How to Sell Yourself -- Carefully

Self-promotion, done well, increases your visibility and advertises the value you deliver to your team and your company. But mastering the delicate art of self-promotion isn't easy. Overdo it, and you're a grandstander; duck it, and you miss out on the credit--and visibility--you deserve. The following points draws on the wisdom and experience of management experts to give you useful tips on effective self-promotion.

1. Offer information about your accomplishments by weaving anecdotes (that include others besides yourself) into the flow of discussion
2. Build a network of appreciative colleagues and bosses by taking on tasks for them and following through
3. Prepare a brief and informal "bragalogue" to have at the ready when the CEO or senior-level executives ask you about your work
4. Be sensitive about the timing of your self-promoting remarks. With forethought and practice, you can increase your skill in subtly drawing others' attention to the contributions you make to your organization.

Be Strategic in 15 Seconds

It’s a really good thing to be tactical. It’s important to have a bias for action, to focus on getting things done.

Write the strategy, build a plan, sure. But spend most of your time in execution mode to make things happen.

Of course, the down side is that it’s easy to be so focused on execution day to day, that we don’t step back and ask the strategic questions to make sure we’re on track, and make sure we’re not missing more significant opportunities to achieve and exceed our goals & expectations.

Stepping back from execution to be strategic is everybody’s job, and it doesn’t have to take longer than 15 seconds to give your work a gut-check. Here are a few questions to ask yourself every once in awhile to make sure you’re on track:

• Why are we doing this?
• What’s the objective? What does success look like?
• How will I know this is successful? How will I measure it?
• Has anything changed (at the company, in the market, with our customers) since we last decided this was worth doing?
• Would our customers think this is a good idea?
• If I started this project from scratch, is this still how I would do it?

How to motivate your employees

By Misty Belardo

For those of us who are employed, we know there are things that motivate us to work and really give our best to the company we work for. I am just lucky I guess that I love my work. I also love the things my company has given me in terms of training and benefits which go along with working there for almost 3 years now.

For our readers who are employers, or who are considering starting their own business, there are some things you need to consider in order to achieve a good volume of work and productivity from your employees. Maybe you think that the employees you currently have are a problem, or hard headed. Maybe you should consider that they just need a nudge or need to be motivated.

I found a video that I hope can help you. This video discusses some valuable steps that can truly help you motivate your employees:

Step 1: Motivate 'YOU' first

Step 2: Get to know your employees

Step 3: Use smarter goals

Step 4: Delegate authority

Step 5: Work out a reward system

Keys to Being Excellent at Anything

If you want to be really good at something, it's going to involve relentlessly pushing past your comfort zone, along with frustration, struggle, setbacks and failures. That's true as long as you want to continue to improve, or even maintain a high level of excellence. The reward is that being really good at something you've earned through your own hard work can be immensely satisfying.

Here, are the six keys to achieving excellence that have been found most effectives:

• Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance. Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That's when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.
• Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4½ hours a day.
• Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously, however, can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.
• Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It's also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.
• Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister has found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you'll take on difficult tasks is to ritualize them — build specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.

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Game Changers

by Mike Myatt at Blogging Innovation

At one time or another all great leaders experience something that is so big, so impactful, that it literally changes the landscape. It’s what I call a “Game Changer.” A game changer is that ah-ha moment that creates an extreme, disruptive advantage or improvement. What’s interesting is that the best leaders proactively focus on looking for game changers. Sure, great leaders never lose sight of their core business, they pay attention to managing risk, etc., but they spend far more energy intentionally searching for opportunity, but not just any opportunity – a game changer. In the text that follows I’ll not only provide you with a blue print for finding game changers, but I’ll also ask you to share your experiences and insights as well. I hope this post is a game changer for you…

As most of you know, I spent last week at the World Business Forum in New York. I listened to esteemed business school professors, two Nobel laureates, bestselling authors, and some of the world’s most successful CEOs. These were all people who have personally experienced game changers, and some have experienced them many times over.

While there were clearly a few moments last week that I found instructionally valuable in terms of creating a game changer (Nando Parrado), there weren’t nearly enough of them. There was far too much rehashing of old ideas spun as new. A game changer doesn’t maintain the status quo, it shatters it. It was this taste of disappointment that led me to share my personal process for finding and implementing game changers – I call it SMARTS (Simple-Meaningful-Actionable-Relational-Transformational-Scalable).