by Caroline Leach | Oct 30, 2019 | Careers, Learning, Social Media
It’s almost the end of the year. Do you want an easy way to gather your accomplishments for a year-end performance review?
You may be preparing for a performance discussion with your manager in the corporate world. Or maybe you run your own company and want to identify how you did this year.
In either scenario, reflecting on this year’s highlights helps you clearly see what you did well and where you can improve. It’s an opportunity to pause and celebrate the accomplishments of you and year team. It’s a chance to elevate what’s working well and make changes to what’s not working well.
But in the rush of meeting year-end goals, how can you simplify the process?
Try looking to your social media feeds. If you’ve been sharing consistently what you, your team, and your company have been doing, you have a ready-made record. (Of course, this presumes you follow your organization’s social media policy and haven’t shared any confidential, private, or sensitive information.)
A former colleague (and now an author!), Angelica Kelly, has a year-end ritual that relies on LinkedIn. “At the end of every year, I take stock of the personal and professional. I consider what I’m grateful for and what I want to improve,” Kelly says.
“After this reflection process, I use LinkedIn like a notepad and do an annual update,” she says. “Everything professionally relevant goes into my LinkedIn profile. This includes accomplishments, interests, volunteering, and big projects that highlight transferable skills and new knowledge I’ve gained.”
In addition to Angelica’s approach, if you posted content to LinkedIn or other social networks throughout the year, you can scroll through your posts to identify the highlights. You can capture instances where you and your team:
- Launched a successful new product
- Completed an important project
- Won an award for your accomplishments
- Spoke at a company or industry event
- Attended a conference and applied new knowledge
- Championed company news as a brand ambassador
After that, here are a few things to consider …
1. Link your achievements to the goals you set at the beginning of the year, as well as your bigger department and company goals. Does your social media content show how you made a difference for your company? Did you contribute to some of your company’s key goals and share about those (to the extent you could) on social media?
2. Quantify how others responded to your accomplishments. See what data you can cite from your social media posts. Did your content reach a large number of people? Generate multiple comments and a dialogue on an important work topic? Get shared in a way that helped build your organization’s reputation as an industry leader or a great place to work? Use numbers to quantify the impact of your social sharing.
3. Identify where you got feedback. Perhaps some of your posts served as mini feedback moments on some of your work. Did people make suggestions for improvements that you ended up using? Did people ask for more information so they could apply your learning to their own work? Social media can serve as an online focus group. See if that was the case for you this year.
As you reflect on this year, it’s also a great time to lay the foundation for the coming year. Are there new and different ways you could share successes and learnings on social media? Would you use social media activity to seek feedback and help solve problems? How could you hit what I call the social media trifecta — sharing equally about you, your team, and your organization?
With the year — and the decade! — coming to a close, I hope you reflect on and celebrate the accomplishments you and your team achieved this year. And if you have rituals you use to make the most of your performance review preparation, please share!
by Caroline Leach | Oct 16, 2019 | Careers, Learning, Social Media
photo by istock.com/akinbostanci
What question do people ask the most about social media?
This is a busy speaking month for me, and I’ve been reflecting on themes in questions. I’ve been talking about personal brands and building careers and companies through social media.
What am I hearing across a diverse group of audiences? What do people ask in the Q&A following my talks? What do they want to know in one-on-one chats?
This month includes talks with CEOs affiliated with the Community Associations Institute, and community members at an author’s panel. It includes employees at Ericsson North America, and employees and guests at Otter Media‘s We Gather women’s leadership event. At the end of the month, I’ll speak with students at the USC Rotaract Club.
What people often ask is a form of this question: what’s the best way to share professional updates on social media without sounding too self-promotional?
Said another way: what’s a good approach to being active on social media professionally without coming across as arrogant and turning people off?
We’ve all probably seen people in our social media feeds — whether it’s LinkedIn, Instagram or Twitter — who make it all about themselves. Sometimes it can be tempting to tap the “mute” button and make those posts go away.
Yet, if we don’t share about our professional accomplishments, there are downsides. We run the risk of being underestimated in our abilities. We may be overlooked for future opportunities. We may not be able to make the impact that we want in our work.
The happy medium: a social media trifecta
So what’s the solution? It lies in a formula I call the social media trifecta. In every post you share about your work, strive to balance three elements of your content.
- First, share what you did and why you’re excited about it.
- Second, share how your team and your colleagues contributed.
- And third, share what’s special about your organization that enabled your contribution.
With this approach, you highlight your own accomplishments in an engaging way. You also showcase the work of others — something good leaders do frequently. And you’re a good brand ambassador for your organization, in an authentic way for you.
In addition, offer something of value to your network. What insight or idea could you include that would help them in their work?
Here’s an example. Laura Ramirez and her colleagues at Ericsson created a fabulous Career Learning Day. Workshops, activities, and employee groups engaged colleagues in career development. My keynote speech included 3 questions to help people create a personal brand statement and 4 steps to build a personal brand. Afterwards, I posted pictures about the event and the great people at Ericsson. My post included bullets for the questions and the steps in my post. People who weren’t there could also benefit from the key concepts.
Who does this well? Here are a few …
Who do you know who does this well? Please share and tag people in the comments. And maybe it’s you!
by Caroline Leach | Sep 17, 2019 | Social Media
What’s one thing you should never do after someone accepts a LinkedIn connection request?
Don’t ask for anything.
Don’t ask for a job. Don’t ask to meet for coffee. Don’t ask to set up a phone call. Don’t ask about the person’s goals.
Just. Don’t. Ask.
These words of advice turned out to be the most viewed topic so far in my weekly social media minute videos. In them I share tips from my book, What Successful People Do in Social Media.
What To Do Instead
What’s better to do instead?
Anything that will help solidify the relationship.
Share a warm greeting. Congratulate someone on a recent accomplishment. Offer up something that may be of interest that doesn’t take too much of the recipient’s time. Maybe you saw an article or a video they might find helpful. If you want to pass it along with no obligation to read or watch it, that’s great. Simply focus on building the relationship.
Think about how you react when people immediately start pitching business to you — what I call spamming — right after you’ve connected on LinkedIn or other social media platform. More and more, it happens before the connection itself. Now I simply decline those requests. It’s clear as soon as I accept I’ll be bombarded with offers for services I don’t need right now or requests for meetings I can’t do right now, if ever.
When I first left the corporate world to start my own business, it was financial planners who contacted me. Now it’s people pitching lead generation services. Recently someone claimed they can guarantee story placements in major media outlets. As someone with an accreditation in public relations, I can say it’s never possible to guarantee a media placement. Maybe they were really pitching paid advertising.
Learning from what not to do, there’s a better strategy.
What is it?
Let Your Goals Guide You
Consider your professional goals for the coming season, quarter, or year. Do you want to get a new job? Position yourself for a promotion? Find great new talent for your team? Get asked to be on a non-profit board? Be invited to speak?
Write down your goals, and then identify who can help them become reality.
- If you want a new job, create a list of job types of interest, both at your current employer and other companies
- If you want to be promoted, consider who, in addition to your boss, will have a say in the decision
- If you want to find new talent, think about the skill sets you’d like to find to round out your team
- If you want to be invited to be on a non-profit board, identify specific causes and organizations of interest
- If you want to be invited to speak, think about where you’d like to speak and who might hire you to do so.
Next, look to the people associated with the group and organizations you identified. Who do you already know? Who would you like to get to know? You can use the search feature in LinkedIn to further refine a list of people of interest.
Raise Your Profile with Key People
After that, create a plan to raise your profile with the people you identified. Start by sending a personalized LinkedIn request. Say why you want to connect and what interests you about them. Follow them on Instagram, Twitter or YouTube … wherever they spend most of their social time.
Then keep an eye out for content they share. Scroll through your feeds once or twice a week. Read or watch what they post. Start to engage with their content in a meaningful way. Comment on something that stood out to you. Share how your thinking has changed or what you might do differently as a result. Offer up additional data points or perspectives. Do it in a helpful way, and not to try to show you’re smarter or more informed.
The secret is to find the right balance, not engaging so frequently that you become annoying, or so infrequently that you don’t make any lasting impression.
The best outcome is to start building a mutually satisfying relationship. It’s ideal to build one where the other person enjoys and even looks forward to your comments. And one where the other person is positively motivated to engage in a conversation with you.
Find the Strategic Serendipity
Another way of thinking of this is called strategic serendipity. By engaging with and helping people in your network with a positive approach, you never know what good things might come your way.
In my case it’s been social media consulting clients, business and leadership coaching clients, speaking engagements, and teaching opportunities. Exactly zero of them resulted from my searching through social media, cold pitching services to people I don’t know. Instead, they came as the outcome of being helpful, in a targeted way, consistent with my top goals.
To make it easy to fit this into your busy life, you can create a note in your smartphone of people you want to make a point of engaging with. Set aside a few brief times each week to scroll through your social media feeds and interact with their recent content. Be as helpful as you can. Make it easy and enjoyable to engage with you. And let the strategic serendipity flow.
How have you built relationships in positive ways?
by Caroline Leach | Aug 30, 2019 | Learning, Social Media, Work/Life
August is the Sunday of summer. So said a chalkboard sign I spotted by the beach a few years ago.
And so true. It’s bittersweet when summer comes to an end. The longer, more leisurely days start getting shorter and filling up with more commitments as Labor Day approaches.
Businesses and teams have year-end goals to meet. Children are back in school. Maybe the Sunday Scaries are staring you down as you head into Labor Day.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. During a last-minute summer getaway, I learned something important. Maybe it will help you, too.
Although it’s summer, it’s been an intense season with two fledgling businesses in our household – mine and my husband’s. I realized I was putting life on hold, so I headed to the Eastern Sierras for a few days. A mini-retreat, I called it. Or a working vacation. Or working remotely.
Whatever it was, it was delightful. With the backdrop of mountains, trees and summer breezes from my desk, I worked on some of my big projects, did client calls, and dipped into the flow state of being completely consumed by what I was doing, oblivious to the passage of time.
The Lingering Project
One of my projects has been on my list for the better part of a year. As a new author of What Successful People Do in Social Media, I know I need to build an email list of subscribers. I even created a free workbook to accompany my book as a reason for people to sign up.
But I ran into a roadblock in the spring, figuring out how to integrate the MailChimp email service with my download document on this WordPress site. I did research. I leaned on the chat and email service functions of the various providers. I reached out to experts to see if someone could do it for me.
And completing this project has been standing in my way. As much as I talk about the need for everyone to have a social media strategy for their career, I also emphasize the importance of owning your own online real estate.
That means your own website where you control everything. That way, an algorithm change on a social media platform doesn’t impact your ability to connect with your community.
And it was standing in the way of my next project — turning my book into an online course or series of courses. If I don’t have an email list of devoted fans who are interested in what I have to say, it’s much harder to launch a course.
I even did a workaround on my free workbook. Not wanting to delay to release of my book in April, I simply put a note on my website that people interested in the workbook could email me to request it. It wasn’t the most efficient or elegant of solutions, but it enabled me to keep moving forward.
One of the lessons I’ve learned over the last year of launching my own business is to fight the oppression of perfectionism. It’s hard to balance a standard of excellence with taking it too far and delaying, as marketing guru Seth Godin would say, shipping the work.
Learning the Way
My last day in Mammoth was my day to tackle my website. The night before, I decided to refresh my WordPress knowledge by completing an online class called WP Savvy by Iglika Mateeva-Drincheva.
It came in a group of online classes called the Entrepreneurship Bundle. And it’s thanks to Marissa Stahl that I learned about it. She’s the COO of Something Social LA along with founder Callie Cholodenko. Marissa and I met through the USC Alumni Association earlier this year.
Marissa was kind enough to speak to my social media class at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising this spring. It was right about the time the Entrepreneurship Bundle was launching. She and Callie had a course in it called Instagram Strategy for Business (great class, BTW!).
The bundle of 31 classes had a special offer for $99, so I thought, why not?
As life often gets in the way, though, I didn’t complete many of the classes right away. Has this ever happened to you?
But what a lifesaver WP Savvy turned out to be. Even after a few years blogging on my WordPress site, I learned several new things from Iglika’s course. And I felt re-energized to tackle the email integration issue.
Figuring It Out
The other inspiration came from Mark Cuban, the business leader and investor on Shark Tank, among other things. He gave a talk at my former employer’s headquarters in the early 2000s.
As the head of communications at the time, my job was to play host while he was onsite. He had driven all night from Texas to Los Angeles to speak to our employees, but he was full of energy.
And I’ll never forget what he said. In the early days of his business, he said they’d be in client meetings, taking in what the client wanted, and telling them they could deliver.
Later, Mark and his colleagues would look at each other and say they had no idea how to do what they’d just committed to. But they had all night to figure it out. And figure it out they did. Time and time again.
If they could do it, so could I.
Figuring it out in this case took a lot longer than I planned. I had to figure out the original email list subscription I started with wasn’t going to work. I had to download existing subscribers and move them to a new platform. I set up the sign up forms, the welcome forms, and the thank you forms. I tested them by subscribing myself. The look and feel still isn’t great yet, but that’s relatively easy to fix.
The Breakthrough
What I couldn’t figure out was how to make my free download available to subscribers. After some web searches, I decided to start clicking through every screen on WordPress to see if I could find something that would work.
And I finally found it. Buried six screens down, in the middle of the page. Even though I wasn’t selling a product, I wondered what would happen if I checked a box that said “enable shop with the plugin I’m using.”
VOILA! That was it. Which was mentioned exactly nowhere in all the online materials I consulted. Or perhaps it was there, but I missed it, which is entirely possible.
The point is, I told myself I would spend whatever time it took to resolve the problem. I was not going to let up until I figured it out.
It now feels like a huge weight is lifted from my shoulders. So many other actions depend on this, and now I can move forward. It’s a release of positive energy and momentum.
I’m going to tackle part two over Labor Day weekend, which is a long-overdue new look and feel for my website. That way, when Sept. 3 rolls around, I’ll have a big project behind me and I can truly move forward with my big goals for the fall.
What’s Holding You Back?
My question for you is, what’s on your list that’s holding you back? Could you devote a morning or an afternoon of your Labor Day weekend to tackle it? Or at least start the process? How much would that jumpstart your fall season? Would it help you greet it with energy and enthusiasm?
I bet it could. And there will still be plenty of time for being with family and friends, celebrating the last of the summer season, and recognizing the social and economic of achievements of American workers on Labor Day.
In thinking about the value of work, I’m inspired by author and poet Maya Angelou, who said, “Whatever you want to do, if you want to be great at it, you have to love it and be able to make sacrifices for it.”
What do you love to do?
________________________
Here’s how to join my email list (on the left-hand column) to get a free copy of Your Social Media Success Roadmap. You’ll also get an email update from me once or twice month with tips about boosting your career through social media.
by Caroline Leach | Jul 22, 2019 | Careers, Change, Leadership, Work/Life
photo credit: iStock.com/wildpixel
“I’m in the process of changing my brand. I love what I do and I’m thinking about creating some new avenues for myself. I would love to get your thoughts. Let me know if you have some time to chat.”
“I appreciate your latest blog post, as it makes me contemplate my own situation. I think I’m making a difference in my work, but I’m under appreciated. I know you were in the corporate world for a long time, and I truly value your opinion.”
“I’m trying to figure out what to do next in my career. I’m focused on survival where I am, while feeling a bit of imposter syndrome. I want to make sure whatever it is I choose to do next is totally worthwhile. What do you think?”
These are a few samples of different notes I got this year from different people in different roles at different companies. Yet for all the differences, there’s a definite theme.
People ask for my advice on making changes in their professional lives. Whether it’s moving up where they are, shifting direction into a new area of interest, or clarifying if they’re really doing what they want to do, the obvious pattern finally hit me.
People want to know how to successfully navigate change, sometimes reinvent themselves into someone new, and make their professional lives more fulfilling.
Finding a Perfect Coach
Early in my corporate career, I wanted a coach. I was intrigued by leaders in business, sports and the arts who had coaches helping them be their best. I wanted one too.
I was looking for someone who could guide me in making difficult decisions. I wanted someone who could help focus my efforts. I was eager to achieve my initial career goal of becoming a VP of Corporate Communications.
But how to find one? It couldn’t be just anyone. It had to be someone who I felt a strong connection with. Someone who I felt really “got me.” Someone who could help me figure out the next steps on my path and nudge me in that direction.
The law of attraction came into play. It often does when you declare an intention, mentally file it away, and then subconsciously take steps toward it.
When I was a communications director in the early 2000s, my supervisor gave me an opportunity to attend a week-long leadership development program at the Center for Creative Leadership.
To say it was life changing is a major understatement. Along with fellow participants, I completed multiple leadership assessments, joined team-based activities to further uncover our leadership styles, and got one-on-one coaching.
My coach turned out to be the person I’d been looking for and more. We had an incredibly intense afternoon session. It uncovered some of my deepest fears and called into question many of the beliefs and assumptions I had let guide my career to that point.
At the time, I was struggling with integrating an ambitious corporate career with being a loving parent of two young children. I looked around the company and my community and didn’t see a lot of role models who were combining both. I felt isolated and alone, not to mention overwhelmed. I was almost ready to leave the corporate world to focus exclusively on parenting.
The only problem is that would have been a disastrous choice for me. My leadership profile is one who likes to be in charge – planning, building and orchestrating large-scale activities. (In the Myers-Briggs personality inventory, I’m an ENTJ, affectionately known as “the commander.”) I needed to figure out a way to make the work/life situation work for me, my family and my career.
And that’s what my coach helped me come to see. I was so happy with her guidance that we worked together for seven years. Sometimes I had a boss who approved a company payment for her services, and sometimes I paid on my own. Because it was just that valuable.
Either way, the impact was incalculable, both for me and the company where I worked. Within two years, I achieved my goal of becoming a VP of Corporate Communications. And I accomplished other important goals as well, although some still proved to be elusive.
Reaching a Painful Inflection Point
Fast forward another seven years and I found myself in another difficult place. “Bored and burned out” was how I described myself to a new coach. A life and leadership coach, Tina Quinn had long been someone I admired in my community. We connected through a friend who was trying to help me move forward with my life.
For a time, though, I resisted meeting with Tina. I just didn’t want to go there. I didn’t want to confront the issues, because that would mean making a change. And change can be painful.
Although the funny thing about change is that in retrospect, I can say that every major change in my life has ultimately been a good one.
We began with my one-year goals and an assessment of my energy leadership, a tool that surfaced how I viewed my work and my life. From there, Tina and I explored ways I could change my view of the world and consciously choose to show up differently.
It’s thanks to this work that I’m where I am today. I’m still striving toward newer and invigorating goals and dreams. And I have a set of tools to better show up in the world and make the journey a more joyful one.
Navigating Waves of Change
In reflecting on change, I’m grateful for some of the changes in my own life. After a few difficult early years in the work world, I chose a new career in corporate communications and took a series of steps to get there.
When another employer was acquired, I had the opportunity to move into marketing analytics. And while I didn’t choose that role, it did give me the view of marketing I wanted.
More recently, I made the leap from the corporate world into the entrepreneurial life. I’m not sure I would have been able to take the steps I did without everything I learned in working with a coach. Talk about a life lesson in feeling the fear and doing it anyhow!
Along the way, I always enjoyed the opportunity to inspire and uplift others. One way I do that is through speaking.
One of my favorite volunteer roles in a philanthropic group called National Charity League was being the inspiration chair. I opened each meeting with encouraging words and stories to uplift fellow parents, professionals, and community leaders.
And my corporate roles gave me opportunities to help others with their development. It was deeply gratifying to put together the first-ever leadership development program, a week-long experience for top executives, at a former employer.
Later, I got to work with HR colleagues to create a marketing leadership development program, to develop future-focused skills among high-potential marketers.
When I was launching my business to write, consult, speak and teach about what successful people do on social media to build their careers, some of my colleagues and friends suggested that I offer coaching as well.
At first I resisted. It didn’t seem core to what I was doing in the social media space. And back to my ENTJ profile, I confess that sometimes I like being the field marshal, organizing and directing a team toward a common goal. Coaching felt a little bit behind-the-scenes to me.
And yet …
The requests kept coming. One of my first social media clients told me how excited he was to be getting social media advice and coaching all in one. Several other people wanted to bounce ideas off of me.
And I found I loved our conversations. It was energizing to help people solve problems in their work lives. I enjoyed asking questions that could help people see new possibilities for themselves and begin taking steps to get there.
Which is a long way of saying that I’m launching a new service with leadership coaching. The focus? Successfully navigating change and transition to achieve big goals.
Introducing a Coaching Practice to Help You Navigate Change
What does a coach do? There are many definitions. An especially good one comes from the International Coach Federation. ICF defines coaching as “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.”
With my background and experience, my focus is on helping people successfully navigate change in their professional lives. This includes:
- Changing careers by choice or by necessity
- Navigating a corporate merger or acquisition
- Moving up to the next level of performance and responsibility
- Managing life as a high-performing leader and a dedicated parent
- Leaping from the corporate world to the entrepreneurial life
If you’re contemplating how you can change, reinvent and transform your career, I’d love to hear from you. We can work together on a short- or long-term basis, depending on what you want to accomplish.
If it involves reinventing your personal brand, we can couple our work with a customized social media plan to launch and build your new brand.
And wherever you choose to navigate your career, I’m wishing you all the best on your journey!
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