The First Things a New Leader Should Do to Build Trust

Source: http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130919113049-279253783-the-first-things-a-new-leader-should-do-to-build-trust?trk=mta-lnk

As a new supervisor nearly 30 years ago and as Lockheed Martin CEO and President, building trust has always been my top priority. That’s because I’ve learned over the years that if you don’t have a bond of trust with the people who can help you succeed, business comes to a screeching halt.

For this reason, my first priority as CEO and President has been to hit the road. I’ve visited hundreds of our customers, sat across the table from our investors and analysts, and held Town Hall meetings at a dozen of our sites, reaching more than 60,000 employees.

The employee meetings are particularly important. Employees drive our success. If they don’t know you, understand where you’re trying to take the business, and trust in your leadership, you’ll have a hard time keeping them engaged. Whether you’re a CEO or a first-line manager, face-to-face communication with your team is vital to your success as a leader. With that in mind, I’d like to share the five guiding principles I follow in building trust with employees.

1. Affirm Your Values
   Trust starts with values. I take every opportunity to reiterate Lockheed Martin’s values and what they mean to us. Our values are 1) Do what’s right, 2) Respect others, and 3) Perform with excellence.
   
   It’s important to communicate that the commitment to integrity, respect and excellence starts at the top – and even more important to demonstrate that commitment through decisions and actions. Show employees that you are embracing your values, and you’ll go a long way towards building trust.
2. Share Your Vision and Strategy
   Once you establish the values that will guide you, the next step is to communicate where you’re going and how you’ll get there. And it’s important to keep your vision and strategy simple. Employees need to understand the direction of the company and clearly see how their work contributes to our success. When I communicate our vision and strategy to our employees I use examples that are most relevant to their areas of expertise.
   
   When you share your strategy for success, you acknowledge your trust in employees who determine that success. I’ve learned that when you show someone that you trust them, they work hard to show that your trust is well placed.
3. Be Open, Honest and Transparent
   I find that one of the most powerful tools for building trust is simply being open, honest and transparent in all of your communications. Employees recognize in an instant when a leader is being honest, and if you communicate frequently, you’ll earn their trust and respect.
   
   This is especially true when times are tough. Leaders have to fight the urge to circle the wagons during times of pressure or crisis. That’s when employees need to hear from you most. If you’re open, honest and transparent, you’ll build confidence and empower employees to stop worrying and start helping the organization overcome its challenges.
4. Demonstrate the Power of a Handshake
   Every good leader knows that it’s important to communicate with employees and that there are several ways to do it. You can send an email, host a webcast, or ask your leaders to relay a message. While these communications channels have their place in a leader’s repertoire, it’s important to remember that they don’t take the place of in-person meetings.
   
   There is power in a handshake. There is power in a warm, in-person greeting. There is power in a smile from across the room. Personal contact builds trust. Let your employees see you as a leader who is personally engaged. Even if it’s just once a week, find a reason to substitute an e-mail or a phone call with a face-to-face meeting, knowing your time is well spent on contributing to a culture of trust.
5. Offer Sincere and Genuine Thanks
   There isn’t a communication I deliver where I don’t personally thank our employees for our success. The simple act of saying “thank you” is incredibly powerful. My goal is to make sure every one of our 116,000 employees knows how much I appreciate their hard work.
   
   Thanking employees is another trust-builder, as long as it’s from the heart. It’s important to recognize people by name and explain why you’re so grateful. To paraphrase the famous quote, your employees may not remember everything you say, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel. Sincere gratitude goes a long way toward building trust.

These are the principles I follow in building trust. I’m interested in your perspective. I invite you to share your strategies for building trust with your teams and coworkers.

Photo: Lockheed Martin CEO and President Marillyn Hewson meets with employees in Orlando, Fla., during her Town Hall tour earlier this year.

 

Want To Be Memorable? It Starts With Your Content

Source: http://blog.slideshare.net/2013/08/26/want-to-be-memorable-it-starts-with-your-content/#!


I have one objective with this post: I want to make it worth your time. After all, time is your most precious asset – more precious than money.
Time cannot be deposited into a savings account to accrue over time, and time can never be exchanged or refunded. Once you spend it, it is gone forever.

If we can agree that time is a treasure, then let’s make sure the next presentation you give respects your audience’s time. The experience needs to be memorable, and it starts with how you develop your content.
Here are a few simple tips to make your content more memorable:

Record Your Thoughts
As a voracious reader, I constantly have programs like Evernote within reach to track and document a new idea, quote or other piece of inspiration. Choose the program that works best for you and track your ideas so that you can share them at a later date.  After all, it’s been said that “A life worth living is a life worth recording.” Your life is full of so many rich experiences and lessons. Most of these are worth documenting. More importantly, some are probably worth sharing during your next presentation.

Write Like You Speak
If you are the kind of person that likes to script out your content, then make sure you are using everyday language. If your audience needs a dictionary to comprehend your presentation, tone it down a bit.  Nobody appreciates a show-off.  Be yourself and write like you speak.

Provide Clarity
If I were to make the statement “A dog walked across the street,” one person will think Golden Retriever while another person will think Great Dane. But if I were to say “The Bulldog walked across the street” then the message is completely different. It’s clear. I’m doing the heavy lifting as the presenter by providing an extra layer of clarity.

Speak in the Present
As a communications major in college, I quickly learned in my first Broadcast Journalism class that “Is” is much more powerful than “Was.” Turn on the channel to your local news station and you will see this at play. Broadcasters always speak in the present tense. You should do the same.

Make Three Points
The human brain works like this: 1, 2, 3…I forget. No one is going to remember your 4th or 10th point. Always aim for three points. Always.

Break Things Up
I always like to pretend a child is sitting in the back of the room when I’m giving a presentation. This mindset forces me to embrace some basic rules of simplicity that includes “chunking” my content into bite size pieces. The best way to do is this is by using lots of periods to ensure your content is littered with multiple/easy-to-understand sentences.

Create ‘Twitterable’ Moments
As presenters, we must embrace that we live in a world where social media is now the norm. Every webinar, product launch or sales presentation provides just another opportunity to share the value of your brand. With that said, you need to create Twitterable moments – clever headlines, golden nuggets and smart advice that you know will be tweeted and shared with the rest of the world.

Now that you have invested 2-3 minutes to read this post, I hope it has been a valuable return on the investment of your time. If so, pay it forward.


Read More: The Best Way to Outline Your Presentation
Scott Schwertly is the author of How to Be a Presentation God and CEO of Ethos3, a Nashville, TN-based presentation boutique providing professional presentation design and training for national and international clients, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to branded individuals like Guy Kawasaki.

G U M P T I O N

Source: Taken out from sethgodin.typepad.com/files/what-matters-now-1.pdf‎

Most of us settle in, and settle for what we have. Rather
than pursue, we accept. Our lives become unwitting
celebrations of passivity: we undervalue our work and
perceive ourselves as wage slaves (and so we phone it in
at the day gig), we consume compulsively (but not
create), we pine for better lives (but live vicariously
through our televisions).

These corners we paint ourselves into, it’s no way to live.
There’s no adventure here, no passion, no hunger for
change. Remember that relentless optimism you once
had? The goals you wished to achieve, before settling in?
They’re still there. You need a nudge to find them; a
little gumption.

You can start that business. You can lose that weight.
You can quit smoking, and learn to garden, and write
that book, and be a better parent, and be all the things
you want to be ... the thing this world needs you to be. It
requires courage and faith, both of which you can
muster. It requires effort — but this effortless life isn’t as
satisfying as it seems, is it?


Declare war on passivity. Hush the inner voice that
insists you’re over the hill, past your prime, unworthy of
attaining those dreams. Disbelief is now the enemy, as is
the notion of settling. Get hungry — hyena hungry. Get
fired up. Find your backbone, and your wings.
Flap ‘em. It’s the only way you’ll be able to fly.


J.C. Hutchins is a novelist. Discover his thriller 7th Son: Descent
at JCHutchins.net.

How to Do Work That Gets You Noticed

By Rebecca Thorman | U.S.News & World Report LP – Thu 5 Sep, 2013 9:02 PM IST

Source:http://in.finance.yahoo.com/news/gets-noticed-153226624.html





Don't get passed over for the next raise or promotion at work. Use the following seven strategies to do work that gets you noticed. You'll find effective and efficient ways to get the job done, and discover how to prepare for a successful climb up the career ladder.

1. Set and exceed expectations. First and foremost, complete your existing tasks and responsibilities. Once you've mastered your basic task list, start exceeding expectations. If you know you can get a project done by Monday afternoon, tell your manager you'll hand it in on Wednesday. Give yourself enough room in case something goes wrong or comes up, but make every effort to hand in the project on your internal deadline. This makes you look good, and lets you get ahead of schedule to boot.

2. Ask, "What would make me an invaluable employee?" Stop guessing how to get a promotion and instead ask your manager what you need to do to become a top performer. Outline specific goals with your team, and decide how to quantify those goals. When you reach a goal, make sure to tell your boss and record the accomplishment in an ongoing document so you have all your good deeds in one spot when it's time for your performance review.

3. Automate your work. You can't take on more responsibility if you're drowning in your existing responsibilities. Batch and automate your to-do list for effective time management. For example, let's say you're in charge of the company blog. Create an editorial calendar of content three months in advance, write all of the blog posts in one day, and then schedule the posts, along with the social media updates on Twitter and Facebook to finish the project in a short time period.

4. Focus on one thing at a time. Multitasking will get you nowhere but a frenzied state. Instead, prioritize your tasks. The Daily Muse recommends structuring your to-do list with one big, three medium and five small tasks. Once you've separated your tasks into each category, focus on your one big item for each day. As long as you complete the main priority, you can sustain your productivity over long periods of time.

5. Delegate. It's OK to ditch lower-level responsibilities, so think about hiring a freelancer or intern. If you're getting paid a salary of $70,000, it's often more cost-effective for a freelancer to write the company blog posts, for instance, at a rate of $50 per post, so that you can focus on higher-level strategies. Outsource work you don't enjoy or work that is easy but time-consuming.

6. Ask, "Can I take on additional work?" There's no better way to get on a team member's or manager's good side than asking for more work. Keep an eye open for new opportunities and places for growth. And take on projects and things that you aren't asked to do. While it may be more comfortable to stick to your job description, you become invaluable when you make others look good.

7. Send regular updates. Try sending or scheduling a weekly update with your boss and a monthly update with your company, so others know what you're working on. It helps to increase communication and collaboration, and makes it clear the value you provide to the organization. Keep it fun and informal by explaining how you really enjoyed working on the last project, and store the updates as reminders for when you're ready to move up in the company.

Doing great work is satisfying by itself, but it's also rewarding for your career. By the time you're ready to ask for your next raise or new title, you can be sure that you'll get it.

Rebecca Thorman's weekly blog Kontrary offers tips to create the career, bank account, and life you love, and is a popular destination for young professionals. Her goal is to help you find meaningful work, enjoy the heck out of it, and earn more money. She writes from Washington, D.C.