Sunday, March 15, 2020

How to Turn Your Teams Weaknesses into Strengths - Your Career Intel

How to Turn Your Teams Weaknesses into Strengths - Your Career IntelIs your gruppe lacking a skill or perspective? Over time, its easy to recruit a talented group of hires that end up bringing the same skills and perspectives to your company. Without even realizing it, you could be reinforcing one viewpoint and increasing the risk for groupthink, the enemy of innovation and creativity.Identifying talent gaps and recruiting to fill these gaps is one of the best ways to address the shortcomings of a particular team or department. As a General Manager, I also encourage the companies I work with to take this strategy one step further and consider recruiting talented hires from outside the industry.Recently, my team employed this strategy when working with an industry-leading company. Despite being at the top of their industry, the hiring manager expressed concern that the companys year-on-year growth was beginning to stagnate. We worked with the hiring manager to identify leaders outsi de their industry with a unique perspective. Ultimately, their new hire helped the company identify and transfer best practices from other industries keeping the company securely ahead of the competition.Heres why hiring from outside your industry is such a powerful recruitment tool and how you can successfully implement this strategyIdentify a Big-Picture Goaldeparture with the big picture. Benchmark your business against the industry as a whole and your top competition. Ask yourself the following questionsWhere do you want to be in one year or five years?How do you expect your competition to innovate?What do you need to do to stay ahead or become an industry leader in your own right?Work backwards to identify specific, achievable business goals that will help you reach these benchmarks. Then narrow your focus to candidates that have proven track records helping other companies achieve similar goals.Pinpoint Short Term NeedsIn addition to focusing on long-term goals, find candidate s that can help you meet your short-term needs. Identify your teams mora immediate needs by asking the following questionsDoes your team need someone who is adept at generating leads or someone with a track record of closing deals?Is your lead generation strong but your nurturing process weak, or vice versa?Is morale flagging because your business consistently trails the competition?If your business is currently the industry leader, are you worried about maintaining this competitive edge?Hone In on Specific Personnel NeedsThe most important part of this equation requires you to focus on your particular sales force or leadership needs. If youve had a hard time understanding the luxury market, recruit candidates from other luxury companies outside your industry. For example, if Audi was struggling to understand the luxury market, the company should look for candidates from other luxury companies, like LVMH, Richemont and Kering, rather than Ford or Toyota.Have you ever hired an outsid e candidate who filled in an important gap in a teams knowledge base? Tell us about your experiences in the comments section below.

Tuesday, March 10, 2020

Career Goals How To Make Sure Your Boss Cares About Yours

Career Goals How To Make Sure Your Boss Cares About Yours Advocating for yourself in the workplace can be challenging. You know you are valuable and want to grow, but making your career goals important to someone else can be tricky. Whetzu sich youre asking for a raise or promotion, looking for a new job or simply creating a career game plan, how can you ensure that your babo is invested in your success?1. Consider your einbildung- What would your perfect day at work look like? What would you be doing and how would you feel? Is this vision different from what you are currently experiencing? Would you maximize your skills in a different way? These are the questions to ask yourself. Write down your ideas and formulate goals - both long term career goals and a short-term plan. The clearer you can paint this picture for yourself, the clearer it will be to your babo. You should have some sort of ultimate career goal. It may not be a single achievement, but could be a position, state of mi nd, or way you want to behave. Envisioning your ultimate goal gives you something toward which you can work.Ideally, your vision should involve your strengths.Embracing your strengths better equips you to achieve your ultimate goal, sinc eyou have the tools at your disposal.2. Make it measurable- The best way to consider your future and to achieve your career goals is to reflect on your past. Keep a log of all of your activities from the past year or more, taking note of when you met with whom and what you discussed. Show your own intentions on promoting growth and progress.Then, when you put this summary against your vision for yourself at work, you can help your boss identify where youre the strongest, how youre adding value to the company, and whether there are areas in which you need help improving. If youre goals are measurable an achievable, youll actually be able to gauge progress and demonstrate that youre taking your goals seriously. 3. Create an agenda- Your objectives ne ed to be well thought out. Reaching a long-term career goal will be difficult unless you have a practical outline of what youre aiming for. Know exactly what you want to cover and firm on what you are asking for. Will you reach a career objective by assumingnew tasks, getting involved witha committee, attending a conference, or getting a promotion or raise? What are you envisioning for your career path and how can you best articulate that? Odds are you have worked with your boss for some time, so you may have an idea of how he/she receives information and makes decisions. You have to take this into consideration as well when formulating your agenda. For example, does she like numbers and facts? Is he a visual learner who prefers diagrams or outlines?Find a way to convey your message in the style it will likely be best received.A sample agenda for your career objective or a long term goal can look something like thisHighlights of job wertzuwachs over past yearincreased sales by 5% fo r areamet targets for past 3 yearssubmitted best practice proposal for regional conferenceIntroduction of Goalsmore involvement with marketing departmentdiscussion about potential professional growth opportunitiesIf you are not asking for anything specific and want to instead brainstorm with your boss about your growth potential and your career path, throw some ideas out there first and be open to feedback. 4. Set the timeBe prepared and allow your boss to be, too. Dont spring this on your boss unexpectedly. Email or tell him/her you have something important to discuss and youd like to schedule some time for the two of you to meet.If you want to be clear about your intent, you can say, I have some thoughts about my professional development Id like to share with you. Can we set aside about 30 minutes to chat this week? This will give your boss the opportunity to determine the best time to receive this information and to prepare as well.5. Be open mindedThe best solutions come from te amwork. Consider the position he/she is in and information you may or may not know. There are often reasons why conversations like these are challenging for supervisors to have, which can include their inability to actually make decisions about subordinate career growth. Yet even if your boss isnt in a position to make certain decisions, she may be able to suggest something else that is doable from his/her perspective. Talk it out. Receive the information and consider how the both of you can work together to fulfill your needs to be a successful employee. After your meeting, take notes on what you have discussed and reiterate next steps at the close of the meeting. There is always an opportunity for follow up regardless of what your boss says. If your requests were met with a resounding yes, you will still need follow through to make sure things happen.If you were told lets discuss this at the end of the month, you go back to your desk and mark it on the calendar. If you walk away w ith a no you take a moment, write down everything that happened. Take a few days to evaluate your approach and consider revisiting the issue at another time.--Nicole Wolfrath is mom to two feisty girls in elementary and nursery school and has worked full time as a college career counselor for the past 15 years. She holds leadership roles on her childrens school boards and PTA, loves to create art when she can find the time, and is passionate about womens and parenting issues which she advocates for through teaching and blogging.Fairygodboss is committed to improving the workplace and lives of women.Join us by reviewing your employer

Thursday, March 5, 2020

Resumes Job Descriptions Reviews & Guide

Resumes Job Descriptions Reviews & Guide Furthermore, like many jobs, responsibilities vary based on the size and kind of employer. The secret is to emphasize your accomplishments and supply evidence of your possible price. Whoever does the searches might or might notlage utilize precisely the exact terms as the man who wrote the work description. Dont be afraid to make your job descriptions reflect your own personal style. The Pain of Resumes Job Descriptions When applying for employment, its important to get a professional, well-written resume thats guaranteed to stand out to hiring managers. Nowadays telephone interviews were preferred and increasingly more popular as a result of time savings for both interviewers and job hunters. Hence, no 2 resumes is going to be the exact same. Each step demands a more in-depth review of the resume. Then consider prioritizing the information that you provide in each individual description. Spend the majority of your time on the very first few sections of the work description about who you are and why your occupation is wonderful. The work search process can be a hard and frustrating one. Looking for the ideal candidate is hard, but it may also be tedious. Hiring managers scan your resume searching for clues about what kind of worker youre. Begin with an introductory sentence or two about why the position you want to fill is an amazing job. Before you commence adding job descriptions to your resume, you can want to earn a list of accomplishments at every one of your jobs. If you are able to say what you have to say in under 3 paragraphs, do it, but dont omit valuable details that may help to draw recruiters. If job seekers find a whole lot more negative details about your company than positive benefits, they may choose to take their talents elsewhere. About us information is notboilerplate that goes on top of all your job descriptions. Concentrate on information linked to resumes, job descriptio ns, your experiences and techniques about the position youre applying, and any helpful information about that organization. Make certain that you have a very clear comprehension of what is going to be expected of you before accepting work. A very good first step is to search some of the bigger job boards for positions very similar to the one that you want to fill. Try to remember, you would like to be certain that the job is an excellent fit for you just as much as the employer would like to be sure youre an excellent fit for the job. When youre searching for jobs, be certain to set your mental health at the forefront and to figure out as much as possible regarding the job before accepting it (or sometimes before even applying). No one would like to know exactly what tasks you performed. One of the greatest methods to put money into quality over quantity when it has to do with posting jobs on the world wide web is to promote your openings on an industry-focused job board. F irst off, you have to read the job posting carefully. The aim of your job description is to hook people so they spend more time investigating your organization and take action.