I gave an interview the other day to Daryl Hannah of Diversity Inc with some advice for those negotiating a job offer.  Here’s the piece he wrote.

TAGS: Interview skills, negotiating pay, Women and Money

By now it’s no secret that women are leaving corporate America to start their own businesses at twice the rate of men.  Statistics show that over 75% of women-owned enterprises open for business in 1997 were still operating in 2000.  That’s about equal to the survival rate of all U.S. businesses.  Recent data also indicates that women invest more in their businesses than do men.  Which just goes to show – women have it what takes to run and maintain successful operations. 

If you’re in business for yourself (or thinking about starting your own company) there are some things you can do to grow your company:

1.         Follow Mrs. Fields Recipe for Success.  Debbi Fields, founder of Mrs. Fields Cookies, once said it was all about passion, persistence, and perfection.  Whether it’s starting a non-profit organization or a for-profit business, you’re going to put a lot of time and energy into it.  Your focus has to be directed toward something you are so passionate about doing – and doing well – that nothing can deter you from success.

2.         Develop a clear vision of where you want to go and a strategy for getting there. Many entrepreneurs with great ideas fail because they think their product or service should sell itself.  They work hard, but not smart.  Your vision of where you want to be a year, five years or even six months from now will guide your day-to-day actions.  Write it down.  This makes it concrete and tangible rather than just an idea floating around in your head. Then develop specific and measurable steps for how you’re going to achieve it. This is your blueprint for success.

3.         Create a distinctive brand.   There are thousands of motivational speakers, meeting planners, and trainers marketing their services.  What distinguishes you from your competition?  It may sound counterintuitive, but rather than try to be all things to all people, create a narrow niche that identifies you as an “expert” in your field.  Author Barbara Stanny uses the tag line “The Leading Authority for Women and Money.”  I use “Get and Keep the Job You Want.”  Make your brand synonymous with your area of expertise. 

4.         Think and act BIG.  When Jamie Foxx accepted the Academy Award for the starring role in the movie Ray he thanked his grandmother for teaching him to “act like you’ve been somewhere.”  Big is relative.  You may never aspire to be the biggest agency, but you should act as if you already are.  Doing so causes you to see things and consider options you would otherwise overlook or think impossible.  When I started my business I put thousands of dollars into marketing materials at a time when I could ill afford to do so.  But it made me look and feel competitive.  I had to live up to the “big” image I conveyed to potential clients and eventually my firm became it.

5.         Learn the language of money.  In  Nice Girls Don’t Get Rich: 75 Avoidable Mistakes Women Make with Money I talk about the fact that women are less likely to understand the basics of money and investing than men.  Regardless of the size or nature of your venture, you need to understand how to make it profitable.  As an entrepreneurial leader you’ll be involved with budgeting, investing, payrolls, or other forms of money management.  Take a course in finance for non-financial managers at your local community college, start reading The Wall Street Journal, and other money magazines.

TAGS: entrepeneurs, growing your business, women business owners

For the third time since Christmas we went out to buy a new washer and dryer.  The first two times we were so disgusted by the lack of knowledge or interest shown by the salesperson that we just walked out of the stores.  One time we even brought cash, ready to plunk it down for the new appliances, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to make an expensive purchase from someone who didn’t seem to care about the sale — or us for that matter.

Then something unusual happened last Sunday when we tried again — within five minutes of arriving in front of the washer and dryer we had an interest in, we were greeted by a young salesperson by the name of Juana.  She actually knew the products we were interested in purchasing (the LG, top-rated two years in a row by Consumer Reports, in case you’re interested) and could answer questions about them.  She went the extra mile by going on-line to see if anyone was selling it for less so that we could get the difference plus 10% off the total purchase — and found a place, thereby saving us $200.   And Juana was familiar with all the delivery options, rebates, and warranties that wound up saving another few hundred dollars.  To top it off, she was friendly and had a great sense of humor.  We were delighted to give her the sale — she deserved it.  As I stood watching her efficiently ring up the sale and gather all the necessary forms and information, I thought to myself, “this is the kind of person I would hire if I had a vacancy.”

You are a salesperson.  Whether you sell a product, a service, or ideas, you most likely have something you want other people to buy — and often these are things other people want from you.  Don’t lose out on the opportunity to make the sale by exhibiting indifference, not knowing your product inside and out, and failing to take the steps necessary to ensure your customers or clients are not only satisfied, but delighted.  You’ve heard me say it before (and will probably hear it again) - with so much mediocrity in the world it’s not that hard to distinguish yourself.  Treat every interaction as a potential “sale” - you are always selling you.

TAGS: influence, LG, salespeople

My friend Susan Picascia and I wrote an article that appeared in the June issue of Hemisphere’s magazine entitled “Creating a Workplace Legacy.”  Our premise is that wherever you land about five years before you plan to retire is most likely where you’re going to remain.  Companies often marginalize employees in what we call the “final five” (particularly women!) but you can revitalize your career by thinking about the legacy you want to leave behind.  If you’re interested in seeing the entire article, e-mail me at info@drloisfrankel.com, but here are few tips for how you can remain productive and fulfilled during the last few years of employment:

• Take more risks.  At this stage of your career you have little to lose.  You’ve proven yourself, you have experience, and you can make a difference.  Be the voice of dissent when it’s clear the company is headed in a potentially disasterous direction or say the things everyone else is thinking but are afraid to say.
• Create new systems or processes.   You’ve been so busy doing your entire career you may have never taken the time to step back and see how things could be done more efficiently or cost effectively.   Now’s your chance to leave a lasting legacy based on your unique expertise and experience.
• Influence the vision, values, and goals of your company.  Seize opportunities to illuminate how the company can be a better member of the community, treat its staff better, or raise the bar for how business in your industry is done.  Comments like “I like this new idea.  Let’s think about how it will impact our community” or “If we really want to retain talent let’s look at the developmental opportunities we provide to all employees, not just ones we hand pick” can go a long way toward leaving a legacy of which you can be proud.

TAGS: making a difference, retirement, Women and Aging, workplace legacy

Whether you employ one person or one thousand people, you need to find the right person for the job(s) you do have.  Here are some tricks we use in our office to increase the likelihood of hiring that right person:

1.  Write down the 5 - 7  most important characteristics for success on the job.  That’s characteristics, not qualifications.   People are far more likely to fail if they don’t have the characteristics needed to succeed in the job and your company culture.  If you’re looking for someone who thinks of their feet, is able to multi-task, and is great with customers be sure to prepare questions that will enable you to observe those behaviors.  For example, don’t ask, “Can you think on your feet” (who is going to say no?).  Instead, throw out several questions in quick succession and see how agile the candidate is in responding to them.  If they get flustered, they most likely won’t think on their feet in the real situation either. 

2.  When advertising, provide your company website somewhere in the ad (in your e-mail address is perfect) and request a cover letter along with a resume.  Now you’re looking for a few things:  did they go the extra mile and look up your company on the internet before responding? Did they provide the cover letter? If so, was it well written and geared toward your job?  If the answer is no to any one of those questions you may have someone who will only do what’s needed and not much more.  They go to the bottom of my list.

3.  E-mail a short pre-interview questionnaire to further narrow the field of those you have an interest in.  We ask questions like why does this particular job appeal to you, describe how you handled a difficult boss or customer, and how would your last boss describe you?  You’d be surprised how many people don’t bother to answer.  Cross them off my list entirely.  Those who do answer have now provided further evidence of their ability to write — and think. 

4.  Conduct initial telephone interviews.  Some people look great on paper but this way of blind interviewing gives you an idea of how they communicate verbally.  If possible, have them call you at a pre-scheduled time.  This will give you an idea of how punctual or responsible they are.  In my experience, one in four candidates doesn’t call at all.   The list is dwindling. 

5.  Observe and document behaviors, not just answers.  It’s true that actions speak more loudly than words.  If a candidate is lethargic, speaks so slowly that you want to pull the words out of their mouth, or so quickly that you can’t understand them it’s all grist for the mill.  If I have a position that requires one of those behaviors it’s a good thing.  Otherwise, behavior at the extremes rarely yields a valuable employee in the long-term. 

TAGS: hiring, interview techniques, Interviewing candidates

I just finished (hopefully) four days of my fifteen-year-old daughter battling a nasty stomach virus. She’s looking much better today. But it was stressful and little sleep was had.

It reminded me of the many years when she and her brothers were ill and my mother was in and out of emergency rooms while I was trying to do a great job at work and later be promoted to levels women had not reached. Keeping a career going strong under those circumstances is an extraordinary challenge. Even with a husband like mine who has been very involved when the children have been ill and there for me and I for him when things have gotten difficult, meeting family and work demands remains a major challenge for most women.

If you’ve been listening to Senator Obama talk about women’s pay being significantly lower than that of men and his references to Michelle Obama carrying the lion’s share of taking care of their children, you can’t help but wonder why so little has changed since books like The Second Shift were published. Betty Friedan used to tell me that we were in the “second stage”, the title of one of her books, that men were becoming more involved and women were making progress along side of their male counterparts. And certainly to some extent that was and is true.

But I frequently hear from women (young ones too) discovering that they are being paid less than men doing the same jobs. There are those who argue that this is not an issue for government. And I understand that it surely isn’t totally that. Women need to learn to be vigilent about where they stand in terms of salary — before they take a job. And when they haven’t done that, they need to find out where they stand in relation to men doing the same job and find ways within their organization to remedy that inequity. So, in other words, part of the challenge falls to individual women — to all of us. It falls to men to consider such inequity wrong and to do what they can do to alter the situation whether they are managers or colleagues of women underpaid, undervalued or underutilized.

That having been said, it behooves all women to pay attention to what is going on around them. A friend of mine told me last week that her daughter was being offered a consulting job. They didn’t want to pay her what she was worth and the going rate. Her father and mother advised her to walk away. And she did. Too many talented women are talked into less than they deserve. Sometimes that’s required — for a short period of time. When it becomes a habit, women as individuals and as a group lose ground. We inadvertently teach younger women and daughters that it’s fine to accept being undervalued.

We need to keep our eyes wide open, vote for candidates who are serious about improving women’s pay and lessening workplace discrimination. We should expect much from senators and congresspeople in this regard and write to them and/or not vote for them when they fail us. And we should make sure women are not penalized for having children, doing the right thing in terms of being with them when they’re ill, and caring for parents who are ill. We should nudge and even push organizations to be flexible in such times as they are rarely long-term.

In our own relationships, we need to be negotiators of shared responsibility. Individual women should look at their lives, look at the loads they carry, and when they have partners negotiate responsibilities with them. It’s easy to believe that you’re the only one who can feed the baby properly, load the dishwasher the “right way,” soothe an ailing child, work with children on homework, etc. We hurt ourselves this way. And the first step in getting organizations and government to do what is right by women is to do what is right for ourselves. It’s a multi-pronged endeavor.

TAGS: Equal pay, family expectations, family leave, government involvement in pay equity, negotiating pay, overworked

I received a wonderfully inspiring letter from a reader that I want to share with you:

For the past two years, I’d been working for a Fortune 500 company as a demonstration coordinator.  I loved what I did and discovered a true delight in working with customers and organizing in-store events.   However, when a new store manager was promoted, things at that location rapidly went downhill.  After a few months, no matter what I did, I was criticized up one side and down the other. For a company that boasts about their ”appreciation of team members”, praise was few and far between for anyone at that location.    

• Be a role model for your daughters.  Ask yourself if you would want them to be treated the way you’re being treated at work. 
• Know when it’s time to vote with your feet.  If you’ve tried to turn around a difficult situation and it isn’t working, don’t remain a victim.  Your self-esteem and self-confidence will only suffer.
• Advertise yourself.  I love that this woman created a presentation to sell herself into a job that didn’t even exist!  Go the extra mile and potential employers will see how you add value.
• Be open, creative, and take risks.  The writer found her next job by simply talking to people at a shop she frequented.  Be alert to the opportunities around you.
• Ask.  As this writer found out, nothing ventured, nothing gained.  Don’t talk yourself out of a job before you even ask. 

TAGS: Job Search, job transitions, Leaving a bad boss or a job you hate

I have to admit it.  I’m a Scrabbleholic.  I crave words.  I take my handheld game with me everywhere.  Long waits in doctor’s offices are made more tolerable when I try to beat my best score.  Television commercials are wasted on me as I pick up my handheld and get in a game between shows. I play while waiting for the car at the car wash.  But I’ve come to realize it’s not such a bad thing.  Scrabble can teach you just about everything you need to know to be successful in life and work.  If you think I’m kidding, consider these valuable lessons:

1.  Look to your opponent to teach you something that might one day come in handy.   When that pesky little computer opponent comes up with a word like qoph (a Hebrew letter) or jato (a takeoff aided by jet propulsion) I am compelled to immediately look it up to learn its meaning.  Then, at the perfect opportunity, I turn the tables and use one of those words to win the game. 

2.  When you’re winning, take more risks.  If I’m ahead by 100 or 150 points, that’s the time when I lay down a word that may or may not be in the official Scrabble dictionary or use spaces dangerously close to the coveted triple word score hoping it will still be available on my next turn. You’d be surprised at how many letters you can string together that form real words that you may have never heard of – like orra (an adjective meaning occasional) or yare (nimble).

3.  Don’t get stuck in analysis paralysis.  Sometimes I’ll be staring at my letters, searching for just one word that will allow me to use them all, empty my electronic tray, and reward me with those 50 extra points.  But nothing appears.  Then I start putting letters on the board, shifting them around, playing with words like they were putty in my hands and suddenly they form a word I couldn’t see before I took such bold action.  It’s a reminder that sometimes you just have to make a move that gets you out of your head and into the game.   

4.  Plan ahead and think strategically.  The nights when I’m dog-tired and play the game as an excuse to not have to think much more for the day, are the same times when I’m doomed to mediocrity.  I may win a game here or there, but I don’t reach my personal best.  As in life, in Scrabble you can’t just act for the moment and expect to get ahead in the long-term.  You’ve always got to be thinking about your next move and sometimes the one after that. 

5.  Take the small wins.  Not every move you make is going to allow you to win the jackpot. As much as I loathe having to hit the “done” button knowing a word that will bring me less than 20 points, I also know every point makes a difference. The trick is to pocket the big wins, prepare for the small ones, and at times be grateful you could make any word at all.  You win some, you lose some, but you suit up for them all.

TAGS: playing the game, Scrabble, strategies for success

A friend was talking to me yesterday about reviewing resumes for a vacancy in her company.  She said the best resume to come across her desk was from someone by the name of “Precious.”  Apparently, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t bring herself to hire someone called “Precious.”  The name certainly doesn’t instill confidence.  She said she couldn’t imagine calling the woman’s name, “Precious, would you come in here please.”

When it comes to names, there is something to be said for erring on the side of conservative.  Names are our own personal brands.  Here are some coaching tips to consider:

• When you name your child, think ahead 20 years and ask yourself if you could picture him or her being called by this name in a Board meeting or when running for public office. 
• Don’t get too creative in spelling.  If the child is going to have to explain it every time he or she is called on, the name probably too fussy.
• Consider whether the name will cause the child to be ridiculed throughout his or her lifetime.
• If you already have a name that doesn’t reprepsent your brand well, consider changing it, going by your first two initials, or going by your middle name. 

TAGS: Children's names, names, personal branding

Today’s economy has made the workplace more competitive than ever.   Financial services firms, retailers, and even your neighborhood Starbuck’s are feeling the crunch.  You can increase the likelihood of not just surviving in this economy, but thriving by being the kind of employee who adds value and is also a delight to work with.   Try following these ten simple steps to increase the likelihood of being bullet proof:

1.    Make it easy to give you feedback by regularly asking what you can do “more of” or “less of” to better meet the boss’s expectations. 

2.    When you are given feedback, don’t rebut it or argue with it.  Simply listen, thank the boss for taking the time to give it to you and promise that you will take it seriously.  Then act in ways that show you got the message. 

3.    Learn the boss’s primary objectives and develop your own goals around those.   Be certain to illuminate how your actions are in sync with his or hers.  Making the boss look good makes you look good.

4.    Don’t cry on the boss’s shoulder.  Even though some appear very kind and understanding, bosses really don’t want to play the role of psychologist.  If you do break down in front of the boss, excuse yourself and do your boo-hooing in the ladies room. 

5.    Never try to change the boss.  It’s not your job.  You can (and should) ask for what you need to be effective (more time together, more feedback, etc.) but whether or not you get it is entirely up to the boss.

6.    Distinguish your boss from your parents, husband or other meaningful people in your life.  Many times women react to the boss as they might to a parent because the boss is an authority figure of sorts.  This can result in you misinterpreting the boss’s behavior or comments. 

7.    See your boss as a human being, not a one-dimensional entity.  The boss is bound to make mistakes, let you down, and have his or her own problems too.  Don’t put bosses on a pedestal — they’ll always tumble off.  Be as forgiving as you would want the boss to be with you.

8.    Deliver more than you promise.  Make certain you meet or beat deadlines, submit work free from errors, and go the extra mile to interpret data, not just report it.

9.    Avoid being a “high maintenance” employee.  Too many complaints, too many challenges, or being too needy will put you in this category.  As one CEO said, “I like it when people push once and push twice.  Three times is too many.”

10. If  you’ve done all the things described above and you still don’t trust your boss, if the boss is making your life miserable, or if it’s clear your boss doesn’t trust you, you have only three options: wait the boss out until a new one comes in; transfer to another department within your company; quit.  It’s that simple. 

TAGS: adding value, bosses, managing up, managing your career, surviving downsizing