Source: http://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/the-8-qualities-of-remarkable-employees.html
by Jeff Haden
Forget good to great. Here's what makes a great employee remarkable.
Great employees are reliable, dependable, proactive, diligent, great leaders and great followers... they possess a wide range of easily-defined—but hard to find—qualities.
A few hit the next level. Some employees are remarkable, possessing qualities that may not appear on performance appraisals but nonetheless make a major impact on performance.
Here are eight qualities of remarkable employees:
1. They ignore job descriptions. The smaller the company, the more important it is that employees can think on their feet, adapt quickly to shifting priorities, and do whatever it takes, regardless of role or position, to get things done.
When a key customer's project is in jeopardy, remarkable employees know without being told there's a problem and jump in without being asked—even if it's not their job.
2. They’re eccentric... The best employees are often a little different: quirky, sometimes irreverent, even delighted to be unusual. They seem slightly odd, but in a really good way. Unusual personalities shake things up, make work more fun, and transform a plain-vanilla group into a team with flair and flavor.
People who aren't afraid to be different naturally stretch boundaries and challenge the status quo, and they often come up with the best ideas.
3. But they know when to dial it back. An unusual personality is a lot of fun... until it isn't. When a major challenge pops up or a situation gets stressful, the best employees stop expressing their individuality and fit seamlessly into the team.
Remarkable employees know when to play and when to be serious; when to be irreverent and when to conform; and when to challenge and when to back off. It’s a tough balance to strike, but a rare few can walk that fine line with ease.
4. They publicly praise... Praise from a boss feels good. Praise from a peer feels awesome, especially when you look up to that person.
Remarkable employees recognize the contributions of others, especially in group settings where the impact of their words is even greater.
5. And they privately complain. We all want employees to bring issues forward, but some problems are better handled in private. Great employees often get more latitude to bring up controversial subjects in a group setting because their performance allows greater freedom.
Remarkable employees come to you before or after a meeting to discuss a sensitive issue, knowing that bringing it up in a group setting could set off a firestorm.
6. They speak when others won’t. Some employees are hesitant to speak up in meetings. Some are even hesitant to speak up privately.
An employee once asked me a question about potential layoffs. After the meeting I said to him, “Why did you ask about that? You already know what's going on.” He said, “I do, but a lot of other people don't, and they're afraid to ask. I thought it would help if they heard the answer from you.”
Remarkable employees have an innate feel for the issues and concerns of those around them, and step up to ask questions or raise important issues when others hesitate.
7. They like to prove others wrong. Self-motivation often springs from a desire to show that doubters are wrong. The kid without a college degree or the woman who was told she didn't have leadership potential often possess a burning desire to prove other people wrong.
Education, intelligence, talent, and skill are important, but drive is critical. Remarkable employees are driven by something deeper and more personal than just the desire to do a good job.
8. They’re always fiddling. Some people are rarely satisfied (I mean that in a good way) and are constantly tinkering with something: Reworking a timeline, adjusting a process, tweaking a workflow.
Great employees follow processes. Remarkable employees find ways to make those processes even better, not only because they are expected to… but because they just can't help it.
Jeff Haden learned much of what he knows about business and technology as he worked his way up in the manufacturing industry. Everything else he picks up from ghostwriting books for some of the smartest leaders he knows in business. @jeff_haden
Seeking candidate with industry related sales experience (construction equipment, car rental, tools, welding gases, rentals.
Responsible for generating profitable revenue by sourcing new customers and accounts, growing and retaining existing accounts, and providing unmatched customer service.
Essential Functions:
Account Management: Learns to manage assigned territory and accounts by developing and employing a thorough understanding of customer needs, competitors, and market conditions. Participates in targeting sales calls to customers at job sites, business offices, and institutional account locations to coordinate customer needs and rent equipment.
Retains and Grows Accounts: Learns techniques to retain existing accounts by meeting customer product and service needs. Assists in resolving customer issues efficiently and effectively, manages customer expectations and coordinates with the sales team. Works with District Sales Manager, Branch Manager and mentors to match customer needs with the right equipment and negotiates rental contracts. Ensures customer satisfaction by facilitating positive, long-term relationships with job site account representatives and account decision makers.
Prospects New Accounts: Learns to prospect new business by soliciting favorable contacts with potential new accounts based on territory analysis and planning. Works with seasoned salespeople to meet or exceed rental revenue forecast without sacrificing month-over-month price improvement.
Market Strategy: Learns to meet rental revenue and sales goals by developing and executing a successful business strategy to meet revenue goals. Assists in analyzing market conditions, competitive position, and potential and current customer needs to obtain rental contracts and generate business on assigned accounts. May participate in pricing decisions within approved guidelines.
Sales Accountability: Prepares reports on sales results, market conditions, or account metrics. May assist with collecting customer accounts or in familiarizing and training customers on equipment and vehicles. May negotiate contracts within established guidelines.
Qualifications
Minimum three years sales and account management experience in the attainment of challenging sales goals.
Requires Bachelor’s Degree or some college and 5 years sales work experience.
Communicates effectively verbally and in writing.
Demonstrates effective interpersonal and influencing skills.
Strong customer service skills with ability to successfully cold call new and potential customers.
Valid driver’s license.
Company Vehicle Provided
Contact me - kimberly.hughes@rightthinginc.com
Responsible for generating profitable revenue by sourcing new customers and accounts, growing and retaining existing accounts, and providing unmatched customer service.
Essential Functions:
Account Management: Learns to manage assigned territory and accounts by developing and employing a thorough understanding of customer needs, competitors, and market conditions. Participates in targeting sales calls to customers at job sites, business offices, and institutional account locations to coordinate customer needs and rent equipment.
Retains and Grows Accounts: Learns techniques to retain existing accounts by meeting customer product and service needs. Assists in resolving customer issues efficiently and effectively, manages customer expectations and coordinates with the sales team. Works with District Sales Manager, Branch Manager and mentors to match customer needs with the right equipment and negotiates rental contracts. Ensures customer satisfaction by facilitating positive, long-term relationships with job site account representatives and account decision makers.
Prospects New Accounts: Learns to prospect new business by soliciting favorable contacts with potential new accounts based on territory analysis and planning. Works with seasoned salespeople to meet or exceed rental revenue forecast without sacrificing month-over-month price improvement.
Market Strategy: Learns to meet rental revenue and sales goals by developing and executing a successful business strategy to meet revenue goals. Assists in analyzing market conditions, competitive position, and potential and current customer needs to obtain rental contracts and generate business on assigned accounts. May participate in pricing decisions within approved guidelines.
Sales Accountability: Prepares reports on sales results, market conditions, or account metrics. May assist with collecting customer accounts or in familiarizing and training customers on equipment and vehicles. May negotiate contracts within established guidelines.
Qualifications
Minimum three years sales and account management experience in the attainment of challenging sales goals.
Requires Bachelor’s Degree or some college and 5 years sales work experience.
Communicates effectively verbally and in writing.
Demonstrates effective interpersonal and influencing skills.
Strong customer service skills with ability to successfully cold call new and potential customers.
Valid driver’s license.
Company Vehicle Provided
Contact me - kimberly.hughes@rightthinginc.com
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Source: http://www.recruiter.com/articles/linkedin-connections/?spMailingID=5188714&spUserID=MTY3MTI3NzgwMjAS1&spJobID=194025868&spReportId=MTk0MDI1ODY4S0
LinkedIn connections were easy to come by when LinkedIn first started. There was a shiny, new feeling to connecting with people. A lot of professionals didn’t think twice about connecting with people.
Now it’s 2012 and the environment is much different. LinkedIn and social networking is no longer shiny and new. The general idea of connecting with people online has been hashed out through countless social networks and some suggest that a feeling of social networking fatigue has set in. It’s no surprise that the folks with the most LinkedIn connections started building their network in the beginning. Simply put, although it may be harder to build connections on LinkedIn, it’s infinitely more important.
If you are just starting out on LinkedIn or if you are just now waking up to the reality of its importance in the professional world, where do you begin? Don’t worry – even if you’ve waited until now to start building a serious connection network, you haven’t missed the boat.
Tips for Building LinkedIn Connections
Look for the Hubs: The first thing that you want to do on LinkedIn is to look for the networking hubs within your chosen industry, profession, and geography. These connection hubs are a little harder to pinpoint now that LinkedIn doesn’t show the exact amount of connections. However, you can perform people searches and then sort by number of connections. Look for people with a high number of connections, lots of shared connections with you, and extremely well-developed profiles (indicating active use.) These are people that you want to connect with; it’s worth taking the time to physically meet them if you can add value to their business. Developing associations with the strongest networkers in your chosen group creates the mathematical connectivity happen. You need to be connected to the centers of any connection cluster or you will never have an expansive network.
Use your Real Life Connections: The next step in building contacts is to connect with your real-life contacts. It’s very easy to forget to include a particular group of your contacts. Set aside an entire day and run through all of these different types of contacts – make sure you include everyone from these broad groups of connections: Colleagues, Friends, Family, School buddies, Teachers, Clients/Customers, Vendors, Partners, Relatives, Service Providers (your accountant, banker, IT provider, etc.), Social media buddies (people you routinely connect with on other networks), People that you have met in the last year (save those business cards!), Competitors (that you know personally) and Ex-colleagues. Connecting with all of your closest real life contacts in a systematic way will immediately grow your network. You should have close to a 100% acceptance rate to these LinkedIn invites – if you don’t, re-check your methods.
Be Consistent: Consistent growth is one of the least mentioned aspects of building a strong LinkedIn network. Building a strong professional network is not a one-time task, but rather a daily routine. Make sure that every externally facing aspect of your professional life contains your LinkedIn profile. Common items for review: Email signature, website, social profiles, business cards, and any kind of auto-responders. After you add your profile to every channel, the next key is consistent invites. Make asking for a connection a part of your regular workflow. Every time you meet with a customer, talk with a partner, make a sale, go on an interview, go to a meeting, etc… send an immediate LinkedIn connection invite. One common short-cut is to use LinkedIn invites as a substitute for a thank-you email. As long as you write a nice personal note, it saves a step and may deliver more long-term value than an email or even hand-written note.
Make Yourself Visible: While active methods of developing LinkedIn connects are best, passive methods are also important. Make sure that you have a well-developed, comprehensive LinkedIn profile and that you include all of the common phrases about what you do and what your company does. It’s a mistake to write your LinkedIn profile like a resume: people want to connect with successful professionals in their own area of interest, not with job seekers or network-hungry marketers. Make sure that you look like someone that you would want to connect with. After ensuring your profile looks good, it’s time to get active. Participate regularly in LinkedIn groups and LinkedIn Answers. LinkedIn also has an update field (much like Twitter) where you can share interesting articles, status updates, and anything else you want to discuss. Make sure that you aren’t ignoring this update feature – it’s a powerful way to make yourself visible in your industry.
Connect, Don’t Friend: LinkedIn is a professional network, which means that it’s not about becoming someone’s friend. Connecting isn’t about seeing pictures of someone’s kids or finding out that they like Lousy Robot. The primary different between LinkedIn and other social networks is the bifurcation between personal and professional data. Now that the general public understands the network, the lines of decorum are being regularly crossed. Invites are often either overly personal (and creepy) or complete marketing related spam. When trying to connect with people, ensure that you differentiate yourself through your language.
Don’t Sell Yourself: Professionals are often told to come up with long value statements about themselves and their companies. This leads to LinkedIn connect invites that read like marketing brochures. Does anyone care that you were instrumental to upgrading your company’s accounting platform? Unless you tailor the message in a highly specific manner, don’t use this kind of marketing-speak. Either write a very brief and courteous message requesting a connection, or use LinkedIn’s standard messaging (if you have a great looking profile and can trust in that.)
Use your LinkedIn Network: This will become more important as you develop a more comprehensive network, but don’t forget to use the connections that you already have. Once you are connected with someone, they can introduce you to people to whom they are connected. If you are looking to connect with someone of a high influence, be sure to do a check to see what connections you have in common. Don’t be afraid to ask your connections for an introduction. However, be careful here: introductions can quickly get annoying with any sort of volume. Use your connections for introductions sparingly. It may in fact be a good idea to note when you do ask someone for an introduction to ensure you don’t do it again for at least a few months.
Don’t Connect with just Anybody: If you are using LinkedIn for purely professional matters, it’s tempting to just connect with anyone. Although you may not be sharing Facebook type family updates on LinkedIn, you should treat it with the same respect if you value your email address. Connections on LinkedIn can see your email address, which means that if you connect with just anyone, you could end up on a lot of unwanted lists. Also note that your connections receive notification of who you connect with: do you really want your next employer seeing you connect with a fake profile?
Nix Short-Cuts: There are a lot of quick ways to build your search capabilities on LinkedIn. This includes joining “open connector” type LinkedIn groups, joining email lists, and putting your contact information inside your LinkedIn Profile. Some people are even tempted to buy LinkedIn connections! All of this stuff just isn’t worth it anymore. Here’s the math: if you connect with the people who connect with everyone, you do end up with a broad search network. However, it’s the same search network that everyone else has. To build a valuable network, you need to get to the fringes of the connection-matrix – to the cluster that matters most to you. Once inside that “hub of people that matter”, you need to do everything you can to become a center of influence within that sphere.
Developing a high-quality, diverse, and powerful group of LinkedIn connections can give you an invaluable resource for professional success. A solid LinkedIn network can be of value to almost any project, whether you are recruiting new talent for your company, looking for a job, building sales leads, trying to get published, or just looking for a great service provider. Good luck and happy connecting!
LinkedIn connections were easy to come by when LinkedIn first started. There was a shiny, new feeling to connecting with people. A lot of professionals didn’t think twice about connecting with people.
Now it’s 2012 and the environment is much different. LinkedIn and social networking is no longer shiny and new. The general idea of connecting with people online has been hashed out through countless social networks and some suggest that a feeling of social networking fatigue has set in. It’s no surprise that the folks with the most LinkedIn connections started building their network in the beginning. Simply put, although it may be harder to build connections on LinkedIn, it’s infinitely more important.
If you are just starting out on LinkedIn or if you are just now waking up to the reality of its importance in the professional world, where do you begin? Don’t worry – even if you’ve waited until now to start building a serious connection network, you haven’t missed the boat.
Tips for Building LinkedIn Connections
Look for the Hubs: The first thing that you want to do on LinkedIn is to look for the networking hubs within your chosen industry, profession, and geography. These connection hubs are a little harder to pinpoint now that LinkedIn doesn’t show the exact amount of connections. However, you can perform people searches and then sort by number of connections. Look for people with a high number of connections, lots of shared connections with you, and extremely well-developed profiles (indicating active use.) These are people that you want to connect with; it’s worth taking the time to physically meet them if you can add value to their business. Developing associations with the strongest networkers in your chosen group creates the mathematical connectivity happen. You need to be connected to the centers of any connection cluster or you will never have an expansive network.
Use your Real Life Connections: The next step in building contacts is to connect with your real-life contacts. It’s very easy to forget to include a particular group of your contacts. Set aside an entire day and run through all of these different types of contacts – make sure you include everyone from these broad groups of connections: Colleagues, Friends, Family, School buddies, Teachers, Clients/Customers, Vendors, Partners, Relatives, Service Providers (your accountant, banker, IT provider, etc.), Social media buddies (people you routinely connect with on other networks), People that you have met in the last year (save those business cards!), Competitors (that you know personally) and Ex-colleagues. Connecting with all of your closest real life contacts in a systematic way will immediately grow your network. You should have close to a 100% acceptance rate to these LinkedIn invites – if you don’t, re-check your methods.
Be Consistent: Consistent growth is one of the least mentioned aspects of building a strong LinkedIn network. Building a strong professional network is not a one-time task, but rather a daily routine. Make sure that every externally facing aspect of your professional life contains your LinkedIn profile. Common items for review: Email signature, website, social profiles, business cards, and any kind of auto-responders. After you add your profile to every channel, the next key is consistent invites. Make asking for a connection a part of your regular workflow. Every time you meet with a customer, talk with a partner, make a sale, go on an interview, go to a meeting, etc… send an immediate LinkedIn connection invite. One common short-cut is to use LinkedIn invites as a substitute for a thank-you email. As long as you write a nice personal note, it saves a step and may deliver more long-term value than an email or even hand-written note.
Make Yourself Visible: While active methods of developing LinkedIn connects are best, passive methods are also important. Make sure that you have a well-developed, comprehensive LinkedIn profile and that you include all of the common phrases about what you do and what your company does. It’s a mistake to write your LinkedIn profile like a resume: people want to connect with successful professionals in their own area of interest, not with job seekers or network-hungry marketers. Make sure that you look like someone that you would want to connect with. After ensuring your profile looks good, it’s time to get active. Participate regularly in LinkedIn groups and LinkedIn Answers. LinkedIn also has an update field (much like Twitter) where you can share interesting articles, status updates, and anything else you want to discuss. Make sure that you aren’t ignoring this update feature – it’s a powerful way to make yourself visible in your industry.
Connect, Don’t Friend: LinkedIn is a professional network, which means that it’s not about becoming someone’s friend. Connecting isn’t about seeing pictures of someone’s kids or finding out that they like Lousy Robot. The primary different between LinkedIn and other social networks is the bifurcation between personal and professional data. Now that the general public understands the network, the lines of decorum are being regularly crossed. Invites are often either overly personal (and creepy) or complete marketing related spam. When trying to connect with people, ensure that you differentiate yourself through your language.
Don’t Sell Yourself: Professionals are often told to come up with long value statements about themselves and their companies. This leads to LinkedIn connect invites that read like marketing brochures. Does anyone care that you were instrumental to upgrading your company’s accounting platform? Unless you tailor the message in a highly specific manner, don’t use this kind of marketing-speak. Either write a very brief and courteous message requesting a connection, or use LinkedIn’s standard messaging (if you have a great looking profile and can trust in that.)
Use your LinkedIn Network: This will become more important as you develop a more comprehensive network, but don’t forget to use the connections that you already have. Once you are connected with someone, they can introduce you to people to whom they are connected. If you are looking to connect with someone of a high influence, be sure to do a check to see what connections you have in common. Don’t be afraid to ask your connections for an introduction. However, be careful here: introductions can quickly get annoying with any sort of volume. Use your connections for introductions sparingly. It may in fact be a good idea to note when you do ask someone for an introduction to ensure you don’t do it again for at least a few months.
Don’t Connect with just Anybody: If you are using LinkedIn for purely professional matters, it’s tempting to just connect with anyone. Although you may not be sharing Facebook type family updates on LinkedIn, you should treat it with the same respect if you value your email address. Connections on LinkedIn can see your email address, which means that if you connect with just anyone, you could end up on a lot of unwanted lists. Also note that your connections receive notification of who you connect with: do you really want your next employer seeing you connect with a fake profile?
Nix Short-Cuts: There are a lot of quick ways to build your search capabilities on LinkedIn. This includes joining “open connector” type LinkedIn groups, joining email lists, and putting your contact information inside your LinkedIn Profile. Some people are even tempted to buy LinkedIn connections! All of this stuff just isn’t worth it anymore. Here’s the math: if you connect with the people who connect with everyone, you do end up with a broad search network. However, it’s the same search network that everyone else has. To build a valuable network, you need to get to the fringes of the connection-matrix – to the cluster that matters most to you. Once inside that “hub of people that matter”, you need to do everything you can to become a center of influence within that sphere.
Developing a high-quality, diverse, and powerful group of LinkedIn connections can give you an invaluable resource for professional success. A solid LinkedIn network can be of value to almost any project, whether you are recruiting new talent for your company, looking for a job, building sales leads, trying to get published, or just looking for a great service provider. Good luck and happy connecting!
Thursday, February 9, 2012
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