Seven Steps to Boost Leadership Self-Confidence

By Marshall Goldsmith

I was asked what advice I have for a leader whose bosses say needs to exhibit more self-confidence while still being collaborative and authentic. This is a great question.

I rarely encounter this issue in my work with CEOs and potential CEOs because people at the top of huge organizations don’t often have self-confidence problems. But I have had several inquiries lately about helping future leaders who need to demonstrate more self-confidence.

Here are a few suggestions that I give leaders who have self-confidence issues:

1. Decide if you really want to be a leader. Many of the MBAs who report self-confidence issues are brilliant technicians. They often find the uncertainty and ambiguity of leading people very unsettling. They are looking for the “right answers” – similar to the ones in engineering school. In some cases, brilliant technical experts should continue to be brilliant technical experts – and not feel obligated to become managers.

2. Make peace with ambiguity in decision making. There are usually no clear right answers when making complex business decisions. Even CEOs are guessing.

3. Gather a reasonable amount of data, involve people, then follow your gut and do what you think is right.

4. Accept the fact that you are going to fail on occasion. All humans do.

5. Have fun! Life is short. Why should you expect your direct reports to demonstrate positive enthusiasm, if they don’t see it in you?

6. Once you make a decision, commit and go for it. Don’t continually second guess yourself. If you have to change course, you have to change course. If you never commit, all you will ever do is change course.

7. And finally, demonstrate courage on the outside, even when you don’t feel it on the inside. We are all afraid on occasion -- that is just part of being human. If you are going to lead people in tough times, you will need to show more courage than fear. When direct reports read worry and concern on the face of a leader, they begin to lose confidence in the leader’s ability to lead.

Originally published in Harvard Business Online, 2008.

Marshall Goldsmith is a world authority in helping successful leaders achieve positive, measurable change in behavior: for themselves, their people and their teams. His latest book, What Got You Here Won't Get You There, won the Harold Longman Award for best business book of 2007. Marshall invites you to visit his library (MarshallGoldsmithLibrary.com) for articles and resources you can use.

What's Most Important in a Flat, Diverse World?

By Patricia Wheeler

Being the only American in the room is a very cool experience. I had the pleasure of spending a few days coaching a group of senior leaders from a large global company. A cohort of their multinational workforce came together to sharpen their strategic focus and accelerate profits. As part of their experience, they received behavioral feedback through a 360 assessment.

These several dozen leaders were from all parts of the world (with the exception of the U.S.). And they were the picture of diversity….imagine an Italian vice president working in the Far East, married to a Japanese woman working for an Eastern European consulate. There was an Australian general manager working in South America. Add to the mix a Lebanese president of a Dubai-based division, as well as a German executive leading in Singapore. And many more, often working outside their home culture.

For several days they explored global strategy, their personal 360s and learning from leaders within their industry. And they came to an interesting conclusion. It may sound overly simplistic, but here it is: It’s all about the people. People are the critical business success factor, whether their challenges involve driving innovation, aligning operations or increasing sales. And this is especially true in an ambiguous, swirling environment, where security and predictability are low, and the need for flexibility and speed is especially critical.

I’ve heard push-back about this idea. Some leaders say things like, “But, Patricia, we’re in the widget business. My business is not about people….it’s about making widgets faster, cheaper, better!”

Well, let’s look closely at the widget business. Who makes the widgets? Who packages and delivers them to market? Who sells them? Who hires the sales force? Who trains them? Who crafts the marketing message? Who creates corporate strategy? Who decides on innovations? Who answers the company phone? At the end of the day, what business success does not rest on the ideas and efforts of its people?

When faced with the reality that every business is the People Business, I hear leaders express thoughts like these, which were expressed in this session:

“I’ve focused so much on the facts, I haven’t developed my people as much as I need to.”

“I’m so sure of my own viewpoint, I forget to ask others for their opinion.”

“I’m so focused on coming up with answers that are 100% correct that I don’t pay enough attention to innovation.”

If attention to the people in your business is crucial to your success, consider the following questions that we ask our clients:

How much time do you spend developing your people and their capabilities? Do you treat people as important as processes? How often do you meet face to face and talk with them about their successes, goals and aspirations? The best workers, especially within the emerging generations, demand development. Ignore this step and you’ll likely lose them.

To what degree to you actively seek the perspective of others, particularly those at levels below yours? If your answer is “not much,” you're not tapping into grass-roots knowledge that could be crucial to your competitive advantage as well as a great opportunity to motivate your people.

How much do your people feel that you value them? How are you measuring this? Remember this: just thinking about something doesn’t count. They need for you to demonstrate your interest, in words and action. And if you’re not regularly and rigorously assessing employee engagement, you are vulnerable to your talent walking out the door.

How are you preparing your workforce to take on various roles across your enterprise? Leading companies “cross-train” their leaders to take on assignments out of their comfort zone, and rotate leaders regularly. The days of spending your days in one function or department appear to be limited, and this is a good thing, as these rotations serve to break down silos and increase long-term performance.

And know this…even in a challenging financial climate, when many companies are cutting their budgets, there are still organizations allocating time, money and attention to developing their current and future leaders. It’s inspiring to me, because we need good leaders even more in an economic downturn. And if you’re not continuing to develop leaders during a downturn, your most promising leaders may jump ship and go to those companies that continue affirming and investing in their value.

Copyright 2008, Leading News

Patricia Wheeler is an executive and team coach who helps smart people become better leaders. As Managing Partner in the Levin Group LLC, she has spent 15 years consulting to organizations and coaching senior leaders and their teams. You may contact Patricia by E-mail at Patricia@TheLevinGroup.com or by telephone at 404 377-9408.

Study shows how spammers cash in

Spammers are turning a profit despite only getting one response for every 12.5m e-mails they send, finds a study.

By hijacking a working spam network, US researchers have uncovered some of the economics of being a junk mailer.

The analysis suggests that such a tiny response rate means a big spam operation can turn over millions of pounds in profit every year.

It also suggests that spammers may be susceptible to attacks that make it more costly to send junk mail.

Slim pickings

The spam study was carried out in early 2008 by computer scientists from University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego (UCSD).

For their month-long study the seven-strong team of computer scientists infiltrated the Storm network that uses hijacked home computers as relays for junk mail.

At its height Storm was believed to have more than one million machines under its control.

The team, led by Assistant Professor Stefan Savage from UCSD, took over a chunk of the Storm network to make it easier to run their study.

"The best way to measure spam is to be a spammer," wrote the researchers in a paper describing their work.

They created several so-called "proxy bots" that acted as conduits of information between the command and control system for Storm and the hijacked home PCs that actually send out junk mail.

The team used these machines to control a total of 75,869 hijacked machines and routed their own fake spam campaigns through them.

Two types of fake spam campaign were run through these machines. One mimicked the way Storm spreads using viruses and the other tried to tempt people to visit a fake pharmacy site and buy a herbal remedy to boost their libido.

The fake pharmacy site was made to resemble those run by Storm's real owners but always returned an error message when potential buyers clicked a button to submit their credit card details.

While running their spam campaigns the researchers sent about 469 million junk e-mail messages. The vast majority of these were for the fake pharmacy campaign.

"After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted," wrote the researchers.

The response rate for this campaign was less than 0.00001%. This is far below the average of 2.15% reported by legitimate direct mail organisations.

"Taken together, these conversions would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88—a bit over $100 a day for the measurement period," said the researchers.

Scaling this up to the full Storm network the researchers estimate that the controllers of the vast system are netting about $7,000 (£4,430) a day or more than $2m (£1.28m) per year.

While this was a good return, said the researchers, it did suggest that spammers were not making the vast sums of money that some people have predicted in the past.

They suggest that the tight costs might also open up new avenues of attack on spammers.

The researchers concluded: "The profit margin for spam may be meager enough that spammers must be sensitive to the details of how their campaigns are run and are economically susceptible to new defenses."

Usability Post » Categories vs Tags

Usability Post » Categories vs Tags:

Categories vs Tags

October 17th, 2008 by Dmitry
Usability

Content focused sites like blogs and online magazines have various ways to organize and sort their content. Sorting articles by date and by author is usually done automatically by the content management system. There are two concepts which can be used on top of that to organize your site’s content: categories and tags. While you can use both of them at the same time, it’s probably too much bother — so which one should you use and why? Let’s examine each one in turn.

Categories

Categories are like folders — they’re collections of things related to one theme or topic. This actually isn’t strictly true because in the digital world you can attach more than one category to your content, but the function is the same — to categorize.

The main advantage of categories is that there is a set amount of them — and if you want to utilize them properly then there shouldn’t be too many either. This lets people scan through the list quickly to choose the topic they wish to browse. Categories give your content structure and an easy browsing experience.

The downside of categories falls on the publisher. Firstly, you have to decide on the list of categories you want to use. This is usually harder than it sounds because you need to make sure there aren’t any categories which would have too many or too few posts in them. There is no point making a category if all your posts are included in it or if there is just one post. And secondly, whenever publishing new content, you need to decide which category to put it in. This isn’t too hard if you keep your category list short and assign multiple categories to content, but it still requires a little effort.

Tags

Tags are the digital equivalent of real tags — little labels you attach to things. Tags have an advantage over categories in that they aren’t pre-set. When you attach tags you write them in manually and have the freedom to write whatever you want. If a tag doesn’t exist already, it will once you’ve hit publish. There is no need to worry about finding an existing category to fit the post into — you just write the labels you feel best represent the content.

The downside of tags is in the browsing experience. One of the most popular ways to browse by tags is using something called a “tag cloud”. A tag cloud is a big block of tags listed one after another, with each tag link having its own size depending on how many items are tagged with it.

Tag clouds are great for showing what sort of entries are posted the most on the site, but browsing by tags is difficult because there are usually just too many of them. The other problem is that they’re unbalanced — there may be only entry attached to a particular tag, or there may be thousands.

OK… so which one do I use?

The answer is… it depends. It depends on what type of content you have and how your search works.

If you’ve got a site like YouTube or Flickr where users submit their own content and you have thousands or millions of submissions then categories won’t be as useful as tags because there may be thousands of entries to each category. This makes browsing very difficult and in most cases impossible. Each tag may also contain thousands of entries, but there will be many more tags with a much more focused yield of results; and using combinations of tags will also greatly narrow the number of results your visitors have to browse through.

If your site-wide search uses tags when looking through records then tags can and will add a clear benefit. If your search is something very simple, like an external Google search which simply filters results by your site address, then tags may not be as useful because they won’t be used to find the results.

I don’t think that for blogs tagging makes much sense. Sure, it may be easier to tag things, but the browsing experience isn’t that great. Sometimes you will have just one post attached to a tag — what use is that? People will generally want to find posts on a particular theme, and that’s the primary function of categories. What’s more, you’re not limited to using just one category — attach a couple if you feel the post is relevant to both.

This is just my take on tags and categories, I’m sure some of you may disagree. I’m very interested to hear whether you use tags or categories on your blogs (or both?) and why do you prefer one over the other — please do post your thoughts in the comments below.

Using Light, Color and Contrast Effectively in UI Design

Using Light, Color and Contrast Effectively in UI Design

August 14th, 2008 by Dmitry
Design, Usability, User Interface

User interface (UI) design is both an art and a science. Artistic talent comes in handy when coming up with an attractive style and aesthetic, but at the core of UI design lies logic and method.

Very basic things like light, color and contrast are often overlooked, which can negatively affect the UI by misdirecting user’s attention and not providing enough focus on the things that matter. Here’s a quick overview of how to use each of these elements effectively.

1. Light — create depth using light and shadow.

Light can be used to create depth. Lighter shades appear closer to us and darker shades further away. This isn’t strictly how light works, but since the user interface lives in a very basic environment of a computer display, there’s not a lot we have to work with.

Think of a button. When a button is pressed, most designers tend to make it darker. Why? The reason is simple — we imagine the button as a 3D object. When this object is pressed, we assume it goes further away from us. We may also assume it goes into an opening on the surface of the “device”, and thus is now covered somewhat from a light source.

Using this basic idea we can build the UI metaphor by basing it on 3D objects with depth. Color things you want to appear to be sticking out lighter. Color things that are carved inwards darker. This doesn’t apply to every aesthetic style, but generic things like OS interfaces tend to follow this principle — especially when depicting real world objects like buttons and switches.

2. Color — use heat to manage focus.

Colors don’t all behave the same way. There are those that are considered cold — blue and green shades — and there are those that are warm — red and yellow. Warmer colors expand when placed next to colder colors, they literally spill out and take dominance. Here’s an example:

Take a look at the square on the right with the blue and the yellow color segmens. The yellow is warmer and brighter and so it takes prominence on the image.

What about the red and the green? This one is trickier, but the warmer red is taking control here. The colder green contracts inwards, letting the red move forward.

This is very similar to point 1 — warmer colors are brighter. Not only that, they also appear closer to us. Use warmer colors for elements you want to pop out and get noticed. Colors like red are especially good for this purpose, and it’s no surprise that pretty much all the US presidential candidates’ websites had the donation button in bright red.

3. Contrast — attract attention with higher contrast

Higher contrast items stand out — they catch your eye. Look at the following example of a content window with some text, and a button. Here we’re using both, brightness levels and contrast, to manage the user’s attention and focus.

In the first instance, the text is on a darker background, while the button is on a lighter surface than the rest of the pane. The button has the highest contrast between its black text and the light grey surface it sits on. It’s also the lightest element on the surface — it pops out.

On the right I’ve flipped the shades. Here the text pops out because it sits on a lighter background and has a high contrast between the text and the background. The button now fades away.

Use contrast to manage user’s attention. You don’t necessarily need to make buttons lighter (that will depend on your design style and theme), but you do need to make them stand out enough so that they’re not overlooked. Decrease contrast for less important areas of your UI to make them take a back seat.

Example: The OS X interface

Let’s see a real world example of these principles from a well known usability expert — Apple. This is the interface for the OS X operating system’s control panel for the Mac:

You can see contrast and 3D metaphors at work here. Buttons are light and high contrast, while becoming darker when pressed. Certain content areas are bevelled inwards to group together various items and because they’re less hierarchically important. It looks good and it’s very usable.

Think through your UI design process logically. Are you trying to depict a real life object like a button or a switch? Use shadow and light to create depth and 3D feel appropriately.

Do you need to manage user’s focus, for example give prominence to the welcome message or a notice on your site? Color that box in a warm color like yellow. Ensure that all the important controls have enough contrast to stand out so they’re not overlooked.

I hope you found this useful — please don’t hesitate to post any thoughts or resources in the comments below.

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Chantelle White featured in DM Confidential, 11/6

Chantelle was featured in Digital Moses' affiliate tips section again...nice work!

http://www.dmconfidential.com/backissues/2008/11/06/newsletter.11062008.html


Chantelle White
Advaliant
Clear and concise marketing provisions are essential to the long term success of a campaign. Advertisers, ensure you are frequently updating your partner network(s) with marketing guidelines that are relevant to the trends and will allow the publishers to utilize their most valuable skill - their innovation!

If you're interested in contributing an affiliate tip, please contact me lpflager@mediatrust.com