Susan Scott's Blog, page 101

Fierce Resources: The Facebook Friend Request Employees Dread

This week’s Fierce Resource was first published last month on the Business Daily News website, and this week was re-syndicated on Yahoo News.

The Facebook Friend Request Employees Dread, sites statistics from our most recent Facebook in the Workplace survey and quotes Fierce CEO & President, Halley Bock.

“Getting a friend request on Facebook is usually exciting, but there is one notable exception. When that request comes from a boss or manager, a majority of workers say they are uncomfortable in accepting it. Workers have good reason to have those feelings. That’s because nearly 1 in 3 employees say they know of a person who has been reprimanded for inappropriate postings on Facebook, research by Fierce Inc., found. That research also found that 40 percent of employees engage in inappropriate communications with co-workers on Facebook, including everything from gossiping to flirting.”

To read the full article on Yahoo News, click here.

Learning through Conversations

Savvy businesses have learned that in order to keep their employees engaged, they need to provide continual learning opportunities. These same savvy companies usually provide continued academic learning options, seminars, workshops, and training to develop their talent and keep a competitive edge. However, they might just be missing another learning opportunity, and that is investing in important quality time for their employees to have different types of conversations together.

It can be hard to make the case for quality time to have conversations. The world moves fast, and it is common for many to leave the office with a mounting to-do list waiting for them the next day.

However, within your organization you probably have a wealth of knowledge that lives in the minds of your employees and is not written down. A productive way to unlock this information and increase engagement is to allow opportunities for teams and other departments to connect.

At Fierce, each month we do a Lunch and Learn. In these sessions, someone from the team brings knowledge about something that impacts our organization or a broader topic that they have expertise about. Those who want to attend come to discuss the topic, learn, and explore how it applies to their work. It’s a time for our team to expand our minds intellectually as well as build stronger relationships with each other through the conversations that take place in the room.

Within your organization, how can you use conversations to learn more?

Fierce Tip of the Week: Share Your Talents

“Hide not your talents. They for use were made. What’s a sundial in the shade?” - Benjamin Franklin

This week’s tip encourages you to be the leader that supports your team highlighting and sharing their different talents.

Provide employees an opportunity to share something they excel at, perhaps at a lunch meeting or by letting them pick an out of office activity. As a leader when you engage the hearts of those you lead, you will not only have more robust conversations, you will also learn something about your employees that may actually have more business use than you think.

Fierce Resources: Webinar Opportunity on Leading Collaborative Virtual Teams

For our Fierce Resource this week, we want to share with you a learning opportunity. Netspeed Learning Solutions is hosting a five part, 2013 Thought Leadership Webinar Series, featuring Fierce CEO & President, Halley Bock.

Join Netspeed Learning Solutions founder Cynthia Clay, on May 15th at 2 PM EST, as she presents the second webinar in the series: Leading Collaborative Virtual Teams: Managing Dispersed Teams that Get Results.

“As advancing technology and globalization continue to impact many organizations, it’s clear that virtual teams require consistent attention, direction, and recognition from managers. Strong work relationships remain critical to drive productivity and support innovation, trust, and nimble teamwork. But building and maintaining strong relationships becomes challenging as teams become more dispersed. What must a leader do in the virtual workplace to effectively manage distributed team members?”

To learn more about the webinar and register for this event, click here.

Fierce Tip of the Week: Be Right Gracefully

I had a problem with wanting to flaunt being right in situations. I learned the lesson the hard way: This inclination was not serving me.

Learning to not do the “nanner-nanner told you so” dance every time I accurately predicted something was not easy. However, once I stopped, it allowed me to strengthen all relationships in my life.

It strengthened those relationships because nobody likes a know-it-all. Most importantly, though, I started paying more attention to my response, and it forced me to be a better listener.

Instead of taking the time to pat myself on the back for being right, I take the time to ask questions and learn from others why they feel differently. I really try to listen to their point of view and look at it as a learning opportunity for both of us.

This week I encourage you to join me in my practice to be right gracefully. Should you find yourself in the good fortune of making a right call this week, take the opportunity to not gloat and instead learn more about others’ perspectives.

Fierce Resources: 3 Ways to Create an Ownership Mentality Within Your Team

This week’s Fierce Resource was published yesterday on The Daily Muse, and was written by Fierce President & CEO, Halley Bock.

3 Ways to Create an Ownership Mentality Within Your Team, explores how, you as a leader, can create a culture of personal accountability by empowering your employees to really take ownership over their work.

“A culture of personal accountability, where employees possess the freedom to make appropriate decisions and the courage to take ownership, is the single most powerful, most desired, and least understood characteristic of a successful work environment.”

To read the full article, click here.

Widen Your Perspective

When was the last time one of your strongly held beliefs was flipped upside down? What about something that caught you by complete surprise?

These scenarios usually happen to me when I travel outside of the USA, my home. Right when I least expect it, a belief or assumption I have gets thoroughly jolted. I’m usually not prepared for it.

When I was traveling in Morocco last week, I was completely caught off-guard, in a beautiful and touching way, by how many people expressed sympathy and heart-felt sorrow about the attack in Boston. I had assumed that even though it was all over the international news, there were other things top of mind for the local people – much like it is for me when I am at home.

When I shared that I was from the United States, more than not, people would say things like “My heart goes out to your country and people – it is so horrible”. They said it in English, in French, in Spanish, and Arabic – oftentimes, it was a beautiful, jumbled mixture of multiple languages.

The moments were humbling, connected, and powerful.

As Richard Branson says in his new book, Screw Business as Usual, “The way we live – and the way we do business – is changing like never before. Our growing interconnectedness, in part fueled by the growth of social media, is transforming the way the world works.”

If we look at our problems on our planet and how we are going to solve them, it is going to happen when we step into vulnerable situations and test our own assumptions. Only then can we have solid ground beneath us to have the conversations we need to have.

The thing is: You do not need to travel ten hours away from home to do this. The challenge is how we do it in our own backyard.

So I ask: What are you doing to widen your perspective?

Fierce Tip of the Week: Don’t Assume, Ask!

We write about making assumptions often on the Fierce blog, because inaccurate assumptions are the achilles heel of conversations.

Asking questions, checking for understanding, and being thorough are how you can combat making wrong assumptions.

Often we skip over the chance to dig deeper and get clarity, not because we are afraid to, but because we are moving too quickly or underestimate how costly not asking is.

This week’s Fierce tip encourages you to ask, in the moment, all the questions you need to ask in order to be clear.

If you encounter impatience, speak to it, and explain that taking the time now for you to fully understand will avoid costly mistakes later. And, if you leave a conversation feeling like you do understand, yet you find yourself making assumptions, stop what you are doing and re-engage in the conversation.

Fierce Resource: Tough Lesson About the Power of Appreciation

This week’s Fierce Resource was first published on the Fierce blog and was written by Fierce Senior Vice President of Training and Program Development, Aimee Windmiller-Wood.

Tough Lessons About the Power of the Appreciation provides insights about showing appreciation to your employees and, in turn, how that boosts morale, makes people more productive, and creates better leadership.

“I was so focused on managing productivity, I forgot to acknowledge the very people who were able to make or break my success, our success. I vowed right then to never begin their day in that way.”

To read the full blog, click here.

Women in the Workplace – Can We Talk about This?

Recently I’ve begun to read Lean In, the book by Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook. As a woman, who works for a women-owned business, ran by a woman CEO, and with a staff of about 75% women – this topic interests me.

But larger than my own interest, what really spurred me to read this book was the intense criticism that Ms. Sandberg has received for just writing it. Every time I’ve heard the book mentioned, by either a woman or a man, from conversations to articles to interviews, the reaction was intense. Overwhelmingly, the sentiment was the same – who does she think she is?

I had to see for myself what all this hype was about. And I was shocked, not by what she wrote, but by the reaction to it. And it made me think: Are conversations about women in the workplace and gender equality ones that people think should be avoided in order to “keep the peace”? If so, what are the prices we are paying for those missing conversations?

From my perspective, the price in this instance is that public discourse about gender equality is so few and far between. We spend more time talking about whether she is qualified to write the book rather than about the subject matter.

As Susan Scott says in Fierce Leadership: A Bold Alternative to the Worst Best Practice: “What gets talked about and how it gets talked about determines what will happen. Or won’t happen.”

Have you read Lean In? What do you think?