7 body language clues to watch out for

Your gestures and postures say more about you than words. To be successful in business, you must know how to make an excellent impression.

Body language and non-verbal communication can have a major impact on your professional life, as well as creating or breaking a deal, a business relationship, and even your financial success. "In business, one of the most important things is the impression you make on people," says Eliot Hoppe, author and body language expert.

Body language includes body movements, facial expressions and gestures, as well as tone of voice. Take note of Hoppe's tips to optimize your probability of success:

1) Posture: People make assumptions about others in the first four seconds, says Hoppe. "In business you have to remember that when you walk into a room, people have already made a decision about you before you sit down."

To ensure that you go to a business meeting with equals, you must have good posture. "Stand up straight and have a brisk walk, as you want to show your desire to be there and your confidence in yourself," says Hoppe.

2) Handshake: Physical contact is an essential part of body language, so doing it wrong could lead to rejection, while doing it right can be the first step to a successful business transaction.

"In most parts of the world, a business handshake is the norm and from there you can get an idea of whether the person is dominant and aggressive or passive," says Hoppe.

Complete Article at Entrepreneur India

Why Prioritizing Growth Will Kill Your Chances of Success

It's a common mistake to conflate growth with longevity.

When you’re considering new business ideas, building a digital platform sounds exciting and appealing. There are fewer overhead costs and virtually no limits on growth and expansion. Theoretically, your business can experience fast and consistent growth as long as you keep pushing sales and attracting customers. 

In these instances, it can be easy to focus on growth and assume that a sustainable business model will simply come together as you go. The truth is that this mindset will lead you down the path of failure, and your brand likely won’t make it past its first year. 

Did you know that 90% of startups fail because of self-destruction? Not competition. Not a lack of interest. Not even funding issues. They fail because they don't start with the correct end goal: sustainability. 

(To be clear, sustainability in this context refers to the longevity of your brand, not your eco-friendliness or environmental impact.)

Complete Article at Entrepreneur India

Amazon will hire 150,000 temporary workers and pay them up to $ 3,000 just for signing

Amazon is competing with Walmart and other retailers for temporary workers amid a staff shortage in the US, offering a hefty hiring bonus and above-average salaries.

This Monday, Amazon announced that it will hire 150 thousand temporary workers in the United States to cover the increase in demand they expect for year-end purchases. One of his strategies to attract staff is to offer bonuses of up to $ 3,000 just for signing with Jeff Bezos' company.

The ecommerce giant is getting ready for the Christmas season , amid a great crisis of labor shortages in the country. Therefore, it is tempting candidates with a hefty bonus of up to $ 3,000 , depending on the city where the workers are based.

This hiring bonus is independent of the salary they will receive: 18 dollars per hour (about 360 Mexican pesos), which can increase to 21 dollars (about 420 MXN) for those who cover night shifts and / or work on weekends.

The new employees will fill vacancies in the merchandise packaging areas , one of the busiest in the last months of the year. These are in addition to those announced by Amazon in September: It will hire 40,000 new corporate and technology employees, as well as 125,000 full and part-time employees for fulfillment and transportation jobs.

Complete Article at Entrepreneur India

The Facebook Trap

Summary.   

Facebook has a clear mission: Connect everyone in the world. Clarity is good, but in Facebook’s case, it has also put the company in a bind because the mission — and the company’s vision for creating value through network effects — has also become the source of its biggest problems. As the company moved from connecting existing friends online to making new global connections (both examples of direct network effects) and now to connecting users to professional creators (indirect network effects), it has come under fire for everything from violating individual privacy to bullying small companies as a monopoly to radicalizing its users. Now, it is struggling to find solutions that don’t undercut its mission. The author calls this “the Facebook Trap.” To address the problems created by the platform — and by other social networks, too — it helps to clearly establish where the company should be held accountable. While it’s reasonable to push for changes in how Facebook’s recommendations work, it’s harder to decide how the platform should deal with organic connections, which would likely entail censoring users and blocking them from making connections that they want to make. Facebook isn’t the only company facing the conundrum of needing to undermine its own mission to minimize harm, and companies and governments will need to develop strategies for how to deal with this issue.

Founded in 2004, Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them.

 ― Facebook Mission Statement

Our mission is to connect every person in the world.

― Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and Co-Founder of Facebook

Depending on who you ask, Facebook’s biggest problem might be almost anything. Critics have argued that it’s violating individual privacy or bullying small companies as a monopoly, damaging teens’ mental health or inciting violent insurrections — the list of possibilities goes on (and on). But varied as these troubles may seem, they are actually all facets of one big, fundamental problem that is staring all of us — policymakers, general public, and Facebook’s own employees — right in the face.

Complete Article at HBR

Leadership Qualities: Good Leaders Know You Can’t Fight Reality

Summary.   

Acceptance is often misunderstood as approval or being against change, but it is neither. Acceptance is about acknowledging the facts and letting go of the time, effort, and energy wasted in the fight against reality. Your reality may be that you are falling behind on revenue, a competitor has outflanked you with a new product, or that the effects of the pandemic are still hurting your business. Whatever it is you’re facing, you can’t employ your best skills to deal with it until you stop the wrangle against reality and accept what you’ve been handed, ready to change things for the better. The author offers three kinds of acceptance that leaders should focus on: 1) Accepting results 2) Accepting circumstances 3) Accepting their failings and those of others.

The ability to accept reality is one of the most useful, and most misunderstood, skills for a leader. It’s a concept that has been around for centuries in philosophy and more recently in psychology, and properly applied can help drive change. As Carl Jung wrote, “We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.” But I don’t see acceptance applied enough by leaders today as a valuable tool for achieving better results.

Complete Article at HBR

 

Job Search: How to Job Hunt (When You’re Already Exhausted)

Summary.   

When you’re already worn out from working full time, caring for family, and managing this new way of “Covid being,” it’s hard to muster up the energy to jump into a job hunt or consider changing careers. Incorporating these five coaching and change management principles into your job search will help you stay motivated throughout what can feel like a grueling process even at the best of times. First, give some thought to why you actually want a new job, and why you want it now. Next, use visualization techniques when exhaustion or false narratives take over. Then, create a plan and follow it methodically. Next, let go of the things you can’t control. Finally, prepare for the inevitable emotional ups and downs.

When Fred, a client of mine, realized he wasn’t feeling fulfilled in his job, he wanted to find something more meaningful. So he started a job search. Within days, he was interviewing multiple times a week for multiple companies, and each interview required hours of preparation while he was also spearheading major projects at his full-time job. As his workload became more frenetic, he said many times, “This is exhausting,” and at times thought he would give up for a while if the roles he was interviewing for didn’t come through.

Complete Article at HBR

Job Interviews: 8 Tips for Conducting an Excellent Remote Interview

 Summary.   

Remote interviewing is here to stay, as the pandemic and its evolving offshoot, the Great Resignation, continue to reshape the modern workplace. Today’s job hunters aren’t just looking to boost their salaries. They’re also seeking flexibility, well-being, and a workplace culture that aligns with their own values and sensibilities. Interviews that delve into these topics can give both parties valuable information about whether a prospective employee is likely to feel fulfilled and engaged at a particular organization. We can absolutely have these conversations “face to face,” even when we’re not in the same physical room. The author presents eight tips for employers seeking to master the medium in order to identify top talent from a distance.

As companies scramble to fill a record number of job openings remotely, the internet is awash in tips for candidates seeking to stand out from the crowd while confined to a Zoom box.

But what about the employers on the other end of the connection? For them, “cracking the code” on remote interviewing is just as critical. Bad hiring decisions cost money and drain morale. Without the multitude of data points available only in person — the feel of a handshake, the way the energy in a room changes when a candidate walks in — employers need to develop new strategies for gauging whether someone is a good fit.

Complete Article at HBR

Proof That Positive Work Cultures Are More Productive

 

Too many companies bet on having a cut-throat, high-pressure, take-no-prisoners culture to drive their financial success.

But a large and growing body of research on positive organizational psychology demonstrates that not only is a cut-throat environment harmful to productivity over time, but that a positive environment will lead to dramatic benefits for employers, employees, and the bottom line.

Although there’s an assumption that stress and pressure push employees to perform more, better, and faster, what cutthroat organizations fail to recognize is the hidden costs incurred.

First, health care expenditures at high-pressure companies are nearly 50% greater than at other organizations. The American Psychological Association estimates that more than $500 billion is siphoned off from the U.S. economy because of workplace stress, and 550 million workdays are lost each year due to stress on the job. Sixty percent to 80% of workplace accidents are attributed to stress, and it’s estimated that more than 80% of doctor visits are due to stress. Workplace stress has been linked to health problems ranging from metabolic syndrome to cardiovascular disease and mortality.

The stress of belonging to hierarchies itself is linked to disease and death. One study showed that, the lower someone’s rank in a hierarchy, the higher their chances of cardiovascular disease and death from heart attacks. In a large-scale study of over 3,000 employees conducted by Anna Nyberg at the Karolinska Institute, results showed a strong link between leadership behavior and heart disease in employees. Stress-producing bosses are literally bad for the heart.

Complete Article at HBR