#HR #RRHH Making love and making personal #branding #leadership

When you deliver a presentation, your body language is important for one over-riding reason: it creates an instant visual first impression that answers a big question for your audience: "Can I trust this person?"

 

Until now, science has not been able to isolate the specific physical cues that could cause us to not be trusted. But thanks to Dr. David DeSteno, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, we now know what gestures can undermine the perception of our trustworthiness.

 

Dr. DeSteno devised a study in which participants played a cooperative economic game. Half played face-to-face, and half played over the internet. And those who played face-to-face were videotaped from three camera angles.

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The problem with asking for a raise is that there are only a few ways it could go right, and so many ways it could go wrong.

 

The best outcome would be getting more money than you imagined, but you’d also be happy with getting exactly what you wanted, and if not that, to at least see a bump, even if it’s smaller than what you hoped for.

 

But in the pick-a-path book of life, it seems many more paths lead to being denied, with the worst paths leading to alienating your superiors, later being passed over for a promotion, and worst of all, having to take a counteroffer from a firm for which you don’t really want to work and burning a bridge in the process.

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You want a team full of motivated employees and a rocking company culture. You're doing everything you can, but somehow it's just not working. Turnover is still high. Employees look good on paper, but seem to get demotivated no matter what you do. What could be going wrong?

 

Your human resources team could be the culprit. It's time to take a hard look at your company's interviewing practices.

 

Sometimes HR wants to "sell" a really great candidate on the position. So they start telling them all of the great things about being a part of the company or fulfilling the role they're trying to fill. There's nothing wrong with that on the surface. The problem arises when HR starts making promises on your behalf. Promises you can't keep, or won't keep, for whatever reason.

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Sometimes one of the important aspects to career success can be something intangible like how likeable you are.

 

That vague feeling of goodwill is often determined by how genuine you seem when interacting with others. One of the first steps to showing someone you sincerely care about what they’re saying is remembering what they say--especially their name.

 

According to a Dale Carnegie training course I took last year, the sweetest sound to anyone’s ear--no matter what language it’s in--is their name. Without nailing down this first step, it can be difficult to move forward in building a genuine professional or personal relationship. Unfortunately, this can be a difficult task since someone else’s name often doesn’t mean anything to us (it’s just another word) so it’s difficult for our brains to remember it.

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Based on my experience in working for companies and studying people at all levels, these are my top 5 keys to not losing your job.

 

1. You Need to Have Drive

 

If you were a car, what kind of car would you be, a 1962 Mini, a 1960 VW Kombi, a Mustang, or a Porsche? Although Minis and Kombis are cute and good for cruisin', to not lose your job, you need to become a Mustang or Porsche. It’s the people with drive, torque, and power and who work harder, achieve, come early, leave late, make the highest number of calls, sales, and complete projects on time who are most likely to keep their jobs.

 

2. Always Say YES

 

 

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When I started my first company, I hired people I knew and loved.  I thought, Why wouldn't I want to work with my friends all day?

In many cases that worked out fine. Then my company began to grow beyond my circle of friends. The talents required for success became a bigger priority than the camaraderie.

 

I was usually able to find people who fit the culture and the job description and whom I also enjoyed spending time with. But every once in a while the person I needed to hire just wasn't my cup of tea. And while we shared mutual respect, spending time with this person became a chore, as did the experience of managing him or her.

 

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Like thousands of professionals all over the country, you're trying your best to stay organized, keep your appointments, and still churn out the countless hours of work you need to keep pushing your company forward.

 

Most of us aspire to conquer more and more work in less and less time, but since none of us can cram more hours into the day (despite our best efforts), increasing our productivity is the best we can do. Even so, in some cruel twist of irony, most "productivity enhancers," like going to the gym every morning, seem to add more effort to our already busy lives. Instead, try one or more of these 15 productivity hacks--which you can execute and experiment with immediately:

 

 

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A few weeks ago, we talked about why happiness at work matters; this week I'd like to share the flip side of that: the gigantic cost of unhappy employees.

Employee engagement has been a hot topic for several years now, but what does it really mean and how do you know if your employees are engaged at work? And why does it matter?

 

Gallup's State of the Global Workplace reported on employee engagement in more than 140 countries and divided employees into 3 categories:

 

"Engaged employees work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company. They drive innovation and move the organization forward.Not Engaged employees are essentially "checked out." They're sleepwalking through their workday, putting time--but not energy or passion--into their work.Actively Disengaged employees aren't just unhappy at work; they're busy acting out their unhappiness. Every day, these workers undermine what their engaged coworkers accomplish.

 

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Sometimes scientific research teaches us things we might not want to know. That happened when organizational psychologists studied West Point cadets to learn what personal qualities were most likely to predict success. The No. 1 answer? Narcissism.

 

Think Napoleon and Steve Jobs. Narcissists achieve amazing things, usually by putting their needs and desires ahead of everything and everyone else. They'll also go to great lengths to achieve their goals. Most important, they can be great at getting others on board as well.

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We focus on completing the task at hand, fighting for the next promotion, outperforming a colleague. But there are many seemingly minor actions that can have a major impact on your career’s trajectory. Ignore them and you risk arriving on a shore you didn’t choose, or worse, capsizing on an unexpected reef! Here are 5 career mistakes that can negatively impact your career down the road:

 

1.    Network only within your company. Most people are aware of the value of networking.

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Find the right people, right from the start

Catherine Hoke (CEO of DEFY VENTURE'S) says She was desperate to “fill a seat” instead of postponing the search and spending time to find the right person for the job, she admits.

“We ended up compromising, hiring people that didn’t have the attributes I was looking for,” Hoke says. “[It] becomes more costly in the long run.” If a candidate doesn’t have the skills but does have the traits for the job, they can grow into the position, she says. (For example, a salesperson better be a closer, and an assistant needs to be detail oriented.) Having to fire someone sets the organization back and is unpleasant, Hoke says. “[The] pain could be avoided on the front end.”

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How do companies create value and achieve competitive advantage in an age of great complexity? This is a question we constantly ask ourselves as we go about our work of helping chief executives and their leadership teams build successful businesses.

 

When we reflect on our work with the companies we have helped over the years—five hundred or more in all kinds of industries in more than forty countries—what we remember most vividly is rarely the specific problem that caused a business leader to call us in.

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