How To Keep Personal Scandals Out of the Office

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StrategyDriven Management and Leadership Article | Professional Career | How To Keep Personal Scandals Out of the OfficeYour personal life is personal, right? Not exactly. In fact, when it comes to your professional career, your personal life plays a critical role. Whether that role is positive or negative is up to you, and it is up to how well you manage both your personal and professional lives. Being calm and preparing in advance can help keep your personal life private. The last thing you want is a criminal charge to ruin your life – which it can, regardless of whether or not you were convicted or exonerated. By staying private and following this guide, you can maintain your professional career and move on.

How A Personal Scandal Can Affect Your Career

A personal scandal can severely impact your career. Businesses don’t want to risk the negative press of keeping you on, and will, therefore, cut their losses as soon as your name is out in the paper. It doesn’t matter if it is later found out that you had a rock-solid alibi or your charge was overturned, because to the media you are guilty. This can ruin a career and make it incredibly difficult to find work later on. Your record might be squeaky clean, but your name will always show up next to news articles with that DUI charge.

The worst part is that the more advanced you are in your career, the harder you can fall. The media loves a scandal, and if the CEO of a big company has any sort of black mark on their name, they will pounce, with or without confirmation. You can sue them afterward for defamation of character, yes, but it still won’t change the negative impacts this press will have on your career.

How to Keep a Personal Scandal Out of the Office

To keep a personal scandal out of the office, you need to take measures to prevent a fall out as soon as possible. To do this, you will want to:

1.Know Who to Turn to For Help

Knowing who to turn to for help can be incredibly useful. If you are charged with a DUI, for example, a professional from this DUI lawyer Philadelphia firm can help fight against the charge and at the very least work to keep your identity confidential.

2. Stay Offline as Much as Possible

Your online persona will affect your career. That is why it is always important to curate your personal presence with the knowledge that it could be used against you. An off-tone joke made five years ago could ruin your career today, so go through everything. Delete old accounts, old posts, and otherwise curate all social media to protect your reputation and digital security.

3. Don’t Feed the Fire

It might seem like a good idea to get on top of a story and talk to the press, but this is the wrong approach. The truth is, by giving them nothing to go on you are more likely to be passed on for a more exciting news story. Unless the case against you is a big news story, staying quiet and anonymous is a great way to keep your name, face, and story out of the press.

Everyone can have a run-in with the law. This doesn’t make you a bad person, nor does it make you guilty. What it can do however is ruin your career if you aren’t careful. Always take every charge seriously, whether or not you are 100% certain of your innocence.

The Secret to Success: It’s Not a Secret

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StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Article | Secret to Success | The Secret to Success: It’s Not a SecretVisualize your goals and then craft a plan for achieving them

Many people wonder about the secret to success. Successful people are viewed as special, possessing unique talents, vision, and unflagging commitment.

The reality is there is no secret. Success is not limited to a few individuals, but is within the grasp of everyone. All it takes is an honest assessment of your abilities and creating your own definition of success. This doesn’t have to include owning a private jet or a villa in France. You just need to figure out the things in life that will make you happy, and create a roadmap for achieving them.

During my career as a successful commodities broker, I learned a key lesson about success: self-management is more important than talent. The most successful people aren’t necessarily the ones with the most talent, but the ones who believe in themselves and are determined to persevere in the face of adversity.

High achievers are often regarded with awe and respect. They are seen as extraordinary beings because they accomplish so much. Yet there are consistencies in their behaviors that anyone can follow. High achievers:

  • Identify goals
  • Study how to make them happen
  • Plans steps to achieve them
  • Execute

Whether they are called ambitions, purposes or aims, goals can help you live a meaningful, productive life. There’s a difference between goals and dreams. You can dream about winning the lottery, but if you make that your life’s ambition you’re going to end up sorely disappointed, unless you’re incredibly lucky.

Goals are dreams that can be realistically attained. Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against material rewards. But a desire to be wealthy without a clear path to attaining it is a recipe for frustration.

Businessman and author Philip L. Stephen aptly describes the basic goals of life:

  • Family: what you will do for them
  • Professional: what you aim to achieve
  • Financial: planning for the present and the future
  • Social: the groups you belong to
  • Health: taking care of yourself
  • Intellectual: continuing to learn
  • Recreational: taking the time to relax

A powerful tool in goal setting is visualization. If you can see where you are going, it’s easier to anticipate the complications that will inevitably arise. That gives you an advantage because you’re not just concentrating on achieving an outcome, you’re also figuring out ahead of time how to avoid or face difficulties that will arise.

A frequent stumbling block in developing and sticking to a plan is negative self-image resulting from childhood experiences. You can rid yourself of negative thoughts by telling yourself that you are a unique individual with unique abilities. You can be what you want to be – if you accept that you can. As Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.”

Be bold! Don’t be afraid to reset your goals as the need arises. New objectives will form, and they may very well be the means to all kinds of rewards.

To summarize:

  • Define your goals
  • Accentuate the positive, minimize the negative
  • Adopt good habits that center on self-motivation
  • Visualize what you want to accomplish
  • Select goals based on your own needs, not on others’ needs

In closing, remember that the only chains and shackles that hold any of us back from any goal in life are those that we ourselves forge in the fires of doubt and hammer out on the anvils of lack of belief.

About the Author

StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Article | Secret to Success | The Secret to Success: It’s Not a SecretRaymond Houser is the author of THE WINNING ADVANTAGE: Tap Into Your Richest Resources. He started earning money by selling pecans when he was six years-old. By the time he was 12, he had a paper route in addition to working in grocery stores and a bowling alley. When his dream of becoming a major league baseball catcher ended, he knew he had to focus on other goals. And that is what he did, challenging himself to overcome shyness and knock on doors until he became the highest-grossing divisional book salesman of his time for the Southwestern Company. After that he started, developed, and eventually sold, his own book company. His career had its ups and downs, including a bankruptcy. Yet, despite setbacks, he never gave up. Starting a new career in his 40s, he was hired at Merrill Lynch where he became a successful money manager who earned accolades — and substantial income for himself and his clients — through trust in himself and innovation. In time, he started, developed, and eventually sold, another company. Today he is a sought-after speaker who offers his experience and perspective on managing a career and, most of all, a life. He divides his time between Dallas and San Diego. For more information please visit, www.thewinningadvantagebook.com

Five Networking Tips for Entrepreneurs

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Networking is one of the lesser appreciated talents that the world’s most successful entrepreneurs have mastered. It is not an easy skill, either. Knowing how to network is a fine line between making friends and actively seeking out business partnerships. You cannot become best friends with everyone you meet, after all, but you do need to make a good enough connection to trade favors with each other. Reaching that stage can be incredibly difficult because if you aren’t careful people will only see your efforts as wanting of something. To properly master the art that is networking, try adopting these top five tips.

Skip the Sales Speech

If you go into any new relationship with a goal to sell products or gain a favor, you will most likely fail. Only a very few people have mastered their charm to the point where people will be willing to help out or buy something new from the get-go, especially if they weren’t expecting you. So, skip the sales speech and instead start a conversation. It is far easier to connect with someone in an organic conversation than it is if you give them an elevator pitch.

Help First, Ask Later

One of the easiest tips to follow and arguably one of the best is to find out what you can do for someone else. Be proactive about networking. This way will help you make connections, diversify your portfolio and skills, and of course give you an acquaintance you can later ask for help. You don’t need to be best friends with people, but you do need to foster mutually beneficial relationships.

Take Notes and Keep Track

Try as best you can to keep track of information about the person in question. Keeping notes in your contacts app can help you stay in touch and give the personal touch all at the same time. Try to keep track of both corporate information (their job position, who they work for, etc.) as well as personal information (if they have allergies, for example). People respond when they feel like you care.

Collaborate

Another way to network is to collaborate. This way you can put effort into fostering one relationship, and then meet others in that niche or industry in a far more organic way – being introduced. As a bonus, you will also be working in a new field or project on the side that can further your career and show your ambition.

Host Your Own Event

Finally, consider hosting your own event. If you are a consultant or own business, for example, you can organize an event, create a great atmosphere, offer free drinks served by professional bartenders from services such as eventbartenders.com, and get key people from your industry to attend. Then, as the host, you can get to know each and every one of them with a position of authority. They will be interested in knowing you because you took the initiative to create a great event everyone in your industry will be talking about. In turn, you can make new business relationships and connections.

Networking is a never-ending task, but it should never be seen as a chore. Instead, connect with people. Try to gain insight from them, help them, collaborate, and even host them. By doing this you not only network with people, but you set yourself up as a huge name in your industry.

How To Challenge Your Employees When You Are Away On Business

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StrategyDriven Talent Management Article | Employee Management | How To Challenge Your Employees When You Are Away On Business Being a traveling business owner can have its difficulties sometimes. You may feel that your team just aren’t as productive as they might be when you’re not there to ensure that they are working hard, for example. If that is the case, what can you do?

Something you don’t want to do is to constantly have to check in on them. Not only does that make more work for you, particularly if you have important meetings and conferences to prepare for, but it also makes your employees feel uncomfortable; they will assume you don’t trust them to do their own jobs, and that might reduce productivity in itself. In the worst cases, your staff might even want to look elsewhere for work.

The best thing you can do is to ensure that your employees are engaged and challenged when you are not there. This will make them feel valued because you are trusting them to get more done, and it will give them plenty to occupy themselves with so that there will be nothing for you to worry about. Here are some of the ways they can be challenged when you are working away on business.

Ask For Feedback

Before you leave on your trip, make sure that you speak to your team, either as a group or individually, about what you want from them while you’re away. It’s essential that they know they can check in with you when they need to, even if you’re not in the office, and that you will check in with them too. Make sure they don’t feel pressured or uncomfortable about this – if you are checking in with everyone once a day, no one should feel that they are being singled out.

If possible, start these meetings with your staff before you go. You can arrange:

  • Weekly feedback sessions
  • One to one meetings
  • Weekly reviews

If you start off right at the beginning with this kind of culture of feedback and performance reviews, it won’t seem out of the ordinary if you continue to do it even when you’re working away from your usual location.

Ask your staff to prepare feedback for you so that you can understand what their frustrations are when you’re not there, and if you travel frequently, you can then ensure that the next time you go anywhere, it is better for everyone.

Give Them Harder Tasks

If your workers are doing the same things each and every day, they can easily become bored and frustrated. They might feel as though their job is going nowhere and that they should be looking to do something else with their lives. If you’re not there, that feeling can easily intensify, and you might find you have something of a rebellion to deal with once you get back.

In order to stop this from happening, add some harder tasks to the list of things that you would like to be done while you’re away. This will keep your employees interested and give them more of a challenge. They will feel as though you trust them to do something a little more difficult. Make it clear that you are there to help if they need assistance, otherwise, if the task is brand new and too challenging, you might still have problems. If you can’t be the one to offer assistance, delegate the task to someone else who will look after these issues ins your stead when you are traveling.

Make A Challenge List

In order to challenge your employees in a fun way, you can create a challenge list. This is a list of tasks that can be done at any time and in any order, and that are there to be picked up on once all the other work is done. If someone is particularly looking for an additional challenge, they can go to this list and choose something from it. The list can include anything from researching medical marijuana companies for your business to invest in, to looking up new ways of carrying out old jobs using innovative technology, to making a budget for the next advertising campaign.

The list should be available for all employees to take tasks from and to add tasks to as they think of them. Your job is to periodically check through the list and approve or remove the tasks that are there. The tasks should all be related to the company; there is no point in having anything on the list that isn’t going to benefit the business in the short or long term.

A list like this ensures there are always new challenges to look into, and could almost be seen as a reward for completing the usual tasks in a timely manner. If there is a slow week, or a gap between one project starting and another ending, this will also fill in the time and your employees won’t have a chance to become frustrated, bored, or discontented.

Train Them

No matter how much your employees already know, additional training will always be useful for them, and for you. Keeping your employees fully trained up will clearly benefit your business, but it will also show your team that you are looking out for them, and that you want the best for them. They will be able to do their current jobs more efficiently and with greater confidence, and they will also learn new skills that will benefit everyone within the business.

By offering training when you are away on business, you can provide a change of scenery to your employees, and guarantee that they will have learned something new by the time you return.

Make Your Goals Clear

Your employees may see you heading off for yet another meeting or conference in yet another town or city, or perhaps even a different country, and wonder what you are doing, and what benefit it really all is. Keep your employees engaged and focused by keeping them abreast of all the changes and updates within the company in a timely fashion. When you are going away, explain why – keep them involved. By making your ultimate goals for the business clear, and showing them how their own job can be a part of the end result, your employees will see the challenge ahead of them, and want to do their best with regards to meeting it.

Modifying Marketing in a Transforming World

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StrategyDriven Sales and Marketing Article | Marketing | Modifying Marketing in a Transforming WorldIn the last 15 years we have seen the world change to become heavily reliant on digital means of communication and change. This has reshaped all aspects of life for every business. In general, it has made conducting business easier, cheaper and more efficient. It looks as if this is going to push even further as new AI (artifical intelligence) technologies are becoming more and more prominent in the market.

Google itself is already jumping on this market in the property sector, investing in a company called Proportunity, which uses it’s AI to help first time buyers purchase a house and only benefits if the customer does. It could also know enough about you that when you find an estate agent online automatically filters the properties on its list to fit the preferences of the user. It could also help automate the emergency procedure for incidents that arise ‘out of hours’. In this context, and many others, the technology will be able to take a lot of strain off individuals that spend time on non-essential tasks and will enable them to instead spend time on the essential tasks for growing the business.

When it comes to marketing the digital revolution has made large changes to the knowledge and decision-making abilities of customers. Now it only takes a single Google search for a potential customer to find out everything they need to know about you, your business, your products, reviews and much more. While this can be a scary idea for businesses, if your business is genuine and you tread the line correctly, the benefits of such a system far outweigh the possible negative effects.

When looking at modifying your traditional marketing methods (media buying, flyering, radio advertisement etc.) be sure to understand your target audience and the mediums by which they are most influence. For example, if you are selling retirement homes, you may want to not waste your time on Snapchat!

Social Media – A great place for referrals and being tagged in relevant conversations. If you are a trades company, your customers won’t be looking for you to share hard hitting stories, edgy memes or your political opinion on a business account. They do want to find somewhere where they can contact the business, see that it is ‘ticking over’ and that there is a person/personality behind it. Don’t worry about ‘trending’, use this advice article to make sure you are in the conversation.

Blogging / Thought leadership – A wonderful way for smaller businesses to show their expertise through providing insightful research and opinions on the biggest industry issues. For example, an independent London estate agent has become a ‘go to’ for UK journalists when looking for information on the luxury property market thanks to the specific and specialised content they upload to their blog.

Events Attendance – In support of those who believe that no matter how digital the world becomes there is so much power in face to face business, marketing CEO Arjun Arora, provides a great quote for the power of personal interaction. “Attending conferences is an important part of any marketing strategy. Attending dinners and events in different cities provide an opportunity to meet with clients or partners and get to know them better. No matter how effective your advertising and email marketing are, or how skilled you are on the phones, an in-person meeting is always more memorable.”

SEO – Simply put – this is ‘how Google finds you, then displays you to searchers’. It is complicated, time consuming and needs a better knowledge of the digital world than most people have, but it is near essential for B2C businesses. If you want to know more about it read this from the industry leaders.

By no means should you completely stop the strategy you have been using previously if it has provided you with success up to now. Instead use these areas to enhance your strategy and produce a more rounded and targeted approach.