Susan Adams talks to seven career and executive coaches, including Ellis Chase, about how to handle 
​common work dilemmas. Read the full article here. 

Excerpt below. 

The manager needs to hire someone immediately. But the last 15 LinkedIn profiles the HR staffer sent over were for people who weren’t remotely qualified. This has dragged on for weeks. The manager finally has a conversation with the HR staffer, who doesn’t apologize, instead saying blithely that he just wants to offer a range of choices. Is it time to complain to the HR guy’s boss? If so, what should you say?

In another situation, a new boss is managing an experienced team. He’s approaching the work in his own way, ignoring the explicit directions given previously by the top boss. As a result the team’s productivity is way down. One team members tries to talk to the boss but the boss wants none of it. What should the employee do? Go over her immediate boss’s head and tell the big boss what’s going on?

A third scenario: On a team of three people, one member repeatedly drops the ball. She comes in late and leaves early. The little work she does is slipshod. Is it time for her teammates to report the slacker to their boss?

These dilemmas are common at work. For advice on how to handle them, I interviewed seven career and executive coaches, in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. My questions: When should you go over someone’s head at work? If you do, what’s the best way to handle the situation?
​
The coaches differ on the first question. Eileen Wolkstein, a longtime coach and straight shooter, says that you should almost never break ranks and go over someone’s head. “People have to find a way around these problems because if you go over someone’s head, it almost always comes back to bite you,” she says. In the HR scenario she says it could work to involve the staffer’s boss, but treading carefully is essential. Suggest to the boss that the three of you sit down and talk through what you need. “I suggest taking the high road,” she says. In a situation where your colleague isn’t performing, Wolkstein says the boss doesn’t want to know about it if the work is getting done.

New York coach Anita Attridge agrees with Wolkstein. Unless the uber-boss sees a problem, he doesn’t want to hear about yours. And often the uber-boss will tell your boss you complained and your boss will retaliate in some subtle, or not so subtle, way. “The way to commit suicide at work is to go to your boss’s manager,” she says. “It’s an unwritten law.” Attridge had just that experience early in her career when she worked at a large corporation. Even though three people had resigned over her boss’s bad behavior, when she complained to her boss’s boss, he said, “He’s getting results. It must be the employees’ problem.”

But the other five coaches say they think that going over someone’s head can work if done carefully. Ellis Chase, a coach retained by Columbia Business School and author of In Search of the Fun-Forever Job: Career Strategies That Work, says you first have to evaluate the corporate culture in your office. Coach Mary Anne Walsh agrees. She has a client who’s a senior vice president in a company she describes as a “flat organization,” an early-stage high tech growth company where people sit in an open space the size of a city block. “There’s no sense of a corner office,” she says. “Dialoguing is a matter of course.” In a place where people pay little attention to hierarchy, it can be easy to jump ranks and discuss problems with superiors or colleagues.

Read the full article. 

Turns our Jennifer Lawrence isn't the only one who has trouble when it comes to asking for a raise. Ellis Chase is featured in another one of Susan Adams' great business articles on Forbes. Below is an excerpt. You can read the full article here. 

Why don’t women earn as much as men? Sexism certainly plays a role, but studies have shown that the majority of women don’t negotiate for a higher salary. According to a 2015 survey by Glamour magazine, more than half, 57%, of women have never asked for a raise. That compares with 46% of men. Another study, conducted in March 2014 by Citigroup and LinkedIn, found that only 27% of women had asked for a raise in the last year. Overwhelmingly, those who asked, got more money. Of the group who requested more pay, 84% got it.
For advice on how women should approach salary discussions, I interviewed eight career coaches, including five trusted sources in New York and three coaches in Silicon Valley, where there is a paucity of women in tech jobs. In Apple’s most recent diversity report, the company revealed that despite efforts to hire more women, only 31% of the workforce is female. The good news, says coach Lisa Stotlar, 51, who is based in Palo Alto and has been coaching for more than 20 years, is that the spotlight on gender disparity in tech can work to women’s advantage in salary negotiations.
But no one should assume that raises will come to them. Says longtime Columbia Business School coach Ellis Chase, 68, author of In Search of the Fun-Forever Job: Career Strategies That Work, “One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to assume that being productive, smart and working like a dog is going to get you recognition and compensation.”
So what should women do? I’ve boiled down the wisdom of the eight coaches to 12 directives.

Read Ellis's latest post on why requesting an informational interview may surprise you with the results. 
​You can find it here.

How To Ace The Interview When There Is No Job
Susan Adams
Forbes Staff
Last week a friend of mine had an interview with the head of an organization where she’d love to work. It wasn’t exactly a job interview. There was no job. But she knew the guy was influential and she hoped to plant a seed that could turn into an offer down the road. The two had good chemistry and the conversation went well but afterward she told me that she worried that she hadn’t gotten the most out of her meeting. Which made me curious: What’s the best way to handle an interview when the person interviewing you isn’t looking for someone to hire?

For answers I turned to four seasoned career coaches and I reviewed some articles by Forbes contributor Liz Ryan, who is big on the idea of a “Pain Hypothesis.” She advises that before an interview, you should try to figure out what the organization’s biggest challenges are and ask questions about those issues. This tactic works well no matter where you’re interviewing. Do a news and web search on the firm and read everything you can get your hands on. If you can find a connection to someone who works there, call and ask for a 10-minute chat or even better, a meeting. Keep probing until you learn what the firm’s weaknesses are. Then direct your questions at the problem or “pain” you’ve uncovered.

In my world of journalism it could be circulation or traffic to a news website. I would ask the interviewer whether traffic was an issue and if shey said yes, I’d say, at Forbes we’ve had the same challenge and we’ve overcome it through our contributor model, through data analytics that help writers develop popular stories and by assigning writers to beats where they break stories and develop a following.

New York career coach Robert Hellmann agrees with Ryan’s approach. “You want to form the hypothesis so you know what the issues are ahead of time,” he says. Among your goals in the meeting should be to convince the manager that you’re not just a good person to consider when he has a job to fill down the road, but that you’re worth referring to another highly-placed contact in the field.

For instance a client of Hellmann’s had been working in the marketing department of a financial services firm and wanted to switch to higher education. Through contacts he landed a meeting with the No. 2 person at a university. Hellmann’s client asked a question faced by all universities: How do you attract more donors? The client suggested he could use his financial background not only to attract new donors but to double the return on investment the school got from existing contributions. He wound up hitting two pain points on the nose, impressing the manager who said, “I’m sorry we didn’t have this conversation two months ago when we needed someone.” Then he went on to say that he knew of a university that needed the expertise the candidate was offering. Hellmann’s client had a meeting at the second school and used the same approach. That administrator referred him to a third person who wound up hiring him. “The third person turned into the actual job interview,” says Hellmann.

If you don’t have a pain hypothesis going in, don’t worry. Use the meeting to ask informed questions about the organization. The coaches I interviewed disagree about how specific to get. Longtime New York coach Ellis Chase, author of In Search of the Fun-Forever Job: Career Strategies That Work, suggests that you keep the questions general. For instance you might say, “I read your organization is planning to introduce a new product. I’m interested in that because we tried that in my office and I’m interested in how you’re going to tackle that.” Anita Attridge, a coach in Basking Ridge, NJ, who previously worked in staffing at Merck, Xerox and The Nature Conservancy, says it’s legitimate to ask even more general questions, like what are your key priorities, what are you really focused on now and what are the skills you look for.

Sarah Stamboulie, a New York career coach who used to work in corporate human resources at Morgan Stanley, Nortel Networks and Cantor Fitzgerald, and as a career coach in Columbia University’s alumni office, recommends drilling down much further. For example, if your expertise is in sales, ask what territories the company is targeting, what the customers bring up as common objections, what issues with products or services the customers are having, and what the company is doing about those issues.


Though Ellis Chase differs with Stamboulie about asking such specific questions, they and all the coaches agree on the importance of following up. He recalls his own experience with a meeting that led to a job. The motto of this story: It can take a long time and following up is essential. He started with a meeting with one of the founders at a big outplacement firm. He’d worked in staffing at what was then Chase Manhattan Bank so he had a lot of expertise to offer. Though there was no specific job open, he hit it off with the firm’s co-founder, who referred him to a more junior colleague. She and Chase set up a 7:30am meeting in Stamford, CT, shortly afterward, but when he arrived, she didn’t show up. Chase called the founder who said, “I’m sorry, do stay in touch with me.” A month later Chase followed up with a call and the founder introduced Chase to a manager who was running the firm’s branch in a region of New Jersey. Still there wasn’t a job, but the manager took to Chase, and, like the founder, he invited Chase to stay in touch. Chase wrote several follow-up notes and finally, nine months after the first meeting with the founder, he was offered a permanent, part-time position. He eventually worked his way up to managing director. “I’m not a great networker,” he admits. “This was the one time in my life that I did everything right: I stuck to it, kept the relationship going. When they said follow up, I followed up.”



Both Chase and Hellmann recommend you go to the interview armed with specific stories that illustrate the challenges you think the employer might face. “Decide on two or three critical skill areas,” says Chase. “Think of two or three concrete examples of each of those skills so you have six stories you’re prepared to tell.”

Stamboulie’s approach is a bit different. She recommends you focus on trying to get your interviewer to talk, rather than trotting out your own story. “It’s a little like going on a date,” she says. “You want to show how you would make a good girlfriend by being nice to them and nice to the waiter. . . Don’t talk about what a great girlfriend you were to your past boyfriend.”

Another tactic: Show that you are current with the news in your field. If I were meeting with a journalism boss this week, I would have several topics to touch on, including the increasing scrutiny of Rolling Stone’s reporting tactics in its attention-getting article about a gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity, the walk-out by editors at The New Republic after the venerable magazine fired respected editor Franklin Foer and the new editor of Bloomberg News, John Micklethwaite of The Economist, who is replacing l,ongtime editor Matthew Winkler. Those topics would demonstrate that I’m a media insider who keeps up with industry happenings.

To me the toughest part of this process is figuring out the pain points and coming up with specific stories illustrating how you could address them, gaining an understanding of the organization’s structure and culture and where you might fit in, and, at least in my field, following up with carefully chosen story ideas that show I understand their pain points, which in journalism means the need for appropriate story ideas.

All the coaches said that no-job interviews are the most effective kind. Often when you go to an interview for a job that’s being advertised, the company has already chosen a front-runner, frequently an internal candidate, and is just covering its bases by talking to more people. Or maybe the hiring manager has decided to hire that sharp woman he met six months ago who asked all those great questions, volunteered great ideas connected to her own experience, and sent him a note last week with a suggestion that hadn’t occurred to him about how to boost sales.


Read the article on Forbes.com

In the first part of this piece, I wrote about how important effective presentation skills are for visibility in an organization – essentially a political skill. 

Now comes the tough part: How can you get past the terror of public speaking? The answer is simple – preparation. There are three essential elements that go into effective public speaking: analyzing the audience, designing the presentation, and developing superior delivery technique.

I hate to sound superficial, but I strongly believe that the last item is the most important. It’s like interviewing; the packaging is as important as the content, maybe even more so. Without it, the content doesn’t always come across that well. 

1) Analyzing the Audience

A presentation will be more effective the more you know about your audience. Even if it’s a staff meeting, do you about know everyone in the room? Chances are there might be someone from a different department. Maybe that person could change the dynamic of the room (maybe it’s the EVP of the whole department?). 

In a larger group, with perhaps a more formal presentation, do you have a real sense of the room? This could be a critical element in the effectiveness of your presentation. A canned presentation given without consideration of the audience has less chance of success. 

Several years ago, I was asked to do a yearly presentation for a large group – usually about 300 - at an open house for a departmental program at New York University. It was impossible to figure out the audience in advance, because it was open to a large community. So, in order to get a real sense of the audience, I would show up about a half hour early, sit in the back, and listen to people as they walked in. This always gave me a good sense of what the tone of the overall group was going to be.

Sometimes, if I overheard something that was relevant to the presentation, I would address the person who said it, and incorporate it, which is always a great way of getting audience members involved. Make it personal. Establish a connection. 

When you do have the opportunity to analyze the audience in advance, there are several questions you need to address before designing your presentation.  

• What is the level of experience in the room?
  
• What is the context of the presentation?
  
• What are the group’s expectations?
  
• What are the potential benefits to the audience?
  
• What is the overall attitude of the audience?  
  

You can’t always figure out all of these in advance, but the more you know, the more you can adjust the presentation to the needs of the group. For example, if there’s a wide range of experience, then a major presentations skill is to be able to teach to both ends of the spectrum, as well as to the middle. Something for everyone. 

2) Designing the Presentation

The first critical aspect of design is to figure out the purpose of the presentation. Is it to inform? To persuade? To motivate? Or some combination of the three? That will certainly affect the tone.

Second, what is the objective? Even if it’s a 10-minute presentation to a group of five, make sure that you know what your main point is. When I teach a 45-minute introductory class about presentations – or any class, for that matter – I’ll always announce at the beginning why we’re doing it. (More about that opening in a bit.)

Here’s a suggested order for putting the presentation together:

• Organize content
  
• Select and sequence key points
  
• Prepare transition statements
  
• Develop a closing that summarizes
  
• Develop an opening
  

See something strange in the order?

The last one is preparing the opening! It’s last because it’s the hardest, and because it’s tough to prepare unless you know exactly what the content of the presentation will be. An unclear opening will lose the audience, and will make it difficult to get them back. I suggest the following elements in an opening:

Introduce yourself, even in a small group where you know everyone.  Maybe there’ll be one person you don’t know. Don’t assume. 

• Announce your objective.
  
• Describe the agenda of the presentation, i.e., the main points to be covered.
  
• Announce whether you’ll be taking questions during or after the presentation.
  
• Tell approximately how long the presentation will be (your audience will be grateful).
  

Be certain to outline the presentation – do not script. The outline will help you stay focused. A script will lead you to memorize, which is not a successful or reliable technique for public speaking. Memorizing makes you focus way too much on the material, when you should be focusing on how it’s being presented. If you lose your place, it becomes a distraction – to you and to the audience. Prepare by rehearsing off the outline, or off the slides in your deck. That will make the presentation flow better, and sound more spontaneous and conversational. It’s also much easier for your audience to listen when your presentation doesn’t sound so rehearsed. Practice is the key. 

Make sure there are connections between the key points. If a presenter just announces what the next topic is, it’s not always clear what the relationship is to the previous segment. That relationship should be spelled out. 

A closing is not “Well, that’s it!” It’s a summation of the main points that have been covered. An audience should know what’s going to happen; what’s happening as the presentation unfolds; and, ultimately, what was covered. Make it easy for the audience. Remember – a successful presentation is geared to the audience. If that works, then the presenter looks good. Which brings us back to the politics of professional presentations, which we discussed in Part 1.

In Part 3, I’ll discuss the actual mechanics of delivery, which, as I mentioned early, is probably the most important part of effective presentations. 


Ellis

For a quick course on networking, pick up my Ebook, Networking: How to Make the Connections You Need

If you're looking for more in-depth advice on your job search, In Search of the Fun-Forever Job: Career Strategies that Work is available in paperback and Ebook.