If you want to move up the corporate ladder, it won’t be easy. The competition is intense. Here are a few things you can do to make yourself more promotable, starting with taking stock of yourself.
What are your strengths? You want to build on those, while you work to make your weaknesses irrelevant.
What do you offer the company, your team, and your boss? This will probably grow out of your strengths, but asking the question this way helps you think about contribution. All things being equal, the folks who get promoted are the ones who contribute to the company’s success.
Here’s an example. A young coaching client of mine told me that she “didn’t play the game” and “told the truth.” She offered those as reasons why others might be getting promoted faster.
After some work, she decided that what she offered her company was an accurate perception of the market that they weren’t getting anywhere else. With that insight, she could pay attention to making that contribution more valuable and easier to take.
Next, take stock of your organization. Who gets promoted in your company?
In some companies, the people who get promoted are the ones who deliver solid business results. In some others, a key career skill is playing golf. In some companies, the top jobs go to people from finance, in others it’s people from marketing. In some companies the people who scamper up the corporate ladder are the ones who provide legendary customer service, while in others delivering production efficiencies wins the day.
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September 22nd, 2008 | Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments
Work\werk\n: an opportunity for discovering and shaping; the place where the self meets the world.
Regardless of what business we are in, what projects we are working on or what interests we have in the world – we are all in the business of relationship building. In business we are always cultivating relationships with employees, with prospective clients, with colleagues. In our personal lives the place of relationship is often more obvious and more central. And our deeper relationship with ourselves is at the core of how we manage and grow each of those other relationships and therefore our lives.
At every moment in our professional and personal lives we are faced with decisions – one after another that create and move along the landscape of our lives. What criteria do you use to make good decisions, what benchmarks do you employ to measure your decision making process? The issue of relationships and decision-making are closely allied. If we are in close, clear contact with our own beings, our wisdom, our intuitive faculties- the decisions we make have more likelihood of keeping us moving along a path that is in integrity with our values and real goals. When we allow the rush of events to disconnect us from this deeper well of understanding and vision – all that we do suffers. I hear over and over again from clients how there isn’t the time, how the bottom-line is what must determine their choices and often their direction. I am not immune to the pressures and demands of the world we all live in. But if we are to, in some way, affect the world positively and develop a life that is worth living we must find some time to allow for the growth and development of that which will give us the foundation, creativity and energy to make moment-to-moment sound decisions.
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September 3rd, 2008 | Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments
Do you know how many people exactly to invite? Have you already set your wedding date? Have you set your wedding budget? If the answer is now, don’t worry. These are some of the most difficult questions to answer you will be faced with during the planning process. There are many difficult tasks in the initial wedding planning process such as making the guest list. As you make your decisions, you may find yourself making compromises due to parental, budgetary, venue capacity, location and many other forces.
Wedding ceremonies mean different things to different people. You have to make a decision if your wedding is going to be a once-in-a-lifetime event or smaller more intimate celebration. The most significant limiting factor is money. Your budget limits the number of guests you can invite more than anything else. After you establish the reception budget, you can quickly do the math and decide the maximum number of guests you can afford to invite.
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August 25th, 2008 | Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments
One of my greatest problems with the control of my weight is the fact that so much self disipline is needed to achieve any tangible results. Ah, but I hear you saying, “Whats new about that” We all have that problem! Tell us something new!
Well yes we do all know that that is the biggest problem is it not. Lets face it, eating is one of life’s greatest pleasures, and we would be pretty abnormal if this was otherwise.
After all, most of us are “regular” people. How many of us stick to the perfect diet all the time, we all have our struggles with food to a greater or lesser extent. If we can recognize an awareness of this problem, and also make a point of knowing a little bit about our health, and also proper food nutrition, we are then much more likely to make wiser decisions about our choices of food.
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August 18th, 2008 | Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments
Did you start your day with Love or Hate?
Discover how to improve the quality of your life by asking this simple question!
As it has become obvious from the first three articles ( SH-H-H-H! Feelings Present!, The Big Cover-Up!, And Personal Decisions Of The Heart: Feelings Buried Alive And Still Lurking! ), that your feelings and the charge of energy that has built up behind them is continually lurking within you, holding you captive.
Worse yet, you may not even know they are there waiting to throw your life off track. To all intents and purposes your life appears to be different than anyone else’s life until you look closer and discover that you are, as is everyone else, affected by feelings, by what you think and by how you respond to the feelings buried within. Once you take a look inside yourself, what do you find?
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August 11th, 2008 | Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments
Ben danced to his own beat. He never listened to anyone, not his parents or his instructors. Ben’s motto was “I do it my own way.” As a consequence, Ben’s life was a series of bad decisions. He was unsuccessful in life. Nevertheless, Ben’s decision making never got any better. As the county guard shut the door to Ben’s cell, he ordered, “Lights out!” Ben screamed, “I’m the man! You can’t make me do anything.” The prison light goes out. Ben is left in the dark.
The Critical Decision
Have you ever wondered why some people continue to make bad decisions? You see million-dollar celebrities doing it. You can see this action in government officials and business leaders. There are no discriminators. From the very rich to the poorest of the poor, we see people caught in a vicious cycle of bad decision making. Sadly, we see it much closer than that. We witness relatives making those bad decisions. Despite all the wise counsel, the poor decisions continue.
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July 20th, 2008 | Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments
Today more than ever before, medical practice management is not just about caring for your patients - it is also about running a successful business. If you lack efficiency, your quality of service will ultimately suffer. To thrive, you need to make informed decisions, but this can be a challenge. After all, as the saying goes, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Without a way to measure relevant financial and operational indicators, you might find yourself relying on educated guesswork. Thankfully, there is an alternative to good guessing: benchmarking - a strategic management tool that helps evaluate effectiveness and fosters goal-setting.
Essentially, benchmarking provides a snapshot of the performance of your business and helps you understand where you are in relation to a particular standard. If your accounts receivable are averaging a sluggish 54 days and you’re wondering whether this is normal, benchmarking can show how you compare to your specialty’s average at just 45 days, signifying not only that you’re trailing behind your peers but that a reduction should be achievable. Or, if you find that your patient wait times have increased, benchmarking can help you find the optimal balance between same-day and future appointment openings. Benchmarking can even help effectively manage your successes. Suppose you know your practice is gaining new patients at an astonishing rate. Only by analyzing this growth will you be able to easily predict whether it is time to hire another full time employee, or if this is just a short-term spike in workload.
So, what exactly should you be benchmarking? In a nutshell, the statistics and trends you need to gather can be broken down into two categories; operational and revenue-related.
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July 20th, 2008 | Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments
It can be stressful when you have to make important decisions regarding your family, career, and other areas of your life. We all want to make the right decisions and this can create a lot of anxiety. As a result, here are some suggestions on how to manage the stresses of making the right decisions.
First, get all of the facts and necessary information to make the right decision. Find out the necessary facts of the situation and study all relevant information. This is important because you do not want to miss critical information that could make a difference in your decision.
Think about what you want and consider the possible outcomes of your decision. Each decision will lead to new opportunities. Consider the possible opportunities and go from there. Spend some time just thinking about what is it that you want.
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July 20th, 2008 | Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments