While the underlying components of the formula for executive presence(credibility + ease/ego) are universal, a strong or effective executive presence might look different from one individual, situation, or culture to the next. 
People should think of the pieces that make up these components as dials on an instrument panel. Depending on the circumstance, you can turn some dials up and others down.

Executive Presence

Credibility has one important piece: expertise in your role.No level of executive presence can compensate for a lack of ability. 
You need to be able to communicate your credibility to others. So once you’re sure you know your stuff, how can you work to better convey that?
<ul>
<li>Avoid a monotone delivery. </li>
<li>Avoid using too many filler words—“er,” “um,” “uh”—which can be distracting from the message you’re trying to convey.</li>
<li>Make sure you aren’t fidgeting or using “props” in a meeting.</li>
</ul>

Credibility

As with credibility, ease also has several foundational elements. These include making sure you are eating and sleeping well, having social support, and are making time for movement in your day. These things will help build your capacity for resilience under stress.
Other ways to convey ease include connecting with those you work with, avoiding emotional outbursts, listening well, maintaining eye contact, as well as authenticity, which signals “a sense of self-assurance.”

Ease

With ego, the focus is on true confidence and true humility.
With ego being the denominator in the executive-presence formula, you don’t want to have a minuscule ego, nor do you want an oversized one, since both a negative number and a giant number will mean an erosion of the credibility and ease that you’ve worked to convey.
Tips:
<ul>
<li>Stop thinking about yourself too much.</li>
<li>A focus on doing good work is what will ultimately determine how your peers or your boss or your clients think of you.</li>
</ul>

A professor and executive coach unpacks this seemingly elusive trait.

career

Career

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Executive Presence Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All. Here’s How to Develop Yours.

Even though many organisations have now transitioned back to a phased or hybrid return to the office, the unknowns surrounding the pandemic has prompted a return to working from home.
Given this trend, leaders must ensure that their employees are once again set up for remote working. Employers are likely to want to continue making the most of the advantages of this working format, which will mean that leadership figures will need to carefully manage productivity and encourage continued communication.

Resurgence in Remote Working

80% of employees want inclusive companies, and almost half of respondents believed that their company needed to improve diversity, race and gender equality. This tells us that every industry leader must strive to familiarise themselves with diversity-related issues in order to create a truly inclusionary working environment.
These issues are now at the top of the agenda – both internally and externally – so we can expect to see leaders working towards a more inclusive working environment in 2022.

Improved Diversity & Equality

Due to extenuating circumstances, such as the pandemic, many industries are reporting considerable skills gaps. For example, there are thought to be skills gaps in up to 70% of the technology industry, and many other industries are finding similar gulfs in appropriately trained workers.
To address this, business leaders must understand where gaps exist in their own organisation and look to develop their employees to fulfil specific skills gaps.

Addressing Skills Gaps

Organisations are failing to develop middle-management to eventually take on C-Suite(senior and executive level) positions. In 2022, businesses must roll out strategies designed to equip middle-management with the skills they need to lead and therefore be considered for roles within the C-Suite.
Crucially, this training must focus on training leaders for the here-and-now, as well as those that are able to develop empathy and an emotional connection with their teams.

Developing Successors

While employees and management may be open to the idea of change in the working environment, implementing large-scale changes can create further issues with change fatigue – particularly prevalent given what we’ve experienced these past few years. If this is the case, then working to reinforce change management should certainly be on your list of priorities for 2022.
Leaders must prioritise the way they manage organisational change since it is likely that almost two years of upheaval in the workplace has greatly contributed to fatigue and burnout.

Managing Change Fatigue

In 2022, employers will need to review their hiring policies to ensure they’re finding those with high ceilings when it comes to their potential.
Hiring new talent has always been a lottery, and that won’t change. However, as a consequence of these changes in the employment market, the penalties for hiring the wrong person could mean that you miss out on that one person that your organisation craves.

Finding the Diamond in the Rough

There was once a time when employees clocked in and clocked out; no questions asked. But these days employees care far more than just their salary. While, clearly, wages are a key pointer for employees to remain with a business, they are now just as concerned about the environment they are being asked to work.
In 2022, businesses must find new ways to bolster the overall health and wellbeing of their employees – this could mean anything from offering perks to preparing them to take the next step in their careers.

Employment Benefits

Employees are also keen to know that their health and welfare is taken seriously; this means everything from ensuring correct health protocols to ensuring that mental fatigue and burnout are addressed quickly and correctly.
Now that remote working continues to look increasingly likely heading into 2022, it’s crucial that organisations rally in order to create a healthy working culture. And for those that must continue with a hybrid working approach, safety must be taken very seriously.

Creating a Healthy Atmosphere in 2022

In this story, we’ll be exploring 7 of the issues that may face business leaders in 2022 and how best they can manage them.

corporateculture

Corporate Culture

7 Leadership Issues Managers Face in 2022

We spend much of our day on autopilot not giving much thought to what we are doing with our time. This is a problem. We should adopt the habit of pausing before action and asking, "What makes the most sense right now ?". Hence,you should schedule every minute of your day. Without structure,its easy to allow you to waste your time on social media,web surfing. To summarise, the motivation for this strategy is to recognise that deep work requires you to treat your time with respect. Scheduling every minute of the day is a simple habit that helps you to manage your time and maintain productivity.

Schedule Every Minute Of Your Day

Read the Wall Street Journal Bestseller for "cultivating intense focus" for fast, powerful performance results for achieving success and true meaning in one's professional life (Adam Grant, author of Give and Take). Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It's a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep Work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep-spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there's a better way. In Deep Work, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite. Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. He then presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four "rules," for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill. 1. Work Deeply 2. Embrace Boredom 3. Quit Social Media 4. Drain the Shallows A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, Deep Work takes the reader on a journey through memorable stories-from Carl Jung building a stone tower in the woods to focus his mind, to a social media pioneer buying a round-trip business class ticket to Tokyo to write a book free from distraction in the air-and no-nonsense advice, such as the claim that most serious professionals should quit social media and that you should practice being bored. Deep Work is an indispensable guide to anyone seeking focused success in a distracted world. An Amazon Best Book of 2016 Pick in Business & Leadership Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller A Business Book of the Week at 800-CEO-READ

productivity

Productivity

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

timemanagement

Time Management

books

Books

Master one of our economy’s most rare skills and achieve groundbreaking results with this “exciting” book (Daniel H. Pink) from an “exceptional” author (New York Times Book Review). Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It's a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep Work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep-spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there's a better way. In Deep Work, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite. Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. He then presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four "rules," for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill. 1. Work Deeply 2. Embrace Boredom 3. Quit Social Media 4. Drain the Shallows A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, Deep Work takes the reader on a journey through memorable stories-from Carl Jung building a stone tower in the woods to focus his mind, to a social media pioneer buying a round-trip business class ticket to Tokyo to write a book free from distraction in the air-and no-nonsense advice, such as the claim that most serious professionals should quit social media and that you should practice being bored. Deep Work is an indispensable guide to anyone seeking focused success in a distracted world. An Amazon Best Book of 2016 Pick in Business & Leadership Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller A Business Book of the Week at 800-CEO-READ

Cal Newport is Provost’s Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, and the author of seven books. His ideas and writing are frequently featured in major publications and on TV and radio.From his website: "I write about the intersection of digital technology and culture. I’m particularly interested in our struggle to deploy these tools in ways that support instead of subvert the things we care about in both our personal and professional lives."

Cal Newport

Deep Work

Any student of economics knows this basic rule, which states that rational agents should not take irrecoverable or “sunk” costs into account when making decisions about present or future investments. Nevertheless, human beings break this rule all the time, succumbing to a cognitive bias known as the “sunk-cost fallacy.” 
If you have ever sat through a bad movie because you did not want to “waste” the money you paid for the ticket or finished a PhD program you lost interest in years ago because of all the work you had already done, you have made this mistake.

Sunk Cost Fallacy

But what if this behaviour was not always a mistake—what if, in certain situations, this “fallacy” were actually an optimal decision-making strategy?
Human beings—even rational ones—have a limited capacity to remember the original reasoning behind their decisions. If that capacity is exceeded, the information could be lost—so we need a mental placeholder that can remind us of why we decided something, just as tying a string around your finger reminds you that you need to pick up milk on the way home from work. This kind of ad hoc “memory device” is called a mnemonic.

Sunk Cost: Keep Calm and Carry On

The Sunk Cost fallacy, then is a useful mental shortcut passed down to us by our savannah-dwelling ancestors.
We call it the ‘theory of the second best': The more you can remember, the better it is, and you don’t have to commit this fallacy at all. But if it’s a common feature of human beings that they do forget stuff, then the sunk cost fallacy is an optimal response to that forgetfulness. Sunk costs can encode information about decisions you made in the past, and if that’s the case you should take them into account, because if you didn’t, you’d make even worse decisions.

Inducing Forgetfulness for Fun and Profit

Understand yourself and those around you.

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Psychology

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

problemsolving

Problem Solving

Is the Sunk Cost Fallacy Actually Smart Business?

It would be easy to ascribe these tendencies to a simple quirk of evolution—a kind of mental tic encoded in our genes. But what if the cognitive biases we exhibit when making choices are not limited to us? What if these biases are basic emergent properties of any system forced to make decisions with limited mental resources?
In order to get inside the “black box” of humanity’s irrationality when deciding between many options, researchers created a simplified mathematical model of how a machine—an “automaton”—would make choices.

Making Decisions

Automatons are decision-making algorithms expressed mathematically rather than in code. These automatons commit the same “mistakes” that humans do when making decisions. An automaton may exhibit a “primacy” effect, in which it tends to pick one of the first items on a list. An automaton may also exhibit a “recency” effect, in which it goes for the last item on a list.
The ability of automatons to mimic human behavior, and the fact that they are built from mathematical first principles, means automatons can be used to formally analyze the fundamental tradeoffs that we face when making choices.

Automatons

When decision-makers are satisficing, it is not hard to see why they would be more likely to choose an item that appears earlier on a list, because they stop as soon as they find one that meets their pre-existing criteria, and might not even look at every item in a list. 
Contrast this strategy with rational decision making, which is a standard assumption in many economic models. It turns out that making a decision “rationally”—which in economics terms means analyzing every possible option—requires a great deal of cognitive horsepower.

Rational Or Irrational Decisions

Humans are neither perfectly rational decision-makers nor strict satisficers, no matter how Spock-like or impulsive any individual may seem.
A history-dependent satisficer automaton has some ability to remember what options it has seen before and to modify its criteria accordingly. The more memory this automaton possesses, the closer it gets to the choices yielded by rational decision making. The more states the automaton has, the better a decision it can make.

History-Dependent Satisficer

The effects that researchers derive using mathematical analysis show up everywhere in the real world. Humans are more likely to vote for candidates who appear first on a ballot, more likely to click on options at the top of their computer screen, and more likely to give high scores to competitors who appear first and last in a competition.
There was even a lawsuit in the 1980s in which the federal government forced American Airlines to stop putting its own flights above those of its competitors in American’s computer reservation system.

The First Option On The List

Psychologists and behavioral economists have established that humans exhibit a number of fairly predictable biases in their decision making. For example, when offered a menu, people generally choose one of the first items on it or the very last item.

Why humans can’t seem to make the “right” choices

Decisions, Decisions

It is best not to rush through writing up a summary of your year. Your employer will ideally let you know what the performance reviews are used for and the effect they could have on your career.Year-end evaluations can be a way to get your boss up to speed on what they may have missed, but they can also be used as part of the compensation cycle. Therefore, you have to be strategic about what you advocate for.

Performance review self-assessment

Vague statements include being a good co-worker, well-organised or a good communicator. <ul><li>Instead, mention specific and relevant accomplishments. Share how they happened and why you could achieve them. Ensure to quantify the impact it had on the business.</li><li>If you don't know how to mention a win, ask yourself why it mattered. What was the effect?</li><li>Consider the people you work with (your manager, colleagues, customers). Gather emails, reports and communications that support your work, then ask yourself what you did to make their life easier and how you can improve?</li></ul>

Don't be vague. Be specific in mentioning relevant progress

Leaving out areas for improvement could be a missed opportunity to make the evaluation a pitch to your boss about what skills you would like to learn or ideas you want to explore. If you want to move up the corporate ladder, ensure your self-evaluation reflects that. If you feel you are ready for more responsibility or a promotion, express that.

Share what you want to improve next year

Using the pandemic as an excuse for not performing your job in the best way is not going to put you in the best light. Language that shows you are stagnant, such as "we did not have enough resources", will taint your evaluation. Instead, use words that show you are moving forward, such as "I was able to be agile during our challenges and changes."

Don't blame others for your setbacks

It's difficult to remember in December what you worked on in February. <ul><li>Habitually keep track of emails, collaborations and projects that are applicable to the team and business goals.</li><li>Every month, ask what you did that month. What stood out to you? </li><li>Keep track of project milestones reached, emails with positive feedback, reports with sales numbers or other metrics and moments that make you proud.</li></ul>

Keep track of your accomplishments and results

False modesty is not helpful in a year-end review, but neither is vague praise.

How To Advocate For Yourself In Your Year-End Review

As remote and hybrid work arrangements become the norm, the debate continues around the value of connection in person. One aspect to be fully explored is how digital communication influences people's desire to help one another.

In-person connections

Research found a clear hierarchy of communication channels: Face-to-face is the most effective, followed by any form of video or audio communication, followed by text-based communication.<ul><li>A behavioural study found that if your goal is to get a "yes", physical presence in the room is the best. 80% of respondents agreed to help with a task when asked in person, while only 48% of people asked via digital communication agreed to do the task.</li><li>A second study found that video and audio communication channels were 86% more effective than email.</li></ul>

The hierarchy of communication channels

Participants in the studies were unaware of the effects. They expected that requests via email or a video channel would be as effective as asking in person. One reason in-person requests are more effective is that they make people feel more uncomfortable to say "no".

Why in-person requests are more successful

A recent study found that people were 67% more likely to agree to in-person requests than those made over audio or video call.

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Marketing & Sales

communication

Communication

Need a Favor? Research Suggests It’s Best to Ask In Person.

<ul><li>Think outside the box will allow you to be creative and to come up with novel solutions.</li><li>Connect with other people from other industries and analyze other businesses. This will help you to find new ways of thinking.</li></ul>

1. Problem-solving

<ul><li>Use "what if" scenarios to role-play different strategies.</li><li>This technique allows you to determine the best strategic direction and to protect yourself from uncertainties by having other plans.</li></ul>

2. Strategic planning

<ul><li>Analyze rationally data and situations.</li><li>Learn how to exercise good judgement.</li><li>Trust your instincts.</li><li>Keep making decisions, because that's what true leaders do.</li></ul>

3. Decision-making

<ul><li>Listen to other people whatever how much different they are.</li><li>Active listening helps you to gather insights and data (necessary before taking decisions).</li></ul>

4. Listening

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Prioritize your time and your ressources.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Manage to get to your objective efficiently without getting lost.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">If you do that, you are mastering the art of logistics.</li></ul>

5. Logistics

Futurist Scott Steinberg shares the career skills to learn in 2022, and where to find free online courses to master them.

These are the 5 most valuable skills to learn in 2022, says futurist—and where to find free online courses

At different points in our lives, we want different kinds of jobs:<ul><li>Growth point: When we prioritize learning and earning more — and we’re willing to put in the time</li><li>Lifestyle point: When we want to prioritize our time outside work, such as taking care of family</li><li>Reinvention pointWhen we want to completely reinvent ourselves, including the role and even industry we work in</li></ul>

Different Points = Different Wants

Whenever Ramit Sethi, author of I Will Teach You To Be Rich, asked people what they wanted from a ”dream job”, one of the most striking things about their answers was how different they were. Some people wanted to step back into their career full time after a hiatus. Some wanted to be able to spend more time with young kids. Some wanted to pursue meaningful work in another industry. All Dream Jobs. All completely different!

Dream Job: To Each His Own

But, then, as well as now, if these people ask for help with how to reach their Dream Jobs, the common answers are all the same:“Just follow your passion!”“Just be thankful you have a job!”“Just do good work and you’ll be rewarded eventually.”(Have you noticed how so much bad advice starts with “just”?)Our career goals aren’t generic and one-size-fits-all. So why is all career advice generic and one-size-fits-all? Why are the tactics we use — like surfing job boards and shotgunning out resumes — so generic?

Career Advice: To All The Same

We all go through different phases in each of our careers. Some of us are early in our careers, looking to grow and soak up knowledge. Sometimes we want to downshift, or prioritize family. And sometimes we want to reinvent ourselves entirely.Ramit Sethi calls these different phases “Career Seasons.” Just like the seasons throughout the year, they’re natural. They change over time. And you may cycle through them more than once.“Your Season has profound implications for the jobs you look for and even the way you search for your job.

Introducing “Career Seasons”

Most of us started in this Season early in our careers. Some of us are still in it! In the Growth Season, we’re motivated by moving up the career ladder and making more money. We’re willing to put the time in and we don’t mind working hard. Here’s a quote from someone that instantly tells you that they’re in the Growth Season. “I feel like I’m falling behind compared to my peers. They’re moving on to senior management titles, director titles. I’m seeing everyone else have upgraded titles, so I say, ‘I want it too.’”

The “Growth” Season

People in the Lifestyle Season still value their work and career, but they also have other equally important goals. Here’s a classic quote describing the Lifestyle Season:“I want to spend as much time with my kids as I can. I do not want to work 60 hours a week anymore.” Notice these phrases, which instantly tip us off to the Lifestyle Season: “Flexibility” (or “flexible schedule”), “downshift,” or “family.” You may think about work/life balance if you’re going into a Lifestyle Season.

The “Lifestyle” Season

Reinvention Season describes people who want to totally reimagine and change the course of their career, usually by switching industries. Imagine a lawyer who wants to leave her firm and join a start-up. Here’s a quote from someone in Reinvention Season: “I have 12 years of financial sales experience, but I feel pigeonholed onto a sales track and don’t enjoy the work. I’ve always wanted to transition to a computer science field, but have no formal experience.” You’ll hear typical phrases like “fresh start” to describe this Season.

The “Reinvention” Season

1. No Season is better than the others.No judgment against any Season — it’s your Season. You choose what’s right for you now. Think of the previous quotes. For some, one or more of them sounds terrible. For others, this is exactly where they are.That’s the point! The right Career Season sounds exactly right to you… and wrong to everyone else. .

A Few Notes About Seasons

2. We naturally move in and out of Career Seasons as we get older. Just like actual seasons. While it makes sense to want all of these things to happen simultaneously, some things are just more appropriate for certain Seasons. You can choose the right Season for you — but you can only pick one.For example, it’s very difficult to embrace the Growth Season and the Lifestyle Season at the same time. Think of what each one asks of you or what you ask of it. So, you can try, yes… but doing so makes it difficult to make any meaningful progress in either.

3. Finally, EVEN if you feel like you could be in multiple Seasons, you NEED to pick ONE. This is hard, especially for top performers who like to go above and beyond. But you will find that trying to do more than one at a time means not doing your best at either. (And Ramit Sethi knows he is repeating here, but he’s repeating this because it’s so important.

Ramit Sethi argues that, just like there are seasons in our life, there are - and must be - seasons in our career and that without understanding “our” Career Season, we can’t and won’t find a job that’s perfectly made for us. 

I’d like to introduce the concept of Career Seasons to you — which will help you find a job that’s perfect for you in this season of your life.

moneyandinvestments

Money & Investments

Career Seasons: Choosing a Job Based on the Lifestyle You Want

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. I see it as “walking in their shoes”, and trying to see the world from their perspective.

Humans versus output

Empathy is being concerned about the human being, not just their output.

We see both sides of that all the time. Some companies push to get a specific output from every shift no matter what, while others work to make sure their employees are well taken care of for long-term health and growth. If you manage people, you can choose whichever one you want.

Your choice

When it comes to business, Simon Sinek has a very simple definition for empathy.

I've talked about empathy on this blog quite a lot, and the idea is simple -- it's the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. I see it as "walking in their shoes", and trying to see the world from their perspective. When it comes to business, Simon…

teamwork

Teamwork

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