The following is a guest post by Joel A. Garfinkle.

Being a good leader — or even a great leader — is just not enough if you want to keep moving up in your career. You must be so remarkable that no one can help but notice you. You must do great things — not once or twice, but continuously — in order to stand out, get noticed, and propel yourself to the top of your company.

Three great ways to stand out are by creating new products, solving difficult problems, and actively seeking out opportunities to do something truly remarkable.

1. Create a new product
You can find ideas for new products all over the place, but one of the best ways is to listen to your customers. What do they want that you don’t sell? Is there already a product on the market that will meet their needs? If not, you may have an opportunity to create a revolutionary new product that will fill this gap and satisfy an existing demand.

There are new products being released constantly, so you need something that is either completely different from what is currently available or a huge improvement. You won’t stand out by making minor changes. You need something that people will get excited about and tell their friends about — something that is different enough to create a stir in the marketplace.

That doesn’t necessarily mean Click here to continue reading »”3 Ways Remarkable Leaders Get Noticed”

Have you ever had an employee come to you with an idea or proposal to address a particular situation to which you answered with one of the following replies?

“That’s a great idea, but let’s shop this around a bit first.”

“I agree that we need to change this, but I’m not sure now is the best time.”

“It’d be nice if we could offer this, but I don’t think we can afford to right now.”

All of these responses sound understanding and appreciative of the employee’s input. And yet, notice how the use of “but” in each reply serves to effectively stop any further discussion or deeper examination of the proposal beyond this initial encounter.

Granted, there are times when leaders need to hold back eager employees because the measures they are suggesting might not be the best in terms of addressing a given problem the organization is facing. Unfortunately, such responses can also inhibit your employees’ sense of creativity and with it, your organization’s ability to innovate if the motivation behind this resistance is based on factors other than ensuring the collective success of your team.

With this in mind, here are four questions leaders can ask themselves to find out if they are letting their ‘buts’ get in the way of helping their team to succeed and thrive. Click here to continue reading »”Is Your ‘But’ Getting In The Way Of Your Team’s Success?”

Imagine walking into work one day and your boss decides to divide you into teams of four with the following challenge – to build the largest structure you can using 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string and one marshmallow, which has to be placed at the top of the structure. It’s an unusual assignment, to be sure, but it’s also the basis of a sociological experiment on teamwork called “The Marshmallow Challenge”.

In his TED talk “Build a tower, build a team”, Tom Wujec shares his findings from performing this challenge with a variety of different groups – recent business school graduates, lawyers, engineers, CEOs, and even kindergarten students. As you’ll see, his observations about how the various groups approached the challenge gave rise to some surprising, and at times humorous, results:

While Wujec shares some interesting points on the nature of how we collaborate and the process of design, there are some additional lessons we can learn from this challenge on how leaders can guide their teams to a successful outcome: Click here to continue reading »”What The Marshmallow Challenge Can Teach Us About Fostering Team Success”

Of the many stories that came out of NASA’s Apollo space program, one of my favourites is the story about the janitor who upon being asked by a reporter what his job was in the organization replied “I’m helping to put a man on the Moon”. Now, whether this story is true or not doesn’t really matter as it exemplifies the general sentiment shared by everyone involved in that project; that regardless of how large or visible their contribution was, they all felt a genuine and direct connection between the work they did and that moment when Neil Armstrong took that first step on the Moon.

In many ways, this prevalent feeling of connecting to a shared purpose and sense of being active contributors to the Apollo space program is as much a noteworthy and admirable accomplishment as their collective feat of sending men to walk on our celestial neighbour in the night sky. And it’s certainly an accomplishment that many leaders and their organizations would like to duplicate within their own workforce in order to increase their global competitiveness through their ability to innovate and create.

So what can this anecdote of the NASA janitor teach us about driving innovation and fostering a strong sense of collective purpose within our own teams? Here’s a few ideas for starters:

1. Encourage your employees to transform your vision into their story

We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.  -  John F. Kennedy

Many of us are familiar with President Kennedy’s famous speech at Rice University where he made the announcement of his government’s plan to put into high gear the creation of a space program that would send a man to the Moon. Without question it’s an inspiring speech, but notice how in the quote above, Click here to continue reading »”Encouraging Your Employees to Reach for the Moon”