Much of a ResourcefulManager's success is tied to soft skills. They may not sound important, but they may be the most critical skills of all and critical in your professional development. These posts will help you stay abreast of what's working and not working.
Executives regularly say that poor communication is the biggest problem in business.
But the real problem may be listening.
The truth is, we humans are poor listeners. And it appears we are getting worse. Goldfish have longer attention spans than we do.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, then sear this into your brain:
There is no such thing as a private email.
Or a private text message either.
Don’t believe it?
Just ask the embarrassed folks at Sony Pictures whose email server got hacked, and juicy stuff about Angelina Jolie (minimally talented spoiled brat), Sylvester Stallone (Social Security number), Adam Sandler (mundane, formulaic) and others leaked out.
Not worried about getting hacked by some 16-year-old in his mom’s basement?
How about an old-fashioned subpoena issued by a judge?
So you resisted your better judgment and went to that meeting after all.
And just as you feared, it ran off the rails in the first five minutes and rambled on for another 90.
It started with the usual awkward silence, but was soon filled by the guy from down the hall droning on and on about GAAP or something.
GAASbag was more like it.
You shouldn’t have been surprised. It happens way too often.
In fact, I just read an article which said bad meetings are usually the result of one of three things.
But when I did an unscientific poll with my colleagues and friends, we came up with 29 things.
And here they are, In no special order
Leaders, supervisors, managers, etc., have been doling out information via slide presentations for eons.
And the majority of these presentations have been bad.
I’m talking “pull your hair out” bad!
I was always under the impression you want your audience to pay attention to your presentation and absorb the knowledge you’re imparting, but I’ve seen so many slide presentation mistakes that I guess I was wrong!
So if you want to join the masses and make your audiences wish they were deaf and blind, here’s exactly what you need to do.
Everybody hates buzzwords. Or at least they say they do.
But virtually everyone uses them.
Even me. And I wrote “The Buzzword Dictionary” back in 2006 to poke fun at them.
People use them for a variety of reasons:
The problem is, buzzwords or buzz phrases often don’t really mean what you think they do.
Here are 15 common buzzwords used in business today – and what they really mean when you dig beneath the surface:
There’s one course that every company should make mandatory for all its employees: How not to be annoying in a meeting!
We’ve all been in meetings with annoying and obnoxious people who seem oblivious to the niceties of meeting etiquette.
In fact, as soon as you read that sentence, I’m sure a number of people popped into your head.
But in case you’re patient as a saint and have no idea what I’m talking about, let me point out some of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to annoying business meeting behaviors:
Perhaps the one thing in the universe that travels faster than light … is bad news.
And the one thing that can be worse than hearing bad news is delivering bad news.
Every manager has to do it at some point.
And doing it badly not only reflects poorly on you and your role as a leader, but also your organization.
Having the right blend of genuine empathy and finesse transforms good managers into strong leaders.
No matter how many times you’ve done it, delivering bad news always takes some forethought and practice.
Here are five mistakes that are sure to make your message backfire.
Let’s get real, you can bet that even “Honest Abe” Lincoln told his fair share of little white lies.
Simply, no one is perfect.
Even the NFL believes the Patriots’ Tom Brady is lied about DeflateGate.
So are your employees, bosses, job applicants and customers always honest with you?
Not likely!
Their lies may not be as big as Richard Nixon’s, Bernie Madoff’s or Lance Armstrong’s, but more than likely you’re hearing a few tall tales.
“On any given day you may be lied to anywhere from 10 to 200 times,” says Pamela Meyer, author of “Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect Deception.”
“And strangers lie three times in the first 10 minutes of meeting each other – remember that the next time you’re interviewing potential employees.”
In a perfect world, every meeting would be short and to the point, start and end on time and something meaningful would get accomplished.
But in the real world, many are too long, start late and end later, and nothing really gets done.
And that’s frustrating for a lot of managers who think they have much better things to do.
In fact, a ResourcefulManager survey of 948 upper-level executives, directors, middle managers and frontline supervisors says nothing gets accomplished in 44.8% of the meetings executives and managers attend.
The only things Mick and I disagree about is the band, the music and what we do. – Keith Richards
Ha! So how is it, with all that dissent, that the Rolling Stones became one of the most popular and longest-surviving acts in rock music?
Disagreements are at the heart of destruction. But good people, and apparently even Keith Richards, know the value of handling disagreements favorably.
It’s true that people can disagree without being disagreeable.
With the intense turmoil on the national political landscape, this is a great time to review some of the most effective soft skills when it comes to handling real-life workplace disagreements.
But first, just a reminder that soft skills aren’t always about being soft.
