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“Creating Successful Leaders”

December 18, 2013 How To Negotiate Your Starting Pay

Negotiating your starting salary can be intimidating. You don’t want to scare potential employers away with an out-of-this-world number, but you also shouldn’t sell yourself short. There are, however, a few general principles that go a long way in preparing you to confidently, successfully negotiate your pay.

1. Have a minimum and a target number in mind beforehand. These two numbers are, respectively, the absolute minimum amount you are willing to be paid, and your ideal salary. Go in with these at the front of your mind as the ranges within which you’ll be negotiating.

2. Never reveal your minimum number. While your target number should be verbalized, your minimum is for you and you alone to help keep your target salary (or something close to it) on the table. Revealing your minimum weakens your negotiating power.

3. Make a counter offer. For the new job seekers, this part can be scary. Employers expect you to counter their offer, because they want to see that you trust and value yourself enough to do a bit of bargaining. Keep in mind that employers are using a similar strategy: they’re starting low and expecting to have to make a compromise with a higher salary in the end. Knowing this helps take the pressure off as you make a counter offer.

4. Be okay with walking away from a bad offer. Now, this depends on how much experience you have and how many other opportunities are out there. If you’re an entry level job seeker, you may have to deal with pay that’s less than you hoped at first. But as you build career capital, you’ll be much better positioned to confidently walk away from sub-par salary offers, because you know other employers will pay more for your skills. However, the general idea is that you shouldn’t be afraid to turn down an offer that doesn’t meet your requirements.

5. Above all else, research, research, research. None of the points above mean anything unless you go in prepared. Know the average salary of the position you’re applying for. Familiarize yourself with the company you’re applying to. The more you know, the better equipped you’ll be to successfully negotiate your compensation.

Here’s a great resource for researching salaries:

http://www.quintcareers.com/salary_negotiation.html

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December 12, 2013 3 Ways To Build Community In Your Life

I was once approached by a colleague with a very unexpected and uncomfortable suggestion: he thought I should distance myself from a particular co-worker and went as far as to suggest that by associating with this other female colleague, I was actually hurting my career.

I believe that this man was speaking from a place of genuine interest in my well-being—he thought he was doing me a favor. I knew that the person with which he wanted me to stop associating had, as of late, lost some of upper management’s support. However, I perceived this recent lack of support to be due to misunderstanding, not due to a lack of skills or business acumen. I found this person to be extremely intelligent and was learning a lot from her. So, as much as she was a personal friend, she was also someone who was teaching and guiding me with her experience and education.

Instead of accepting my colleague’s advice, I decided to respond by sharing the positive things about my relationship with this particular female co-worker. I described what I learned and valued as a result of associating with her and attempted to show a side of this person to him that he did not know. I asked him, “What better choice than to befriend someone who challenges my thinking and exposes me to things that she has learned and experienced that I have not?”

I share this story to illustrate just how hard being a part of a community can be. You will encounter people who try to sabotage the relationships you’re trying to build, and learning how to handle this gracefully can be quite the challenge. It comes as no surprise that strong communities are built upon respect, reciprocity, and courageous leadership, but how do we go about achieving this? How do we overcome the naysayers and saboteurs?

Author, speaker and consultant Peter Block shares some insight into how healthy communities are formed. Take a peek at this clip from one of his talks:

As Block says, strong communities…

1. Center on people’s gifts and strengths, and give them a space to flourish.

2. Are localized, within walking distance. Keep your community close, if not geographically, then on a personal level. Shoot for that small town feel, where everyone knows your name and everyone’s got something valuable to bring to the table.

3. Disregard labels, encourage genuine interaction. Official titles and bureaucracies are a sure way to kill community. While necessary, don’t let labels define your community. People are not numbers and labels.

Seeing past the labels and looking at personal strengths is what allowed me to defend my coworker using examples of her positive attributes. I’m glad I stuck up for her, because as I suspected, she turned out to be a great teammate and friend. Applying these three simple ideas to your community–whether in your neighborhood or in your office–will transform a stale environment into a dynamic one.

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December 3, 2013 If It’s Getting Too Easy, Shake It Up

We’re all familiar with that awful feeling of being stuck on a plateau, in a dry spell, up a river without a paddle, whatever you want to call it. After the excitement and challenge of learning something new, we get to the point of proficiency, and there is where you’ll encounter the deadly lull.

This is because your brain lights up to new challenges, releasing that feel-good chemical we call dopamine as a reward for reaching new milestones. You know what I’m talking about: that feeling you get when you finally nail the recipe that you never figured you could make, or hitting a personal fitness goal you thought impossible. It’s the joy of landing the big job, acing the tough class, or taking on a project that’s ripe for new personal growth. In other words, it’s the satisfaction that comes after long hours of frustration and failure where you go, “I got this!”

Unfortunately, once you get it, “its” magic wears off a bit. You do this new skill over and over, until your brain no longer feels challenged by what once took your full concentration. Welcome to proficiency, where it’s not a big deal anymore. It’s expected.

Author Whitney Johnson argues that the way to combat a plateau is to implement some personal disruption, writing that “We may be quite adept at doing the math around our future when things are linear, but neither business nor life is linear, and ultimately what our brain needs, even requires, is the dopamine of the unpredictable. More importantly, as we inhabit an increasingly zig-zag world, the best curve you can throw the competition is your ability to leap from one learning curve to the next.”

Don’t think of seeking out new challenges as a task you must do in order to meet the demands of the world at large. Instead, do it for yourself. Want to get that burst of accomplishment you used to get when you were still learning? Then seek out new tasks that push you outside where you’re already proficient. This is where real growth happens, and real growth leads to mastery.

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