First Friday Book Synopsis – September

It’s time once again for the monthly First Friday Book Synopsis.

Here’s the deal: you pay Karl Krayer and Randy Mayeux $11 each to review a current business book for you, and get a free buffet breakfast! That’s $22 for two book reviews, and they throw in breakfast and networking with area businessmen. And you save the cost of buying the books, because they’ve already told you everything you need to know about them.

This month, Karl and Randy have selected a couple of terrific new books:

• Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships by Daniel Goleman (Bantam, 2007)

• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Random House, 2007)

Click here to register for the event.

Introverts guide to self-promotion

When I wrote about sociable introverts last spring, I never imagined it would become one of the most popular posts on this blog. Even to this day, that post sometimes gets more hits than my current posts. There is much more interest in how introverts guide their careers than I ever imagined.

One of the biggest challenges for introverts is self-promotion. While self-promotion seems natural and normal for most extroverts, many introverts dislike self-promotion because they is draws too much attention to themselves. Self-promotion, however, is a key component of communicating your brand, developing your business, or getting the next job.

Part of the reason that introverts shy away (no pun intended) from self-promotion is that they see the extroverts glad-handing at social events and assertively shouting their stories. These activities are sometimes viewed by introverts as at best as uncomfortable, and at worst disingenuous and obnoxious. As distasteful or awkward as it is, however, introverts need to master the art of self-promotion just as much as extroverts. Their style and methods will likely be very different, but the principles are the same.

Marci Alboher, author of the New York Times column Shifting Careers, offered several suggestions for introverts in a recent column:

• First, you need to make peace with the fact that you have to actively tell others about your accomplishments. Others are not paying attention to you — they are busy telling their own story.
• Focus on your strengths. Many introverts are more comfortable writing their thoughts and ideas than speaking them. Find creative ways to use emails, letters, newsletters, blogs, portfolios, etc.
• Find a way to become an expert or the go-to person for something in your organization, so other people are coming to you.
• Develop and practice your presentation skills.

Of course, the first rule of effective self promotion is that you have something meaningful to promote (Duh!), but that concept is lost of some people. As Marshall Goldsmith observes in his book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, “Being smart turns people on. Announcing how smart you are turns people off.”

Career in a Box

Are you living in a box? Is your career in a box?

Too many people live and work in a box of someone else’s choosing, often because they don’t know any better. Some people don’t even know they are in a box; they just acquiesce to others’ expectations and think this is all life has to offer. Others know they are in a box, but have no idea how to escape.

How do we get in a box?

We are conditioned by many influences in our life — our parents, teachers, friends, pastors, spouses, employers, etc. — to behave in certain ways. Much of the conditioning is positive, but sometimes we are conditioned to behave in ways that are contrary to our natural personality. Sometimes we are conditioned to behave in certain ways because of our gender, our nationality, or race.

A recent study in Scotland found that even career advisors put job seekers in boxes, frequently reinforcing gender and job stereotypes. What’s the lesson? You need to be in charge of defining who you are and what your best career fit is. Don’t let others put you in a box.

In his groundbreaking 1997 article The Brand Called You, Tom Peters’ wrote

“You’re branded, branded, branded, branded… We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.”

Like it or not, you already have a brand. Everybody has a brand. Is it the brand you chose, or the brand someone else assigned to you?

How do we get out of a box?

Okay, so you find yourself in a box and want to get out, but you don’t know how.

The first and best place to start is to develop self-awareness of who you are and what you were created to do. You should be aware of your personality and behavioral preferences, your abilities and talents, and your passion.

Studies have shown that personality can be effective predictor of both job satisfaction and job performance effectiveness. When you understand your personality traits — your true nature — you can begin to identify the types of tasks and work environments that you are best suited for. While there are a number of good profile instruments on the market, such as DiSC and MBTI, I’ve found that CORE MAP is the most effective profile for identifying conditioned behavior patterns and revealing your true nature.

Developing self-awareness may take a lot of effort, but it is the essential first step to getting out of the box that others have put you in.

 

Study: Personality can predict performance

A recent study conducted by Dr. Nathan Bowling at Wright State University found that personality can be an effective predictor of job performance success. A couple of excerpts from the findings follow:
I’ve often debated with fellow graduate students and managers over the relationship between job performance and job satisfaction. Are employees satisfied at work because they perform at a high level? Or do employees perform at a high level because they are satisfied at work? Prevailing wisdom is that high performance follows job satisfaction, though there are compelling arguments for both sides.

Bowling’s research, however, rejects both arguments. He suggests that both are a result of personality characteristics:

“My study shows that a cause and effect relationship does not exist between job satisfaction and performance. Instead, the two are related because both satisfaction and performance are the result of employee personality characteristics, such as self-esteem, emotional stability, extroversion and conscientiousness.”

What are the implications? Please share your thoughts…