How to Stay Focused While Working from Home

Laura Lee Rose is the Corporate Exiting Strategest for blooming entrepreneurs.
Laura helps others to easily transition into their next chapter whether it’s the next ladder of success within their corporate environment or into the entrepreneurial playground.

To sign-up for these tools, subscribe at  http://eepurl.com/gGZtP

 

Questions to Ask Yourself After You Get Fired

As a business and life coach who specializes in time management and work life balance strategies, I recommend clients to consistently look forward (not backwards).

Therefore, the question “why I got fired” is not as beneficial as “what do I want to do now“.

Although there are many symptoms — there are usually only a few underlying reasons that anyone gets fired (I am making a distinction between being “fired” and “getting laid off”):

1) The ‘real’ job did not match what the effort the employee wanted to submit.
2) The employee and employer’s expectations were not understood or did not match.
3) The job didn’t lead the employee’s career in a direction that the employee wanted to go.
Given the above, better questions to ask yourself after you get fired are:

Creating a “No Excuse” Zone ~ Part 3

Below is Part 3 of a 3-Part article designed to help IT and database professionals stay on top of their game in an ever-changing trade. Part 1 and 2 describe examples of how we inadvertently make excuses for our lack of progress in certain areas of our careers.

Part 3 offers several steps toward creating “No Excuse Zones” in our home, office and thinking. For more examples that fit your specific work environment, please feel free to contact LauraRose@RoseCoaching.info.

We all have “excuses‟ as part of our normal, default speaking and thinking patterns. It’s normal. It’s human. We often entertain ourselves with stories of how we got to where we “don‟t want to be”. We do not readily acknowledge these stories as “excuses” or blaming something or someone external to ourselves for our predicament; we’re simply “explaining” ourselves.  But the longer we stay in the “explaining” stage of the current situation; the longer we are stalled and not making forward progress.

As you can see in part 1 and part 2 of this article, there are endless ways to take control over your own calendar and time.  Using external people and event as excuses for your lack of progress is very natural but not very beneficial.  We won’t be able to totally avoid our very natural and human reactions to things.  But we can continually improve upon are recognition of what is more beneficial in moving us forward faster.

Beginning steps toward NO EXCUST ZONE thinking:

Step 1) Create several NO EXCUSE ZONES in your home, office and social environments.
These places will be designated as “NO EXCUSE ZONES”. These are places where you are deliberately on the lookout for excuses in your speech and in others. It will be in these places where “excuses” will no longer be acceptable.
You can place a “NO EXCUSE ZONE” sign to warn co-workers, friends and family that you have kicked-up your game. It will be at these places that you practice your new-found energy, focus, and purpose.
When you detect “defensive” speech from yourself and others, diplomatically challenge the thought as an assumption, a false premise or even an irrelevant truth. Just because something is factual doesn‟t make it beneficial or useful. There are lots of truths that are simply immaterial to forward progress or solutions.

Click here to read the rest of this article.

 

 

How to Repel a Current Client From Ever Returning

 

Laura Lee Rose is the Corporate Exiting Strategest for blooming entrepreneurs.
Laura helps others to easily transition into their next chapter whether it’s the next ladder of success within their corporate environment or into the entrepreneurial playground.

To sign-up for these tools, subscribe at  http://eepurl.com/gGZtP

 

How to Repel Your Existing Customers from Ever Coming Back

Hello, this is Laura Lee Rose – Corporate Exit Strategist for the Blooming Entrepreneur – and I am a business and life coach that specializes in time management, project management and work-life balance strategies. As a business coach, I received this recent question:

“How do you repel your existing customers from ever coming back?”

At first glance, this may seem like a strange question, but it is actually a great topic. In any business, it is unrealistic to feel that you can make everyone happy with your products and services. Most successful businesses do not plan to be “all things to all people”.   As such, there may be certain customers that you don’t really want as regular clients.  This is actually very good business planning.

Having said the above, how does one go about professionally “repelling” an existing customer without the risk of a “Better Business Bureau Complaint”?

One very positive way to “repel customers from ever coming back”, is to focus on your overall goal to an exceptional client experience. This seems strange, but please bears with me.

If your goal is for 100% client satisfaction (or an exceptional client experience), and you are unable to satisfy this particular client with your current services or products, point them toward someone else’s service or products that will satisfy them.

Unhappy workers staying on the job — Is this good or bad?

My name is Laura Rose (LauraRose@RoseCoaching.info), Business and Life Coach specializing in time management, project management and work life balance strategies. As a business coach, I recently received the following question:
Unhappy workers staying on the job – Is this  good or bad?
What does this mean for employers and HR managers? On the
other hand, is it really a benefit to a company to have a
majority of employees staying put but maybe not staying engaged
or productive?
This topic can get very tangled very quickly — when you put the responsibility of “employee happiness” on anyone other than the employee. THEREFORE,
 
HR and employers should continuously stay focused on the business/company goals and vision. If the company goals and vision include “happy workers” — then HR and employers should focus on continually making the environment “happy” for the workers. If the company goals is to be productive, then HR and employers should have appropriate recognition programs for those that exceed those productivity success criteria, appropriate consequences for not meeting the criteria, and metrics/reviews to distinguish between the two.
 
To keep it simple, let’s say that the company vision, mission and goal is to be productive by providing quality products and service. Then the employers and HR primary focus should be to evaluate productivity and the quality of product and service. This is very easily done by putting clear business goals, company vision and success criteria for each department and team. This also entails identifying clear metrics, thresholds and reviews that will clearly articulate to the employee how they are doing against those productivity and success criteria. This also includes clear directives and explanations of consequences for not meeting those success criteria – as well as recognition and rewards for exceeding those criteria.
Celebrations should be based on performance. Perks and work environments should be directly tied to forecasted productivity gains (and if the changes do not produce the expected gains then it should change again).
 
When employees are consistently not meeting the job expectations, the employee, employer and HR collaborate on a performance improvement plans (which includes positive changes in the work environment to support the shared productivity goals, and milestones for improvement). If the PIP criteria is not met within the appropriate probation period, then corrective action is taken.
 
If a company is consistently harboring unproductive workers, then HR and employers are not effective in their roles. Therefore, they should be under review, PIP or re-training. Consistent unproductive workers (employees consistently not meeting the performance criteria for their role and responsibility) simply means that the job role and employee’s talents/desires do not match. There’s a match somewhere…but just not here.
 
Take a deep breath and relax….everything is unfolding perfectly.

Creating a “No Excuse Zone” around YOU Professional Development Series

Below is Part 2 of a 3-Part article designed to help IT and database professionals stay on top of their game in an ever-changing trade. Part 1 highlighted some IT scenarios. In this part 2, we will take a closer look.

Part 3 offers several steps toward creating „No Excuse Zones” in our home, office and thinking. For more examples that fit your specific work environment, please feel free to contact LauraRose@RoseCoaching.info.

We all have “excuses‟ as part of our normal, default speaking and thinking patterns. It’s normal. It’s human. We often entertain ourselves with stories of how we got to where we “don‟t want to be.”  We do not readily acknowledge these stories as „excuses‟ or blaming something or someone external to ourselves for our predicament; we‟re simply ‘explaining’ ourselves. But the longer we stay in the ‘explaining’ stage of the current situation; the longer we are stalled and not making forward progress.

 

Let’s look closer:

My task was to contact 3 hospitals to collect meaningful metrics on these five database features. Only one hospital has responded on only one database features. I am late with this project and don’t know how to proceed.

Our developer had not been keeping his team and stakeholders involved in his progress. He had been struggling with the 3 hospitals without conveying the obstacles he was encountering. He allowed the deadline to pass without a word of status. He was nervous and ashamed about his lack of progress on this task. Continue reading

How to Transition From a Consultant Job Back Into Corporate

 

Laura Lee Rose is the Corporate Exiting Strategest for blooming entrepreneurs.
Laura helps others to easily transition into their next chapter whether it’s the next ladder of success within their corporate environment or into the entrepreneurial playground.

To sign-up for these tools, subscribe at  http://eepurl.com/gGZtP

 

 

Side note: When re-entering into the corporate environment from either a consultant or previous entrepreneurial position, I highly recommend targeting executive or skip-level positions. Do not focus on corporate positions that are merely lateral role to your previous corporate position. The experience that you gained as a consultant or entrepreneur is equivalent to executive, director or VP status. Please don’t sabotage yourself by aiming too low.

How to Handle Multiple and Unclear Job Directives

Hello, this is Laura Lee Rose – Corporate Exit Strategist for the blooming entrepreneur – and I am a business and life coach that specializes in Time Management, Project management training and work-life balance strategies.  Today we are sharing tips on how to handle multiple (and often conflicting) directives from various clients, managers and stakeholders.

Whether we are in the corporate environment or starting our own small business, we have competing resources for our attention, skills and talents.  How can we not only professionally handle these multiple and unclear job directives, but use these opportunities to propel us forward faster?

Step 1) Acknowledge and congratulate ourselves for being in demand. Because we are valuable in our field of choice, people do come to us for our advice and coaching.  We don’t want to stop this trend.  We don’t want to resent the people that value and need us.  We just want to take better advantage of this great phenomenon.   You need to create a daily schedule that allows you to get important work done and handle the expected interruptions.  Although you don’t’ know exactly what will interrupt you, you know that you will be interrupted.  Therefore, the intelligent thing to do is to schedule and integrate interruption time into your daily schedule.

Corporate Exit Strategy Series: Handling Multiple Directives

Whether we are in the corporate environment or starting our own small business, we have competing resources for our attention, skills and talents. How can we not only professionally handle these multiple and unclear job directives, but use these opportunities to propel us forward faster?

Tune in to the video below for suggestions you can put into practice starting today…

 

 

Laura Lee Rose is the Corporate Exiting Strategest for blooming entrepreneurs.
Laura helps others to easily transition into their next chapter whether it’s the next ladder of success within their corporate environment or into the entrepreneurial playground.

To sign-up for these tools, subscribe at  http://eepurl.com/gGZtP

———————————————————————————————————–———————————–