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Dear Dana Career Coaching: Seeking New Opportunities

by | Nov 16, 2016 | Coaching Advice, Dear Dana (Workplace Advice)

 

Welcome to “Dear Dana,” our Friday column to give you career coaching workplace advice and coaching. Please write in and tell me about a frustration you’re facing at the office and I’ll publish my answer in an upcoming column. We’re also discussing these topics on our Tuesday Coffee Break talkshow with our guests. I can’t wait to hear from you! – Dana Theus

Dear Dana: When you are actively seeking a new job and your current employer is aware of this (because they’re the ones laying you off), do you recommend posting something like “seeking new opportunities” in your headline or only in your summary? – Not Bitter in Boise

Not Bitter – Regardless of whether your employer knows or not, it’s not a good idea to put “seeking new opportunities” in there because it makes you look desperate. You can use a more generic title like “Operations Specialist” or “Strategic Marketer” to signal your expertise and job category as your “title.” For recruiters this usually is a signal that you’re open to being an operations specialist or strategic marketer for an organization other than the one you’re currently working with. (more…)

The Myth of Hard Work: Maybe You’re Really Not Enough

by | Nov 15, 2016 | Commentary, Gender Equality, InPower Women Blog

I’m a positive person and the recent election in the U.S. has dealt my positivity a serious blow. But I will do my best to turn it into a lesson we can all learn from.

A week ago the world watched as a highly qualified Wellesley and Yale educated public servant, with decades of experience for exactly the job she applied for, was rejected in favor of a bully and braggart with absolutely no experience for the job he now holds. Many of us played a part in this process and regardless of which side you were on, the gender dynamics of the contest were hard to ignore. It’s a story many of us have seen too many times: the misogynistic bully gets away with all kinds of indecencies and inadequacies, garnering the favor of the decision-makers with his braggadocio and willingness to say what they want to hear. All this while the highly qualified woman is discredited and pushed aside making room for the braggart to ascend. (more…)

Dear Dana Workplace Advice: What’s the LinkedIn Best Practice to Follow Up With a Recruiter on LinkedIn?

by | Nov 10, 2016 | Career Development, Coaching Advice, Dear Dana (Workplace Advice)

Welcome to “Dear Dana”, our regular column to give you workplace advice and coaching. This question about LinkedIn best practices is informative if you’re looking for a job or simply building out your business network. – Dana Theus

Dear Dana: What is the protocol or LinkedIn best practice for connecting with the person who posted a position on LinkedIn?  Should the applicant send the HR person a message via LinkedIn after submitting an application, if it isn’t possible to make a more personal connection via one’s own network?  Thanks! — Puzzling in Virginia

Dear Puzzling:

I don’t think this is an either/or question. If you can make a personal connection, that’s always best, but if it’s going to take time to make that happen, don’t wait to make sure they know you’ve submitted. (more…)

November 15: The Brain State Model with Sarah Baca

by | Nov 10, 2016 | Coffee Break

What is the brain state model? And how can we use it for our success?
A while back, I attended Sarah Baca’s Brain State Model talk at the Agile 2015 Conference and thoroughly enjoyed it. I was able to take away from the discussion how I could best communicate and collaborate with a team in different environmental situations.
There are 3 brain states: the survival, the emotional, and the executive. And there are different reasons why some people are using different parts of their brains vs others. And there are different ways to work with individuals in these brain states.
Sarah will be discussing:
  • What the brain state model is
  • How we can use the brain state model to become better team members
  • How to move from survival state (Am I safe?) to the executive state (How can I learn from this?)
  • Tools you can use today to help you move from your survival brain into executive brain

Sarah Baca is an Agile Coach who has been coaching conscious ways of working for over a decade. She currently works as a ScrumMaster and coach for Medullan, Inc. 

She’s is very passionate about creating workplaces where we put people over processes and create cultures and processes that grow awesome teams and amazing products. 

You can reach her on Twitter at @sjbaca3.

 

Women Leaders: Communicate With Grit And Grace

by | Nov 9, 2016 | Career Development, InPower Women Blog

“I know what I want to say, but HOW do I say it without getting ignored or killed?” In my experience as an executive coach, this question stymies women leaders as much as any other issue. Why? Because organizations often require women to operate within a painfully narrow stylistic range: nice, but not TOO nice; strong, but not TOO strong. The metaphor of dancing on the head of a pin comes to mind. How on earth do you navigate this?

Here’s what doesn’t work. It doesn’t work to dilute your message, minimize your strength, or chip away at your authenticity so much that you disappear. Nor does it work to “damn the torpedoes,” just letting your message rip full throttle. (more…)

Dear Dana Workplace Advice: Dealing With Difficult People At Work

by | Nov 4, 2016 | Coaching Advice, Dear Dana (Workplace Advice)

Welcome to “Dear Dana”, our Friday column to give you workplace advice and coaching. Please write in and tell me about a frustration you’re facing at the office! – Dana Theus

Dear Dana, I need help dealing with difficult people at work. I love my job. I’ve been with the same company for 8 years and have had great co-workers until this summer. My boss just hired a total jerk for our team and he sits next to me. So annoying! He’s loud and pushy like when I’m on the phone I have to make excuses for the background noise because he’s yelling over the cube wall to someone in the walkway. How does he not know this is inappropriate? Obviously his parents didn’t teach him any manners! What should I do? I have tried to talk to him but he just nods his head and keeps being a jerk. – Fuming in Savannah

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What To Do If You’re Worried About Getting Laid Off

by | Nov 2, 2016 | Career Development, Coaching Advice

Here it comes: year-end when a dearth in 2016 financials start showing up in 2017 budgets as lower head counts. Is that likely to be you?

Layoffs at Christmas make no sense emotionally, but financially they do for the people planning next year’s expenses. If you’re worried your position may be on the chopping block, don’t waste any emotional energy hoping that compassion wins the day. It might, but you can’t count on it. Use the possibility of being let go as fuel to get excited about taking the next big step in your career. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a little parting severance gift to urge you on to the next thing in greater comfort.

Easier said than done? Read on.

Getting laid off, or even knowing it’s a possibility, can be a real energy drain. The worries that can crop up—about money, reputation, self-worth, rejection, yadda yadda, can come on you like a tidal wave if you let them. So don’t let them. Understand that all of those feelings that feel so uncontrollable are just old emotional triggers that you can let go of. And if you may be facing a career transition, now is the time to let them go!

If you’re triggered by the worries that come up when you think you may be about to lose your job, then whether you do or not, now is the right time to let the emotional triggers go—reducing your stress by a boatload. And, even more importantly, once you can see past your triggers, you’ll see that a potential lay off is a fantastic opportunity to think about what’s most important in your work-life reality and set about getting a job that’s an even better fit for where your life is right now (instead of where it was when you got the job you have now.)

Face it, when you took this job things were different. You and your life have progressed, you’ve moved on, you’re in a different place. So what kind of job does your life need now? When you have the answer to that question, you’ll feel much more excited about looking for a new job, or talking to your current employer about ways your job can evolve if you make the cut.

And you need to be in this place of excitement! Connecting to your enthusiasm not only gives you energy to get out there, network and interview well, it makes you more confident while you do.

But then what? Dreaming about a better future can be fun and easy, but what about looking for a job? I recently did some outplacement coaching for a company’s employees, many of whom haven’t been on the job market in over a decade and here’s what I told them: things have changed! And yet they haven’t.

What’s changed (and what hasn’t) in job hunting?

These days it’s deceptively easy to find job openings to apply for online. There are so many sites that are begging for your resume that it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking you’ll find your dream job just by sending out 5 resumes every night between ten and eleven pm. But beware… the vast majority of those job postings are just trolling to fill resume databases that reduce you to a collection of keywords. Many of the jobs advertised aren’t even real. As a result, less than 5% of hires are actually made from online submissions, and those aren’t good odds.

Use job sites to help you research your dream job, employers and salary ranges. Use them to stimulate your job search, not become the basis of it.

Even with all our cool technology, most people are still hired these days through personal referral. What this means is that you’re going to get closer to your dream job faster by networking. LinkedIn is a great tool for networking these days, and so is picking up the phone or talking to people at social events. No matter how you do it, you must network to increase your chances of getting the best job for you.

Also, when it comes to interviewing and negotiating your employment package, things haven’t changed much either. Sure, you need a LinkedIn profile in addition to a resume, but interviewing face to face is still talking to another human being face-to-face. Video interview? Face-to-face rules apply, plus you’ll also want to be sure to minimize distractions in your background, have good lighting and look at the camera instead of the bottom of your screen.

So, basically, your job hunting strategy doesn’t need to change, but a few of the tactics have.

Bottom line advice if you’re not sure a layoff is coming

It comes down to this. If you’re not sure, plan for the worst case scenario and you’ll be farther ahead no matter what. At a minimum, do the following:

  • Find your emotional triggers and let them go so they don’t sap your positive energy
  • Take the time to create a career vision and identify your dream job
  • Network to find people who can help you find your dream job (use holiday parties wisely!)
  • Spiff up your LinkedIn profile and get a base resume ready

Even if you keep your job, you’ll be more focused on what you want and you can be more specific in talking to your current employer about how you can get it. And… if the pink slip does land on your desk, you’re ready to go.

Yes, easier said than done, but that’s why we’ve created the InPower Coaching Community and Career Tools to help you along the way. Don’t wait. Start now.

P.S. And if you do get laid off, here are five questions to ask before you walk out the door to protect yourself.

Photo by Austin Guevara from Pexels

 

Real Life Monsters: 3 Career Lessons from a Bad Boss

by | Oct 31, 2016 | Career Development, Coaching Advice

Hopefully the biggest monsters you find on this Oct. 31st will be knocking on your door looking for candy, but sometimes a bad boss happens. When you find yourself working for someone who is insecure or over his or her own head it can make your job even harder. We like Dana’s advice for thinking about these situations. As she says, “detrigger early and often!” – InPower Editors

I love Halloween. The little kids are so cute and their enthusiasm for candy is infectious (I always buy enough for all of us!)

Unfortunately, not all the monsters we encounter in our careers are so cute and there’s nothing more horrifying or terrorizing than a bad boss – especially early in our career. There are many things that make a boss bad: incompetence, insecurity, immaturity are top on the list. It’s important to remember, however that these monsters are also people. Sometimes they are also overwhelmed, under-supported and over their heads.

Whatever your situation, if you find yourself being managed by a bad boss, the most important thing for you to do is to remember that both you and s/he are contributing to the negative relationship. Take responsibility for your half of the problem and don’t allow yourself to feel guilty about their half – at all. (more…)

What’s The Productivity Toll of Holiday Stress?

by | Oct 26, 2016 | Coaching Advice, Personal Mastery, Work-Life Blend

Halloween is around the corner and I’m already starting to gear myself up for various kinds of holiday stress over the next two months. There’s always a lot of ups and downs with family coming into town, more social activities to host and attend and the pressure of wrapping things at work up for year’s end. It’s not like I’m already planning my Thanksgiving menu, but it’s on my list and the list is getting longer. Fortunately for me, I no longer find holiday stress quite so difficult to manage, which is good because it leaves me more present for my clients, who do!

The most stressful pattern I see in my executive coaching clients is the interplay between work stress and personal stress at holiday time, and a lot of it is related to family dynamics. Take poor Sue, who had to deal with a mother-in-law who insisted on bringing her own cooking pots, pans, butter, mayonnaise and more to make her son’s favorite thanksgiving treats. (Yes, Sue is real, and so is her mother-in-law!)

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When I Don’t Know What I Want, I Suck

by | Oct 24, 2016 | Career Development, Coaching Advice

For months I’ve been contemplating this big blog post about the importance on setting intentions for guiding your career development and life (without having to rely on coaches and other expensive experts.) After all, I wandered in the wilderness for decades before I got a clue, continually saying to myself “I don’t know what I want….” But the topic of “Career Planning” seems so big, that the blog post just eluded me. Then I watched a TV show.

I was watching The Good Wife* and one of the characters, Will Gardner, was having one of those moments of cluelessness I’d experienced many times. He was lost in his own thoughts trying to think about what to think when Alicia asked if he was ok. He turned to her and said:

When I know what I want, I’m great. When I don’t know what I want, I suck” – Will Gardner, The Good Wife

OMG. That’s it! That’s exactly how I’d felt all those years. I was achieving great things in some areas, but in others felt completely lost. I had achieved all the family success I could dream of but when it came to my career, I wasn’t networking very effectively inside or outside my companies. Even though I had a huge network, I “sucked” at networking for career advancement because I wasn’t able to explain to others what I thought my own career success looked like. (This wasn’t Will’s problem, by the way. Quite the opposite.)

(more…)