Leadership is getting others to believe in you and your ideas. It’s the foundation of success in every career. Find practical leadership tips on my blog.
Make your message better with my new mini-course: How to Communicate Anything. No matter what you want to say, using my four-step process for clarifying and improving your message will help you communicate more effectively. As an English teacher, I taught thousands of students how to write. I started teaching at the USC Freshman Writing program when I was in graduate school, and love teaching so much that I continued teaching for another dozen years after I graduate. The more…
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Everybody negotiates. Avoid these three negotiating mistakes. We negotiate the big stuff, like salaries and contracts, and we negotiate the little stuff, curfews and who will do the dishes. From my years as an entrepreneur and my coach training, I’ve honed my negotiating skills. I’m not supposed to make negotiating mistakes, but it happened to me recently. In the end, even though I got what I wanted, the whole process left me feeling that I was in the wrong. My…
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There’s Positive Feedback, Coaching and Counseling When people genuinely want to do well, and nearly all employees do, a coaching approach to feedback works best. Recently my client Christina* was taking her new hire, Julie, along for a meeting with a vendor. Christina, Julie, and the vendor were on site, looking at an event space. The vendor was recommending more tables. “I think we need to do it,” said Christina, “but I’ll have to get my boss to approve it.”…
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Today is the 25th anniversary of Sleepless in Seattle, and my husband, Gary Foster, was the driving creative force behind the film. Of all the people I’ve learned from in my life, I’ve learned more from him than anyone else about the ability to collaborate, be tactfully assertive, and build a great team in order to realize a common goal and vision. Read his piece on what it took to turn a good script from a then-unknown writer into a…
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News quiz: Who is publicly advocating for private investors to balance their investment returns with “the prosperity and security of their fellow citizens”? If you answered BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, the head of one of Wall Street’s flagship firms, you were right. But if you didn’t know, you might be tempted to answer Bernie Sanders or someone from Occupy Wall Street. As head of one of Wall Street’s flagship firms, Larry Fink made more than one headline by focusing his…
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