Relationships

Employees Engage

If you’re just joining us, we are in part 3 of 4 in our Toxic Traits series. So far, we’ve thought about why toxicity in the workplace seems to be on the rise and what managers can do to make the workplace less toxic.

Have you seen any Reels like these lately? Social media amplifies discussions about workplace issues, bringing visibility to toxic behaviors that used to be overlooked. While these videos make you laugh as well as feel seen, they don’t exactly help you solve your toxicity problem. Through collaboration, inclusivity, communication, and mutual respect you can help transform your workplace into an environment where both employer and employees thrive. This solution seems simple, but it’s not easy. So, what can employees do to make your workplace less toxic?

Communicate Effectively: Interact respectfully with colleagues and supervisors. Commit to constructive communication and use the appropriate medium. For example: When you feel like someone belittled your idea in a reply-all email, instead of immediately defending your position, reply all with, “I’d like to learn more. I’ll set up a call for you and I to go deeper.” Showing curiosity in their input signals you have an open mind. Pulling the issue out of the group email demonstrates emotional intelligence. By the way, keeping your mind open does not mean you have to change it.

Support Peers: Foster a collaborative atmosphere by helping your teammates. For example: When someone new joins your team, think about what you wish you’d known when you were in their shoes. Are there certain reference documents in the shared drive they should know about? Does the team take turns buying coffee? Offer to be available to answer their questions.

Engage Constructively: Participate positively in meetings to build a sense of community. For example: When your weekly check-ins start off with what went wrong, call out a teammate who helped make it right.

Manage Stress: Practice self-care to maintain personal well-being. Establish and maintain healthy boundaries around time spent on work. For example: When you receive a work email during Jeopardy! do NOT reply.

Report Issues: Speak up about toxic behaviors using appropriate channels. For example: When you repeatedly get left out of emails containing information pertinent to your responsibilities on the project, get face time with the source and ask them to add you to the thread. You do not have to be confrontational. Concentrate on the call to action. You can say, “Will you please add me to the email list for the project? It has come to my attention I need that information to complete my part of it. I can wait while you do that right now.”

Help Others: Embrace opportunities to stay engaged. For example: When your marketing department needs an extra hand hosting a table at an event your organization is sponsoring, volunteer to help. This gives you insight into another department, feedback on how your work contributes to your organization’s brand, and a networking opportunity.

Both employers and employees have crucial roles to play in growing a healthy workplace culture. It takes perseverance, but working together will decrease toxicity, increase productivity, and promote overall well-being for everyone in the organization.

Have you ever worked in a toxic workplace? What did you do to make it less toxic? Please share in the comments.

Managers Matter

Last week we wondered if workplaces are becoming more toxic in part one of our series, Toxic Traits. The growing awareness of the effect of employment on mental health keeps workplace cultures under scrutiny. We talked about possible causes and listed some clues to watch for. Every employee of an organization at every level influences its culture. This week let’s talk about how managers impact your work environment.

The Role of Control

Excessive control, whether through micromanagement or rigid policies, can lead to feelings of powerlessness and frustration among employees. On the other hand, a lack of control or guidance can create confusion and insecurity contributing to stress and dissatisfaction. To successfully supervise a team, managers must balance guidance with agency. Your team should have a clear mission as well as feel trusted to perform their duties.

Set Them Up for Success

Empowering employees with decision-making authority on how to meet their key performance indicators develops an individual contributor’s sense of ownership and accountability. Providing clear direction, like establishing monthly goals and coaching on how to reach them, sets your team up for success. When you balance oversight with autonomy you significantly reduce the potential for toxicity. Here are some suggestions.

Open Communication: Encourage transparency and honest feedback through regular check-ins with each member of your team. Allow your direct reports to voice their concerns without fear of retaliation. Address any issues quickly. This both prevents escalation and builds trust.

Clear Expectations: Define roles, responsibilities, and goals. Make sure they are realistic. When circumstances change, revisit them. Every six months at one of your check-ins, analyze how the last six months went. Align expectations for the next six months.

Work-Life Integration: Can you offer flexible working hours, remote work options, and/or resources for mental health and emotional well-being like an employee assistance program (EAP)? Can you budget for investing in professional training and personal development opportunities for your team? Continuing education in communication, leadership, and diversity will not only help them grow and feel valued, it will positively impact your organization’s bottom line. At the very least, ensure your employees take regular breaks and use their vacation days.

Foster Inclusivity: Create a culture of respect and belonging where diversity is valued and discrimination is not tolerated. Implement and enforce policies that protect against harassment and other toxic behaviors. Promote teamwork and collaboration to build strong, supportive relationships among coworkers. Check your hiring and promotion processes for hidden biases. Monitor your team’s workload distribution. Is one person doing all the heavy lifting?

Recognize Progress: Acknowledge employees’ hard work and achievements and reward them with public praise, an email to your Director, lunch with the C-Suite, or a gift card. Learn what type of recognition makes them feel valued and use it to reward them.

Lead by Example: Demonstrate the values and positive behaviors you want to see from your team. You set the tone for the organization.

Both employers and employees have a role in preventing workplace toxicity. Next week in part three of this series, Toxic Traits, we’ll look at some of the ways employees can promote a healthy work culture.

Have you ever worked in a toxic workplace? What was your manager’s role in the toxicity? Please share your story in the comments.

Assess Your Success

This is the final installment in the series, Stop and Think. For the last three weeks we’ve talked about reflecting on how you spent your time, energy, and attention on your work for the first half of 2024. This week, let’s stop and think about the money you make.

Your Decision

Society uses money to gauge success. But that does not mean you have to. If you make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, but have no time or energy to spend them the way you want, is that really success? Success is not actually about the money. It’s how you feel about the money. If making a lot of money is important to you, ask yourself why. What does the money you want buy you?

Our culture trains us to believe the more money you have the more options you have. While that can be true, it is also true that with more money comes more expectations. You have to figure out the balance between how much money is enough to reach your goals and what you’re willing to do to get it.

Think about that in relation to reflecting on your goals half way through 2024. Has your definition of success changed since January? Maybe at the start of the year you were focused on financial gains, but now a flexible schedule is more important to you. Update your definition of success and adjust both your goals and systems accordingly. Here are some questions to help you rethink your definition of success.

Is management happy with your job performance?
Is your family happy with your work-life integration?
If you have given your best effort for the last six months, what are three things you are most happy about accomplishing?
Are your original goals still relevant? For example: Did you discover a new skill in the last sixth months and you want to get certified in it? If so, then it’s time to rethink your original goals.

Your Climb

Success is more like climbing a tree than like climbing a ladder. You may need to move laterally, switching branches, before you can climb higher. For example, you may have to change jobs or acquire new capabilities. Moving in reverse or taking a different branch of the tree can often lead to your desired destination more effectively than sticking to your original goal. It may also reveal a new destination you were not aware of that you want more. For example: Is your definition of success more money or is it more control of your lifestyle? Do you have rare and in-demand skills that would allow you to work the hours that you dictate? Time is more valuable than money. You can always make more money. You cannot make more time.

You do not have to wait six months to reflect on your progress, alignment, systems, or success. If you normalize rethinking when new information warrants it and embrace the change then your self-awareness will grow. Periodic realignment keeps you motivated and helps you pursue what type of success truly matters to you.

How do you define success? Please share in the comments.

Assess Your Systems

This is part three of four in the series, Stop and Think. In part one, we talked about reflecting on how you spent your time during the first two quarters of this year. Last week we put some energy into applying the insights you gained to update your goals for the rest of 2024. This week, let’s take your newly iterated SMART goals and turn our attention to your systems for reaching them.

What is the Difference?

SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals help you break down big ambitions into manageable tasks and set a timeline for reaching them. Goals are the results you want to attain. Developing systems focuses on your process to achieve those results. Now that you have updated your goals for 2024, you also need to update your systems. I’m thinking here of a quote from Atomic Habits:

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
James Clear

Reflecting on the last six months, do you see where your current routine led you to where you are now? How far off target are you? Gradual improvement is key to reaching your SMART goals. The purpose of your habits should be to help you keep making incremental progress. Flexibility and adaptability ensure that your incremental progress is in the right direction. Adjust your habits so they give you both the consistency and direction you need. For example, let’s say you got reassigned to a new department in May and are getting acquainted with four new team mates. Having a system to build relationships with them so that you can get to know, like, and trust each other will not only enable your team to complete work assignments faster, but also increase the quality of your projects’ results. Your system for getting to know your four coworkers is asking them how their weekends went during your project status meetings, so progress is slow. To get to know them more efficiently, calendar a 30-minute coffee meeting at the beginning of the workday every Tuesday for a month with a different team member. If during one of these coffee talks you discover it’s going to take more than 30 minutes to get acquainted with a certain team member, then schedule another coffee for next month. Experiment with your systems and adjust them to serve your goals. This helps you remain agile and open to change. Adaptability is crucial to your success at work. It is essential for navigating the challenges of your current responsibilities. It is also a highly sought after power skill.

What’s Next?

Let your manager know you have updated your goals and systems in your next one-to-one meeting. Give them a brief summary of your reflection including what you noticed was not working well, your updated goal, and your new plan to reach the goal. Tell them you intend to implement this process through the end of Q3, then report the results back to them at the beginning of October. This not only helps you be accountable, it also lets your manager see you are self-motivated, take initiative, and are a leader.

What modifications can you make to your routine to improve the systems that support your goals? Please share in the comments.

Underwhelmed

I was introduced to the concept of boreout in Adam Grant’s book, Hidden Potential, and it’s fascinated me ever since. You’ve heard of, and probably experienced, burnout caused by your job. It’s when you are exhausted by too much emotional, physical, and mental fatigue for too long. Boreout is the same exhaustion, but the cause is different. Instead of being overwhelmed by the stimulation of your job, you are underwhelmed by it.

What It Looks Like

You arrive at work each morning facing the same tasks you mastered ages ago. You complete a monotonous routine that offers no room for growth or innovation while constantly checking the clock and counting down the minutes until you can leave. There’s no challenge and no sense of accomplishment. You go through the motions while your skills stagnate, your creativity dwindles, and your enthusiasm decreases with each passing day. You feel apathetic and frustrated. These emotions can spill over into other areas of your life, affecting your relationships and overall well-being. Here are some questions to ask yourself if you suspect you’re suffering from boreout.

Is your comfort zone too comfortable?
Are you running on empty energy-wise?
Do you procrastinate more often?
Are you disengaged with your work and coworkers?
Is your productivity slipping?
Do simple tasks feel burdensome?
Do you feel indifferent to meeting deadlines or achieving goals?
Are you questioning the purpose of your role within the organization?
Do you feel like a cog in a machine rather than a valued contributor?
Has your job performance suffered?
Are you progressing on your career path?
Are you increasingly irritable?
Do you feel detached from friends and family?

How to Combat It at Work

Seek Challenges: Talk to your manager about taking on stretch assignments. Work with them to identify new projects or responsibilities that align with your capabilities. Ask where the skills gaps are on your team then volunteer to learn the competencies that are missing. Online courses, in-person workshops, and mentorship opportunities all broaden your skill set and keep you engaged. Increasing your knowledge base and your network both expands your comfort zone and breaks your cycle of boredom. Experimenting with new approaches to old challenges promotes continuous improvement, injects creativity into your work, and helps you build relationships. Host brainstorming sessions and collaborations with colleagues to spark fresh ideas and gather diverse perspectives. Explore unconventional paths to solutions together embracing failure as a learning opportunity rather than a setback. Everyone suffers from boreout at some point. Surround yourself with coworkers who inspire and motivate you so you can support and encourage each other when needed.

Set Goals: You don’t have to wait for your manager to give you something new to do. Set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) personal development goals for yourself, both short-term and long-term, that align with your values and career aspirations. Having something to work towards gives you a sense of purpose and direction. Break down larger objectives into manageable tasks, track your progress, and celebrate every completed step.

Establish Boundaries: Strive for healthy work-life integration by prioritizing self-care. Take regular breaks throughout the day to recharge and refocus. Go for a walk or do whatever helps you clear your mind and boost your energy level. Set, communicate, and protect non-business hours so you can disconnect from work to do things you enjoy and be with people you enjoy. BTW, if the only person you want to be with is you, that is valid!

How do you fight boreout? Please share in the comments.

Sustainable Success

What happens when you compare your job performance to your coworkers’ and you are not flattered by the comparison? You feel like you can’t mess up. Ever. You fight to be #1, and discover how hard it is to stay #1. You stick to the routines that proved successful in the past instead of trying new things which stifles your creativity, experimentation, and innovation. Beating the competition becomes more important to you than your customer’s satisfaction. What can you do to turn things around?

Team of Rivals

It’s normal to see your coworkers’ job performance, notice your manager’s reaction to it, and gauge how you are doing. You feel good when you compare favorably and nervous when you don’t. This habit is probably most obvious, and even formalized, in a company’s sales department where top salespeople are rewarded more than bottom ones creating internal competition among the team. Instead of comparing yourself to colleagues, how about setting incremental goals for yourself? Make them flexible so you can embrace change, be open to new approaches, and bounce back after disappointments. For example, using our sales scenario, if you did not reach your quota last month, would another 10 cold calls a day help you reach it this month? Your capacity to adapt will not only set you apart, but also carry you through inevitable setbacks.

Abundance Over Scarcity

Instead of being threatened by your coworkers’ success, how about using it for motivation? Continuous learning is a cornerstone of professional development and identifies you as a leader. Seek opportunities for upskilling so you stay relevant in your ever-evolving market. Make resilience in the face of adversity one of your goals. Swap your fear of not being good enough for curiosity. For example, analyze the differences between you and a successful coworker to discover capabilities you should obtain. There will be enough opportunities for everyone because you will create them. Factor self-compassion into your goal setting. It will help you maintain a positive mindset and reduce self-criticism. Be kind to yourself by celebrating your achievements, no matter how small.

You Are Your Competition

Instead of focusing on competing with your colleagues, how about shifting your mindset to competing with yourself? Strive to become an expert in your field. Set goals focused on personal growth so you are not only valuable to your organization, but also to your profession. State your goals using phrases that describe process improvement. For example, improve on, get better at, grow in. You want to be better than YOU were yesterday not better than OTHERS are today. Set small, specific, easily-achievable goals to quickly boost your self-confidence. Maintain and refine your learning through regular practice. Whether it’s honing your presentation skills, becoming a more efficient project manager, or perfecting your coding techniques, steady progress helps you retain knowledge and discover new skills to learn next.

Measuring your self-worth by whether or not you meet monthly Key Performance Indicators (KPI) does not set you up for sustainable success. When some variables are not under your control, you can try your best and still fall short of the organization’s goal for you. Align your goals with your values and aspirations, not with external benchmarks or the achievements of your team. It’s surprising how often you meet monthly KPI when you set goals that are personally meaningful to you.

How do you prevent comparing yourself to your coworkers? Please share in the comments.

That is Disappointing

When I have a negative experience at work it feels much like the grieving process (shock, denial, anger, acceptance). After feeling all the disappointment, I have to intentionally let that emotion go. Being preoccupied by disappointment can cause us to get stuck. Do any of the following sound familiar?

Taking Your Credit

During a brainstorming session, you share an original concept and your team enthusiastically supports it. At the official launch of the project your coworker presents the idea as their own. What do you do? First, control your emotions. Then gather your date and time-stamped notes just in case you have to prove it was your original idea. For example, flag emails and save meeting minutes (and any other records you can cite as evidence) in a folder on your desktop. Now pull the credit stealer aside and in a private 1:1 meeting say something as non-confrontational as possible like, “I’m happy the client is excited about our idea and I’m surprised you did not mention that it is our joint brainchild. As we move forward, what is your plan for sharing future credit?” If they don’t plan to share credit and if this person is a repeat offender, confidentially ask your manager how they would handle someone who presents other’s ideas as their own.

Losing a Client

When a client leaves it is a blow both to your confidence and your company’s bottom line. After pausing a minute to process the emotions, adopt a learning mindset and get curious. Analyze your data and ask yourself some questions. What went wrong and where? Was there a breakdown in communication? Did the client’s needs or expectations change unexpectedly? Get past the symptoms to pinpoint the root causes so you can prevent similar issues in the future. Take what you learn and apply it to the rest of your clients. For example, if the client left because what they received from you was wildly different than they expected, that indicates you may want to adjust your communication process with your other clients.

Denied the Promotion

You invested your time, energy, attention, and money into developing your skills and all that still was not enough to get the promotion you expected. Again, give yourself a moment to feel your disappointment, then get proactive. Seek feedback from your manager to understand why you weren’t selected. Was it lack of skills? Were the projects you worked on not visible enough to senior leadership? Do you need a sponsor? Determine which variables were in your control and fix those. Be open to constructive criticism and use it as a roadmap for next steps. Identify skills your organization values and strengthen those. Build relationships with people who will champion your work. Publicly committing to bounce back after this disappointment impresses your managers, inspires your coworkers, and makes you a more competitive candidate in the next round of promotions.

Festering disappointment can poison your work environment and stifle your personal growth. Overcoming it requires a combination of self-awareness, proactive communication, and resilience. You have to choose over and over again to control your emotions. With the right mindset and strategies like addressing issues head-on, learning from setbacks, and finding ways to turn negative circumstances into opportunities, you will emerge stronger.

What disappointments have you experienced at work? Please share how you overcame them in the comments.

Getting Directions

Customer success became one of my passions during the pandemic. I wondered what our users’ experience was with us. So, I asked them. What are your expectations? Are we, at the very least, meeting them? How can we bring more value to the relationship? Their answers to these questions were as unique as they were. Each of their journeys to us was different, but had three major themes in common.

Awareness

Customer success begins when a stranger turns into an acquaintance. It involves multiple touch points across various channels, including online platforms, events, and other customer’s opinions of their experience with you. How did they first connect with you? Social media? Word of mouth? Networking event? You have to collect data at each interaction and analyze it so you can personalize communications, services, and outcomes to encourage your potential customer’s engagement. This is a relationship. It’s personal. It’s unique. They expect tailored experiences based on their preferences. For example, did they see a post on LinkedIn promoting your monthly newsletter, then click through to your website and subscribe? Then they are interested in the content you provide. This is a good time to find out how clear your message is. Does this potential customer easily see your value proposition?

Anticipation

Do you have a process for onboarding customers? During discovery conversations, can you identify potential hurdles? Do they look confused when you list your offerings? Is the language in your proposal clear? Have you given them three ways to contact you at their convenience with questions? By anticipating their needs and challenges you can proactively address issues before they escalate. Ask them what their preferences are. How do they want to be communicated with? What are their goals? What does success look like? Then ask yourself: How do they benefit from working with you? Are they excited for check in meetings or do they keep cancelling? Monitor your customers’ behavior. It’s feedback you can use to identify patterns of frustration then quickly course correct. Use conflict as an opportunity to strengthen the relationship. Whatever you promised to do for them over deliver on time and on budget.

Advocacy

As you move through a project for your customer, continuously optimize their experience by making notes of what works and what doesn’t. Regularly review and update their customer journey map based on feedback, data analysis, and their evolving expectations. This helps you not only stay responsive to their changing needs and preferences, it also makes them want to work with you again and again. You craft such a superior experience, they reward you with their loyalty. They organically become your champion in the community. They write good reviews and refer their friends to you. At this point in the journey, you come full circle for how a new customer becomes aware of you: word of mouth.

People need stuff and they assign value to those who can give them what they need. By understanding a customer’s journey from awareness to advocacy, you can move more confidently through the know, like, and trust process.

What do you do to understand your customer’s journey? Please share in the comments.

Want to Know

Last week we began Let’s Get Critical, a four-part series on critical thinking, by defining what it is. Here in part two, let’s discuss why critical thinking is essential to your job performance.

Business moves at the speed of trust. Active listening combined with critical thinking and empathy is one of the fastest ways to build trust. When you communicate your ideas clearly to your teammates, attentively listen to them, and respectfully debate with them, then your meetings are more likely to generate positive results. Building a safe space for everyone to contribute ideas not only facilitates effective productivity within your team but also across the organization. When you repeatedly give your subject matter expertise to anyone who asks for it everyone wants to know you.

Decisions

Critical thinking prevents knee-jerk reactions while helping you make wiser choices faster. Testing your assumptions breeds confidence because either you get confirmation that you are right or you find out you are wrong before you go telling a bunch of people. Identifying the various factors, considering their impact on people, processes, and performance, and predicting potential consequences for each all help you excel at solving problems efficiently. Banish the phrase, “because we’ve always done it that way,” from your mind. It squelches the culture of transformation your organization needs to survive. Instead make it a habit to question existing processes, listen to your team’s ideas, and propose low-risk experiments. Using critical thinking this way enables you to quickly grasp new concepts and adjust your strategies accordingly. This capability becomes more crucial as technology like Artificial Intelligence speeds up the pace of business evolution. Adapting to new challenges, identifying the opportunities in crises, and devising original conclusions require you to possess strong critical thinking skills because you have to navigate ambiguity, normalize change, and address challenges with clarity and precision. It is an organization’s critical thinkers who identify inefficiencies, brainstorm new ways to correct them, and drive the mission forward.

Future

Critical thinking is a power skill. It equips you with the tools and mindset necessary to thrive in today’s competitive job market. You help maintain a positive work environment conducive to productivity and innovation when you can:

Demonstrate your creative resourcefulness at problem solving
Think strategically and align your actions with your organization’s goals
Communicate complex concepts concisely and in easy-to-understand terms
Recognize when it is time to pivot, embrace change, and quickly learn new skills
Empathetically challenge both yours and others’ assumptions and welcome alternative perspectives
Actively seek feedback and regularly reflect on your experiences
De-escalate tensions, constructively resolve conflicts by seeking common ground, and facilitate meaningful dialogue to foster collaboration

For example, let’s say you are on a software development team troubleshooting a critical bug in a new application. Instead of resorting to quick fixes or assuming you know what is wrong, your team applies critical thinking skills to systematically diagnose the root cause of the issue. You conduct thorough analysis, dig through code repositories, and interview stakeholders to gather relevant information. Through rigorous testing and experimentation, you identify the underlying flaw, implement a sustainable solution, and document it to prevent similar issues from happening in the future.

Next week let’s talk about how you can demonstrate critical thinking skills to further your career. How does thinking critically help you do your job? Please share in the comments.

Under the Influence

Coworkers and managers influence your decisions. They have plans for you, but do their expectations align with your values, skills, and goals? Influence is a powerful tool that shapes your organization’s decisions, strategies, and culture. As a leader, it’s essential to intentionally decide whom you allow to influence you, but how?

Who You Are Looking For

Stay away from influencers who are negative, office politicians, cynical, and toxic. Look for people who ooze credibility, integrity, and reliability. Seek out people whose life experiences and ideas are different from yours. Surround yourself with individuals who encourage, inspire, and interact with everyone; not just those who can help them get ahead. You want to follow leaders who are committed to building a healthy and productive workplace environment. These may be colleagues with seniority, peers with specialized knowledge, or direct reports whose work ethic you admire.

What You Want From Them

You need influencers who will offer guidance, provide valuable insights, and exert a positive influence on your leadership style. These are not people who tell you what you want to hear. They both challenge and uplift you. They are accountability partners who spark your mutual growth. Align yourself with individuals who tell you the truth in love. You can identify them by the way they ask you questions then allow you space to rethink your opinions. These types of leaders are busy people. Relentlessly respect their time and find ways to bring value to the relationship.

Boundaries

It’s tricky to collaborate as a member of a team and complete your own assignments and avoid becoming a doormat. To maintain this delicate balance, you have to diplomatically manage both your supervisors’ and coworkers’ influence.

Set: Do you have time to complete your report and help your coworker prep for their client meeting? Be realistic about your own workload and deadlines. Does your team share calendars? Can they see when you are busy and vice versa? It is better to be unexpectedly available than to withdraw the help you said you’d give.

Communicate: As Brene Brown says, “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” When you receive requests for help, first express your willingness to collaborate then email your manager and copy the requestor. Ask for clarity on whose project has priority in terms of what is best for the organization. If your manager decides your input is crucial to the project your teammate is working on, and that means you will miss a deadline on your own work, then ask what the new deadline for your own work is.

Protect: When prioritizing someone else’s project benefits you, your teammate, and your company, then it makes sense to move your boundary. But there is always that one person (let’s call them: TOP) who repeatedly asks for help until that task you do for them becomes part of your job description. Every time TOP asks for help, ask yourself: What is TOP’s track record for getting their own work done? Does what TOP wants me to do directly impact our organization’s bottom line? Will this project make me more visible to management and/or clients? Politely decline TOP’s invitation to do their work when the additional task conflicts with your current commitments or if it’s outside the scope of your responsibilities. It’s okay to offer guidance, share your expertise, and encourage problem-solving, but avoid taking on TOP’s tasks. For example, if TOP asks you for prospects, invite them to look at your LinkedIn contacts, filter for their target, and find people they want introductions to. If TOP persists, redirect them to your manager.

What criteria do you use to decide whom you allow to influence you? Please share in the comments.