit group. His directive: answer those questions asked of him only. Otherwise he was to remain silent and observe. He dutifully sat quietly and after about 90 minutes realized that the people in the room had no earthly idea what was actually going on at this company. There were so many layers of management that what was going on down at “ground force” was not visible. And if these executives didn’t have all the information, how could they be making sound decisions for the company? So when he ...
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Why Tone Matters and how to adjust it.
FYI: Tone is essentially the attitude you reflect toward your audience, whether one-on-one, team or even large group. (E.g.: tough/sweet/stuffy, personal/impersonal, authoritative/egalitarian, submissive/demanding, respectful/taken for granted, hopeful/cynical, friendly/distant, understanding/out of touch, etc.) Furthermore, all these attitudes demonstrate or at least imply emotional content. It is emotion that most successfully drives attention, and tone carries emotion. It ain’t what ya do. Hit’s the way that ya do it. That’s what gets results. Although many execs take tone seriously in face-to-face conversations, often manipulating it for their own advantage, it’s rarely discussed for business materials other those of public relations. Yet tone is just as valuable for the achieving of objectives in our writing of emails (and similar missives) as in face-to-face delivery. ...
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A few unique job interview tips to make you the one they want. 
This is a guest post by Thomas Taylor. If you’d also like to guest post here on JobMob, follow these guest post guidelines. Job interviewers read and hear so many clich?s these days that they just about walk and talk in their sleep during the recruitment process. No more “I should get the job because I’m honest, hardworking, and reliable” — it’s time to say something different if you want to them hire you. In job interviews, you’ve not just got to talk the talk. You’ve got to walk the walk. Here’s how with these unique job interview tips. 1) Give examples It’s more than likely that you’ll never have met the interviewer. Somehow, though, you have to convince them that you’re the person for the job. How? You prove you’re not just blowing hot air, by supporting your answers with examples: of problems you’ve solved, of (good) results, of how you’ve turned things around in some way (if that’s the case). Show that you understand the job requirements. Demonstrate that you know about the sector by highlighting key ...
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One of the important insights from the financial fiascos of the last few years is that senior managers and their company can’t always be trusted to act openly or ethically. The consequence of that is writ large: a huge number of people lost their jobs. Indeed, on several occasions, employees who lost their jobs have expressed their frustrations to me about their firm’s practice, telling me that they would never have guessed that of their firm’s leaders.
But then, as the conversation went on, they emphasized that a person at their level couldn’t possibly know what’s going on behind closed doors. Duhhhh. Sometimes we have to be shocked to see what was there all along. The status of a firm and its managers is not nearly as obscure as many employees think. Furthermore, there are a number of clues to various kinds of financial difficulty or hanky panky that employees at any level can pick up. Bankruptcy?
Here’s how I got educated on potential corporate bankruptcy. Back in the early ‘nineties, I had a number of long-term, development projects at Sunbeam in Boca Raton. Since a part of my development program involved 360 interviews, I ...
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 Recognize This! – Innovation is not just the big, market-transforming end result, but the little ideas along the way.
What’s the most powerful word in business today? Innovation. Read any blog, any news source, any prospectus and you will quickly stumble over “innovation.” How the company pursues innovation, how innovative the products are, how “innovation” is a core value of the company. And this is all well and good – innovation truly is what propels industries and markets ever forward. But the real question smart companies should be encouraging every employee, in every role, to ask is: “What can I do, in what I do every day, to be more innovative? How can I innovate our product, our service approach, to better serve our customers, change the market, or push the company forward?” Unfortunately, too many people think innovation is too big for them or “not in my job description.” I believe that’s because we as leaders have failed to explain what real innovation actually looks like. David Steinberg, chief executive of XL Marketing, gives a much better definition of innovation in a recent New York Times ...
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(Editor’s Note: Today’s post is brought to you by Allied Van Lines, a leader in the moving and storage industry with more than 75 years of experience. For a second year, they are championing a research project, Allied HRIQ, aimed to provide business professionals with data on current workforce trends. I’m honored to be working with Allied again and hope you find the information interesting.) A few months ago, Yahoo! President and CEO Marissa Mayer banned telecommuting. The response uproar backlash was swift. Experts from everywhere said telecommuting is essential to employee satisfaction and engagement. Some said this was the first sign of the apocalypse. All right – you caught me. No one really said that … but you would have thought the world was coming to an end given all the media attention. 
Let me toss an idea out there. Maybe telecommuting isn’t the utopia we think it is. Or that it’s been hyped up to be. By definition, telecommuting is when employees do not travel to a central place of work. Telecommuting is also referred to as telework or remote work. Typically when a person telecommutes, they’re working from home. So ...
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Recently we were in San Francisco interviewing a new candidate for our computer engineering and support team. We had the opportunity to extend our trip to visit some of the vineyards in Sonoma and Napa Valley. We visited five different wineries and had the chance to meet the owners and winemakers at each of the vineyards. There was one common theme between all of these individuals. Extreme passion for their work! Even while in the surreal environment of Napa Valley, I found myself wondering; why can’t organizations create engagement in their workforce similar to the passion that a winemaker brings to his or her work? I can tell you not one of these winemakers talked about how much money they were being paid, or how much they were making. While certainly they are all running businesses, they speak first about the love for what they are doing. Not about the financial returns that their work produces. If you think about it, these owners and winemakers get a lot of feedback, attention and recognition when they produce a quality product. I think everyone has a need to be positively noticed. To back up my common sense, I’ll cite a recent survey where 78% of ...
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My colleague, Bill Brandon, brought Brian Hall’s post 10 Technology Skills That Will No Longer Help You Get A Job to my attention when I was looking for feedback on what the most relevant and valuable professional development needs are of today’s training and learning technologies practitioners. Hall’s post ends with this: “To justify any salary, it’s not only about what you know – now – but what you can learn going forward. The key to a long career in Silicon Valley, or anywhere in the tech world, is showing that you can learn and adapt – and master - constant change.” OK, I’m nodding. It’s easy to agree. But how do you show that you can learn and adapt (and master) constant change? Do you just keep crossing out and adding on like this to show you can adapt to to change? Adobe Flash Developer/Designer HTML 5 Developer/Designer Mastering constant change is not illustrated this way. I’m reminded of a JFK quote: “And our liberty, too, is endangered if we pause for the passing moment, if we rest on our achievements, if we resist the pace of ...
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 There are plenty of ways to get an employee appraisal meeting “right,” all of which leave the employee walking out the door feeling driven and excited to get back to work. Good employee appraisal meetings end with each party feeling a renewed sense of respect and appreciation for the other, and great ones end with the employee racing back to her station, determined to make the upcoming year twice as successful as the last.
On the other hand, terrible employee appraisal meetings have the opposite impact. They leave employees feeling drained, belittled, and disconnected. And in the worst case scenario, the employee races back to her desk…so she can get to work polishing her resume. To avoid this scene, watch out for these damaging moves and do whatever you can to remove them from your appraisal process. - Focusing only on recent accomplishments, or worse, recent failures and mistakes. It’s natural to do this, since our memories are wired to focus on the short term. But lambasting a strong employee for a minor mistake simply because the mistake happened a week ago won’t do much to keep turnover down.
- Giving feedback that would have really ...
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The May issue of the McKinsey and Company newsletter is one I’ll be holding onto for a while, it has at least four articles that I know I am going to read…I do wonder though how we’ll ever read everything we want to, especially now that so much of it just comes to us because we asked for it. Anyway, as I was saying, good stuff from McKinsey this month and among it all one piece in particular has captured my attention. ‘Givers Take All: The Hidden Dimension of Corporate Culture is by Adam Grant. He is author of the recently published ‘Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success’, a book that seems to be getting a lot of attention from a business community that continues to struggle for answers on how best the attract, develop and retain the millennial generation. Before I get to far let me ask you this; “It is Better to Give than Receive” … when was the first time you heard this adage? Maybe bible study class, maybe catechism, maybe your grandmother said it first? Of course…when you read ‘All I Need to Know I learned in Kindergarten’ by Robert Fulghum right? I thought so, me too! OK seriously, the idea of giving being inherently a better way to live than taking isn’t ...
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