Lose Your Voice?

“Did you lose your voice?”shutterstock_128182871

It was the first question my exec coaching client asked himself as the chairman went around the room polling everyone’s thoughts.

Worse,” my client said, “I knew it was a really bad idea and everyone else knew it too.”

Research by social scientists documents the dangers of groupthink; an opinion gets started, a couple of people agree, and pretty soon you have a tidal wave of sentiment pushing in one direction.Read the rest

3 Quick Items Worth Catching

Three posts worth your reading / watching time:

Reading (process)Dan Pink’s new book To Sell is Human has terrific great research on getting your ideas across. Here’s a link to a short video of his 6 Successors to the Elevator Pitch.

Former McKinsey consultant Andrew Sobel’s sweet spot is client relationships. Here’s a recent post titled 6 Essential Roles You Should Play with Clients that frames the key roles you should be thinking about if you work with clients.Read the rest

The Perfect First “Real” Job?

Skills Like This

Is there a perfect first “real” job?

Probably not. But there are some real stinkers to avoid if you have the choice.

And I’m not talking about summer jobs, volunteer work, and or that paid – or unpaid internship – that might be out there. All of them, IMHO, are important.

But for serious importance it’s hard to match that first fulltime real job.… Read the rest

Hiring Season: Can I Be Asked If I’m a Gamer?

Yes. No. Maybe?

You can tell when the economy’s improved because there’s an uptick of interviews. More experienced managers revisit what they’ve done before that’s worked well when hiring and novice supervisors surface this season’s new crop of oddball, silly questions.

“Can I be asked if I’m a gamer?” will likely be one of the tamer examples.

Candidates invariably want to know what can be asked.… Read the rest

The Trouble with Recruiters

There is trouble in recruiter-land.

Talk to any in-house recruiter and they know it. Talk to any job candidate and they suspect it.

Heck, as someone who has run small, medium, and large size talent acquisition operations I even know it.

You probably do too.

So what’s going on?

Back in the pre-online application days, circa 1996,  internal recruiters working for employers customarily carried (preface: at least the good employers who knew to balance workload with quality) 10-15 job requisitions – openings they were trying to fill – at any one time.… Read the rest