Last week, I focused on Verbal Communications Skills to Enhance Promotability; today I’m covering Written Communication Skills - with the same goal in mind. I’m giving you an assessment - questions to ask yourself, as well as specific strategies to improve an area of your written communication skills.

Today, I want to give you strategies to improve your verbal communication skills - specifically, with an eye to enhancing your promotability. I’m giving you an assessment of your verbal communication skills, as well as four areas of communication where people tend to struggle, and strategies to help improve each area.

Today’s topic is the most important leadership qualities employers are looking for - and derailers to avoid. I’ve divided the list into leadership skills for leading an organization, leadership skills for leading teams, and leadership skills for leading yourself. I’ve also identified the #1 derailer, which can be a result of a lack of any of the leadership skills I’ve identified.

I’m leaning heavily on an article from cnbc.com by Claire Hughes Johnson entitled “I was VP at Google for 10 years. Here’s the No. 1 skill I looked for at job interviews—very few people had it.” What is this important, yet rare, quality? Self-awareness. Today, we delve into how interviewers check for self-awareness, how to recognize if you’re lacking in self-awareness, and how to build self-awareness.

Transitioning from managing yourself to managing others — is this the route for you?

For those becoming first-time managers, there is a learning curve, with the biggest change being a shift to begin thinking about others. Let’s talk about the differences when moving from an individual contributor to a manager, issues that can arise and what to do to help, and how to set yourself up for success.

One of my all-time favorite leadership books – certainly the one with the most sticky tabs in it – is Reldan Nadler’s Leading with Emotional Intelligence. I’ve used this resource for other episodes of the podcast, and today I want to talk about tools for building your self-confidence — specifically, Being on Your Side rather than Being on Your Case. Or, as I like to call it, having your own back. While we’re specifically talking about your relationship with yourself in this episode, understand the consequences of that relationship to all the other relationships in your life. If you lead people, you will likely treat them as you treat yourself.

We’ve all had to work with difficult co-workers. Of course, what makes a co-worker difficult to work with for one person may not be an issue at all for another person – maybe they even view that co-worker’s idiosyncrasies as a strength. The most important thing to understand here is that YOU CAN’T CONTROL ANYONE ELSE. Today, we’ll talk about what this looks like.

This week, we’re talking about how to position yourself as a star performer. According to the book The Emotionally Intelligent Workplace by Cherniss and Goleman, there are several key competencies of Star Performers. A Star Performer is defined as someone who is in the top 10% of performance. The goal is not to be a Star in every competency in each of these clusters, but to have a good balance of competencies across the four clusters.

Today, my guest is Laura Berman Fortgang, and we are discussing three clues you can look at from your past to help you find the career you are meant to be in. We talk about what clues to look for, how to assess those clues, and what to do with your new-found self-awareness.