HB Publishing’s Top 6 Posts of 2016

1. Incorporating Video into Articles and Posts (and vice versa)

2. Does Your Trust Battery Need a Charge?

3. Successful Professionals Use Slideshare

4. Not Worried? Maybe You Should Be

5. Working Out the Changing Nature of Our Work
6. Is Free Time Overrated?

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From Trump’s surprise election victory to the Chicago Cubs’ World Series victory (ending a 108 year drought), 2016 was anything but a boring, predictable year. One thing we learned from your reaction to our weekly blog Online Marketing B2Beat, is that your desire to keep abreast with the constantly changing landscape in your working lives never strayed far from your subconscious. Your reading patterns revealed strong interest in content marketing strategies, such as incorporating video clips into your articles and posts and using Slideshare to expand the audience for your presentations. From a strategic standpoint, you expressed concern about disruptive factors in the marketplace, building trust within your team, having more work/life balance and turning worry from a negative to a positive. If you missed a popular post, here they are again with a quick summary:

1. Incorporating Video into Articles and Posts (and vice versa). As far back as 2014, we explained how adding video to your written content can substantially improve engagement and recall. On the flip side, a concise text-based summary that accompanies your video will greatly increase viewership. Our client, Coyle Financial Counsel found that viewership of its twice weekly video blogs increased substantially when it started offering a text-based summary right below its video player. The text summary always includes snappy “Key Takeaways.”

2. Does Your Trust Battery Need a Charge? Tobi Lutke, CEO of the e-commerce software provider, Shopify, described how every new employee starts at Shopify with their “trust battery” charged at the 50 percent level. As time goes on, the charge level goes up (or down) based on interactions with managers and whether the employee becomes more or less trustworthy and whether or not he or she delivers on what they promise.

3. Successful Professionals Use SlideShare.  If you’re not familiar with Slideshare (now owned by LinkedIn/Microsoft), think of it as a YouTube for professional presentations. The sharing site gets an estimated 70 million unique visitors per month and an estimated 400,000 new presentations are uploaded daily. Unlike YouTube, SlideShare gives you quality eyeballs, rather than quantity. SlideShare is a favorite hunting ground for journalists, speaker bureaus and conference organizers. Learn why.

4. Not Worried? Maybe You Should Be.  As a former boxer and wrestler, I’d rather have my guard up all the time than take a haymaker to the chin from seemingly out of nowhere. That’s not negativity or pessimism—that’s good old fashioned pragmatism and one of the most important ingredients for business survival. Some worry is actually good for you,” according to Simon Rego, a cognitive behavioral psychologist. Learn more.

5. Working Out the Changing Nature of Our Work.  Sally Krawcheck, CEO of Ellevest outlined five keys for success in the new world of work. She said businesses are changing, pivoting and being disrupted at lightning speed, thanks to “the forces of technology and globalization.” What that means she said is that “what worked for decades won’t be a given any longer.” She believes successful leaders will ditch corner offices, encourage more collaboration, give people time to think things through, embrace intellectual discomfort and a willingness to fail.” What do you think?

6. Is Free Time Overrated? A Stanford University professor argues that time is a “network good.” In other words, free time is only valuable if others in your schedule also have that time free as well. As Young observed, “We face a problem, of coordination. Work-life balance is not something that you can solve on your own.” Same goes for telecommuting, flex-time, job-sharing, etc. We’re freer than ever to work where we want to work, how we want to work and when we want to work. But if you can’t enjoy that time with others, how much is it really worth? Do you fall into that trap of “bowling alone” or in my case skiing alone?

From all of us here at HB Publishing, have a great 2017. You can work smarter without having to work harder.

Our blog has more as does the FREE Resources page of our website.

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Tags: Top posts of 2016, time management, workplace trust, Slideshare, Video with articles, Sally Krawcheck

Working Out the Changing Nature of Our Work

Did you see Sally Krawcheck’s post this week about career transitions and the changing nature of work? Yes, that Sally Krawcheck, once one of the highest-ranking women on Wall Street who left Citigroup during the global financial crisis because she clashed with management about doing more to protect clients who’d been burned by investments that Citi sold them. Krawcheck is now the CEO and Co-Founder of Ellevest, a digital investment platform for women, to be launched later this year.

We’re not here to plug Ellevest, whose goal is to close our country’s “gender investing gap.” We’re here to call attention to career agility for employees, business owners and independent contractors alike. Krawcheck’s argues that successful careers will increasingly be built not by climbing the ladder at one organization, but by finding interesting work at many different organizations and building one’s skill base and contacts through strategically-planned lateral moves. Keep this in mind if you or a close colleague or client is considering a career “pivot.”

Most businesses are changing, pivoting and being disrupted at lightning speed. Krawcheck points to “the forces of technology and globalization are fundamentally altering any number of industries; that means what worked for decades won’t be a given any longer, she said. Whether you’re in media, financial services, technology or any other line of work, Krawcheck argues that we have less job security than ever before, but more career flexibility and business startup opportunities thanks to cloud-based computing instead of buying servers, shared workspaces instead of multi-year leases, video-conferencing instead of business travel, crowdfunding instead of venture capital money or bank loans and freelancers instead of full-time hires. We couldn’t agree more.

Krawcheck offers five keys for success in the new world of work and we’ll weigh in on each below:

1. Successful leaders will ditch corner offices as well as a strong, decisive management style. Instead, the will encourage open-mindedness, intellectual flexibility and an interest in understanding others’ perspectives. Our take: All good attributes, but without strong decisive leadership—and having an ultimate decision-maker willing to make tough calls, you are vulnerable to analysis paralysis and institutional inertia that plagues so many academic and not for profit organizations filled with smart, talented people. Also, whether you’re at the helm of a Fortune 500 company or the ground floor of a startup, company leaders need to close the doors to the office from time to time in order to think things through and have private conversations (see #4 below).

2. Embrace a certain intellectual discomfort and a willingness to fail. This one can be tough because Krawcheck argues that females tend to take a failure harder than men do, personalizing it. We agree you have to embrace discomfort and be willing to fail in order to get better—we don’t think women take failure harder than men. Failure’s hard for everyone. We all fail. It’s all about how quickly you can bounce back. Let’s not confuse willingness to talk about failure with feeling the sting of failure, Sally.

3. Get comfortable being criticized. Krawcheck says this is another tough one for women because “so many of us were socialized to prioritize relationships.” We don’t agree. You can’t learn or get better if you don’t receive constructive feedback from your clients, peers, bosses and subordinates, regardless of what your gender is—or theirs.

4. Give yourself the time to really think things through. Amen to that! We agree with Krawcheck that It’s more easily said than done in our hyper-connected 24/7 world. But you’ve got to do it. One thing that works well for us….turn off your email and text messaging SEVERAL TIMES EACH DAY. Unless you work in a hospital, air traffic control tower,  emergency dispatch center or missile control room, for how many things in our work lives really demand an immediate, ASAP, instantaneous response?

Conclusion

Finally, Krawcheck advocates “playing in traffic.” That means going out and engaging with people, getting a feel for a new industry or position. Don’t wait for a headhunter’s call or a colleague to pick up the phone—be proactive, she added. Or, as ancient Roman philosopher, Seneca the Younger famously observed: “Good luck happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

Keep plugging away. Listen to your self and make your own breaks!

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