Please Get the LinkedIn Invitation Right!
LinkedIn is an increasingly popular and powerful professional tool. Like many other professionals, I enjoy connecting with others via LinkedIn, and find it a remarkably useful tool for making new contacts, remaining in contact and conducting talent and firm research of all types. However, a pet peeve of mine is the generic invitations that I frequently receive from people I do and don’t know. Cut it out!
If you are on LinkedIn, you know the generic invitation. It reads: “I would like to add you to my network.” Relying on this invitation is just wrong.
If you know the person and send that invitation, it’s just rude. What, you can’t take 20 seconds to jot a note to someone you haven’t seen or talked with in 15 years? If you think so little of the person you’re inviting to join your network, why invite?
If you don’t know the person and send that invitation, it’s rude and dumb. Why should anyone accept a generic invitation to connect with someone they don’t know? No introduction, no connection. You’re either a “collector” of connections, someone who is looking for numbers and access or, you missed the memo on social media etiquette.
3 “Must Haves” for Getting the LinkedIn Invitation Right:
1. Always customize the invitation! If you are interested in connecting with someone you’ve not met, introduce yourself!
2. Always establish context. If you are reconnecting with old friends or colleagues, take a few seconds to say, “Hello.” The years melt away and memories return in the warmth of a friendly greeting. If you are seeking to connect with someone you follow or admire, describe a reason for connecting.
3. Always showcase your willingness to serve as a valued networking partner.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
There are more ways than ever to connect with people, but numbers of connections are meaningless. Quality counts, and whether you are reconnecting or introducing yourself to someone new, take the time to make it personal and relevant.
4 Key Skills Leaders Must Develop to Succeed in Today’s Workplace
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Marketing Yourself, Professional Growth
With the clear disclaimer that there are no magic formulas, silver bullets or guaranteed fast-track approaches to success in the workplace, there are a number of critical steps you can take to accelerate progress and improve your odds.
4 Key Skills You Must Develop to Succeed in Today’s Workplace:
1. Learn to See Yourself as Others See You.
Short of having a genuine out-of-body experience, learning to see yourself as others see you is a challenging task. Our own view to our strengths and weaknesses is often pretty inaccurate, based in large part on the fact that we’re human and open to a huge number of cognitive biases.
Overcoming our own self-perception biases requires good outside help. I encourage emerging leaders to cultivate a feedback group comprised of other motivated professionals interested in gaining and giving input on performance and perception. While the recruitment of your 3-5 person group is not easy, a good (dare I say it) support group is a priceless source of frank feedback and idea exchange.
Define a group charter, ensure everyone is comfortable speaking openly about perceptions, and hold people accountable for input…as well as for actions. Politically motivated members and social loafers should be quickly benched in favor of others genuinely interested in giving and gaining.
2. Cultivate Your Social Intelligence and Skills
Learning to assess and respond appropriately to the situation at hand is a core component of projecting your professional presence and building your brand. While this sounds a lot like playing politics…and it may be, it is at least being smart about how you participate. No one’s asking you to nod your head blindly…or, to compromise your morals. I am indicating that you should be smart enough and self-aware enough to adapt your style and approach to the situation. Make your point, but make it with grace and courtesy.
The inability to assess and respond appropriately in varying situations is a derailment factor for too many. We all know the person who never passes up an opportunity to stand-up and standout, often in an obnoxious and off-putting approach. You can be zealous in pursuit of your agenda, with out being a martyr.
3. Become a Network Connector
Think in terms of organizational and industry ecosystems, not departments and functions. The better you are at building connections across the broader ecosystem, the more likely you are to gain access to unique information and insight to top talent. A well-developed network where you constantly strive to connect parties (in contrast to just linking yourself into disparate groups), the better the opportunity to help others create value and for you to gain opportunities in the process.
4. Learn to Lead both Vertically and Horizontally
The most successful leaders understand that theirs isn’t just a downward facing challenge. Effective leaders apply the tools in 1-3 above and cultivate their power and influence across organizations. They learn to involve others in pursuit of vexing organizational problems and improvements, and importantly, they learn how to make heroes out of others.
Managing upwards is one of the more important and in my experience, one of the most under-pursued critical professional activities of all. And sucking up to the boss, brown-nosing and generally serving as a brainless follower are not the same as properly managing upwards.
Proper boss management requires you to invest in understanding the boss’s priorities, communication and decision-making styles and preferences. Once you’ve gained some insights in these areas, you are accountable for both providing support for the boss’s agenda, and for adapting your behaviors to better align with his/her approaches. Remember, someone chooses you to be successful, and the boss usually gets a big vote.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Self-development….it’s hard work. It’s also a full contact sport. Engage or expect to be left behind.
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Art Petty coaches and trains emerging leaders and consults with B2B firms on strategy and marketing. You can reach Art via e-mail to discuss your needs for coaching, speaking or consulting,
Leadership Caffeine: Learn to Make Quick Connections
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Marketing Yourself, Professional Growth
In a typical day fast moving day, there are dozens of small opportunities for leaders to make or strengthen connections with team members and peers. Effective leaders strive to leverage these fleeting moments as golden opportunities to show respect, strengthen connections and even support coalition building. The trick is to execute a deliberate “connection” strategy throughout your day.
5 Ideas for Quickly Connecting On the Fly:
1. The Eyes Have It-In a large corporate environment where you encounter hundreds or more people per day, constantly connect with your eyes and your smile. I don’t care if you are walking from your car to your office or heading towards the company cafeteria for lunch, you’ve got a chance to engage a great number of people in a hurry…don’t waste it. Being recognized…even if it’s just a smile, direct eye contact and a friendly nod, serves up a spark of energy for both receiver and giver.
2. Provide Public Praise Where Appropriate-As you encounter teams or project groups, including sticking your head in at the beginning of status meetings, or bumping into groups in breakouts, never pass up an opportunity to offer supporting (and specific) praise. Do the same for deserving individuals, just be sensitive to social factors that might create embarrassment for the praise recipient. Absolutely deliver well-deserved praise in one on one contact situations.
3. Show Interest by Asking Questions-If you’re in charge, you’re supposed to know what’s going on, so don’t be shy about asking questions. A good tactic is to check-in on status and to ask whether there’s anything you can do to support the effort. Your inquiry PLUS your offer shows concern and commitment…much better than an openly invasive grilling. Of course, if someone has something for you to do, make certain and take care of it as quickly as possible.
4, Extend Invitations on the Go-“Jen, I would love to catch up on the Alpha project you are spearheading. Drop me a note and I will find a spot in my calendar as soon as you are ready. Again, you’re showing interest and commitment, and your offer to adjust your calendar displays importance and respect.
5. Broker Introductions-Good leaders recognize the importance of helping others make connections. Always be thinking of other groups and individuals in the organization that might have valuable ideas to offer or be interested in knowing what’s going on with particular projects and programs. If you don’t know the right person, reach out to your peer and ask who might be most interested in the topic at hand. The better you do extending the network of your team members, the broader and more powerful your network becomes.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
A chance encounter is a horrible thing to waste. Too many managers roll through their days on a mission chasing the urgent and the urgent-unimportant, without investing any time cultivating relationships. Develop the good habit of leveraging casual and fast encounters to pay respect, show interest and offer help, and you’ll single-handedly raise the office energy level.
Twitter and Social Networking: Job Search Power Tools or Time Killers?
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Marketing, Marketing Yourself, Professional Growth
One of the best lessons that I’ve learned from working on about two million fix-it and improvement projects with my Dad is to match the right tool to the job at hand. This is particularly true in searching for a job, which can be one of the more vexing projects for many people.
Fortunately, there are a number of interesting new power tools available in the form of social networking platforms, to help today’s job seeker. However, unlike the tools in the picture, there are few guidelines on how and where to to use these tools to good effect.
Sidebar 1: Most of us probably know more than a few great people looking for work, and hopefully, you are providing your help and support in the form of networking contacts and moral and morale support.
Sidebar 2: A friend indicated that she now knows what it might feel like to suddenly be the person that no one is comfortable interacting with anymore. It seems her friends have responded to her lingering unemployment by doing what many people do when someone gets sick or suffers a personal loss…they disappear. Please don’t do that.
OK, back on topic. One of the issues that I make it a point to always ask my job searching colleagues about is their social networking strategy. I’m both curious how people are using the tools and whether they are finding them helpful or distracting. The feedback is mixed and interesting.
My informally captured, non-scientific research findings indicate the following about the use of social networking tools in the job search:
- Use and enthusiasm for social networking seems to vary by age and experience, with younger job seekers comfortable leveraging a broader swath of the social media spectrum than the more experienced (translated: older) professionals. No surprise here.
- LinkedIn is the most common tool that senior managers opt for initially. Again, no surprise.
- The minority of people that I’ve spoken with are Twitter users, and the perceptions of what Twitter is/can do are all over the map. Again, not surprisingly, there’s a great deal of ignorance about Twitter and a fair amount of cynicism. It usually goes something like, “I don’t know how telling people what I had for breakfast will help me find a job.” That’s certainly one point I agree with…, there’s no chance that telling people what you had for breakfast is correlated with landing a job!
On the positive side, I’m also hearing some interesting ideas and uses of the various media coming from some of the more adventurous job seekers.
The tone/theme of this feedback is: I don’t expect social networking to replace the hard work of researching, live networking and effective marketing and selling, but it is a valuable supplement and source of ideas, leads and contacts.
That’s a good, well-grounded perspective.
Some of the best uses that I’ve heard are (paraphrased):
- Targeting: I target the firms that I’m interested in working for, then I leverage the social media platforms to learn as much as I can about the company and the people. I’ve openly shared with people that I’m interested in their company and have received some great insights and suggestions.
- Culture Assessment: I look at how involved a company and its employees are in social media as one indicator of culture. I don’t want to work for a firm that is restrictive or paranoid.
- Pure Networking: I use the tools to meet people and learn about exciting new firms.
- Research: I use the tools to find people writing about or offering advice for job seekers.
- Power Research: I use the research capabilities of Tweetdeck (an application to help organize your twitter world) to search on key terms and find firms and people talking about things related to the type of work that I do.
- Introductions: Several times I’ve asked for help from my LinkedIn colleagues for an introduction to a contact of a contact, and they’ve come through for me every time.
- Rest, Relaxation and Rejuvenation: Social networking is my life-saving coffee break. I let myself jump into the conversations twice a day for about 15 minutes each time, and I come out rejuvenated. I meet great people and we exchange ideas and then I get back to work.
The Bottom Line for Now:
My two-cents suggests that it’s critical to use all of the tools available in securing a new opportunity. Social Networking may not hold the easy answer, but it certainly can be part of finding the answer. Savvy job seekers recognize the information and research power of social networking and are leveraging these new power tools to help get the job done.
Seven Survival Tips for the Newly Independent
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Professional Growth
I suspect that we are all engaging with former colleagues, friends and family members that have recently been furloughed from the corporate world.
A few that I have spoken with are struggling to adapt to the new reality and are finding themselves floundering as they struggle to replace the comfortable routine of getting up and going somewhere with wandering around the house wondering what to do and where to start.
Here are some ideas that I’ve either learned myself over time or have gained from others that have mastered the art of working alone and managing themselves without the services and security of a mother ship. I would love to hear your suggestions as well
7 Suggestions to Survive and Prosper in your Period of Corporate Independence:
1. Define your new work, establish goals and create and work your plan.
If you are looking for a job, that is your full time job. Set goals for yourself. Create plans to achieve the goals and dive into your new work. A number of people I know like to establish daily targets for networking and prospecting activities.
If your new work is reinventing yourself or pursuing a venture other than a job, it may be a bit harder to set goals…but you need to identify the priority activities that will move you towards your objective and focus on those activities. Exploration, networking, research, plan development, vetting, more networking and so on.
2. Create a new routine.
Allow yourself to enjoy the break from fighting traffic every morning, but don’t lounge away your time reading the paper. I like to hit my home office with cup of coffee in hand by 5:30 a.m. I allocate 45 minutes to write a post and then I’m off to the races on my priority tasks. (Note: not all of the neurons are firing this early, which explains my occasional typos and editing lapses!) Breakfast consists of a run for another cup of coffee, enough time as it takes me to assemble a bowl of oatmeal, add milk and raisins, heat it in the microwave and return to my desk. Elapsed time: about 3 minutes.
Depending upon what I’m working on, I’ve identified optimal times for networking calls and prospecting as well as time for content creation/preparation for the next engagement etc. It took some experimenting, but there are better times to catch people than others, as any salesperson will tell you.
3. Give yourself a routine break and work off stress.
Some new independents have a severe guilt complex if they vary the routine off of work. If that ‘s you, get over it. There’s nothing more energizing for me than the mid-day workout at the health club. As long as I’m comfortable that I am not missing prime networking opportunities, an investment in one hour at the club returns huge dividends in the form of stress relief and energizing you for the next part of your day. Oh, you can turn this into a networking opportunity. Unplug the headphones from your ears and say hello to the person next to you on the treadmill. It might just be the CEO of the company down the street that is looking for someone like you.
4. Learn to leverage the new technologies but don’t become consumed.
I’m a huge fan of the power of social networking technologies and am active on LinkedIn and Twitter. I do however set strict time limits on my use of these services. I allocate 15 minutes per weekday. Otherwise, it would be possible to get lost in an on-line existence.
I’m still under 1-month new to Twitter, but I’ve met a number of great professionals who are now part of my extended network. A few benefits thus far: I’ve conducted and have scheduled numerous phone calls with prospective clients or partners that I met on Twitter. I’ve been invited to be interviewed for a podcast aimed right at my target market, and I’m talking with other successful bloggers about exchanging guest posts. My blog traffic is up considerably thanks to the Twitter referrals and the free access to new prospective readers. Plus, I’ve reconnected with former associates in a way that a simple phone call would never allow. We are interacting daily…140 characters at a time. There’s something to it, and you need to approach it with clear objectives in mind.
Also, as an fyi, that was a long commercial for Twitter. LinkedIn offers some remarkably powerful professional networking tools. You should learn how to leverage this great service. It may be one of your best friends in a job search.
5. Invest in yourself.
I don’t care what you do, but do something that shows that you are concerned about your own personal/professional development. Take a class, read books, start a blog and immerse yourself in a topic to feed the creation of posts. Start your MBA or explore courses that fit with your business or career aspirations. Do something productive with your brain or it will atrophy or worse yet, it will allow negative thoughts to take root and grow like wildfire.
6. Help others.
Strive to give way more than you are asking for. Help others with their networking activities. Help at school, at church or check to see if your county has a Volunteer Center. I am now on the board of my county’s Volunteer Center and excited to be helping this organization recast its vision and strategy.
7. Stay positive, celebrate your victories and your progress.
Don’t preoccupy on the defeats and rejections. Again, every great salesperson knows this style of thinking. They have to stay positive or the rejection would push them over the edge.
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There are many, many more ideas. Feel free to share your own in the comments.
My bottom-line for now is: keep moving, keep thinking, keep planning, follow-up and keep improving.
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