The quieter days of summer are a great time to make enhancements to your marketing and business development efforts – especially when it comes to your LinkedIn profile. A robust and complete profile enables you to put your best professional self forward, which will strengthen your brand and help you achieve your personal LinkedIn goals.
I recently had a conversation with a lawyer who was struggling to finish a client alert. It had been sitting on his desk for about a week for his final review.
This lawyer is not known to be a procrastinator, so I asked him what was going on, and he candidly told me that he just couldn’t stop finetuning it. He said he kept moving around paragraphs, editing sentences and adding and deleting sections.
I (gently) told him that time was of the essence here since the alert was about a recent development in his area of the law and his clients expected him to write about it and they wanted to know his thoughts on the issue.
I also told him that three of our peer firms had published alerts on a similar topic in the past week and it was suddenly like a light went off in his head (nothing like a little competition to motivate someone!). A few hours later, he sent me his final version of the article, and we were able to finally distribute it, albeit several days late.
While it was better late than never, this situation wasn’t ideal for the article to get maximum exposure and the strongest effect, and I know I’m not alone in having this experience, which is why I decided to write this piece, which is geared toward lawyers but can be adapted for anyone in any industry.
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So many lawyers are perfectionists, which psychologists define as striving for flawlessness and setting overly high-performance standards. This can really derail them when it comes to content creation because they will tinker with writing/editing a client alert so much that they miss the boat on distributing it at the right time to their clients and
Of course everyone learns and thinks differently – our brains are each hard wired uniquely – different strokes for different folks.
All throughout my formative school and college years, I was a traditional note taker, writing things down with an old-fashioned pen and paper. Despite the advent of many cool tech tools designed to make
For me, writing is a way to both share helpful content and also to express what I’m feeling. It’s always been a helpful outlet for me to process something, devise solutions to deal with it and then move on from it. I’m trying to use this blog as a way to help others and to share content as well as experiences that I’ve had that you also may have had, which might resonate with you too.
The timing of publishing my mean girls article in the workplace last week was timely as I had yet another experience with one – this time in a social setting (I know many of you know this, but mean girls lurk not only in the workplace but in your personal life too).
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Women can be pretty ruthless to each other in the workplace. Backstabbing, rumor spreading, malicious talking, gossiping, purposely excluding someone from an event or meeting, taking credit for someone’s work or helping to push someone out of a job.
I bet many of you have experienced behavior such as the ones mentioned above at the hands of another woman.
I call this the dark side of working with women.
Those close to me know that I have wanted to write an article on how to recognize a mean girl at work and develop strategies to effectively manage her and succeed in spite of her undermining behavior for a long time. (As an aside, I’ve also dealt with a few “mean guys” too, but that’s for a different article.)
Today, I am lucky enough to work in an environment free of mean girls (thank goodness!), that I don’t come into contact with them from time to time, or carry with me the memory of some terrible experiences of working with some very toxic females. Learning how to navigate them is an important skill to have throughout your career.
Before I delve deeper into this topic, I want to make it very clear that are plenty of amazing, supportive women in the workforce, and I’ve been very lucky to work with a number of them. They aren’t threatened by other women, and instead they go above and beyond to help others succeed. They are true role models. This article isn’t about them. I could have written an entire series of articles about the supportive women who have mentored me throughout my career. This article is about those women in the workplace who do not have your best interests at heart, and how to protect yourself against them. It’s important to remember that while you cannot can’t change someone else, you can change your own behavior, and this article will teach you how to do just that.
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The LMA Annual Conference is almost here and I can’t wait! I’m excited to learn new things, reunite with friends and to bring back new ideas to my firm. I’ve been thinking a lot about how I can maximize my time away from the office (missing three full work days is stressful especially when you
As you all know, I am a huge believer in the power of social media – that it can amplify your brand in so many powerful and wonderful ways, and lead to new business and clients. But it also has a dark side. And we keep seeing how social media can be detrimental to one’s
I recently achieved two major professional successes by putting myself out there and asking for them. I know it sounds a bit, well, basic, but I felt really good about going out on a limb and seizing the right moment to make a big ask in each of these situations.
So often, we are afraid
I recently had the opportunity to participate in an interview series with the Legal Marketing Association where they asked some of the speakers of the upcoming LMA19 conference to respond to questions on why they submitted to speak at the LMA Annual Conference, what they hope attendees will learn from their presentation, what they think are the keys for success for legal marketers today and which other sessions they are most excited to attend. Here are my responses. I’m looking forward to seeing many of you in Atlanta on April 8-10, and I hope you will join me and Jennifer Carr for our deep-dive workshop session on April 10 at 1:30pm on “Beyond Branding: Aligning Social Media Strategy With Business Development Goals.” Learn more about the session.
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