Discover practical advice, inspiration, and insights to help you succeed in business and grow both personally and professionally.
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Integrity means that you have high moral principles and follow professional standards. Simply put—to practice integrity in the workplace you can’t just talk the talk—you have to walk the walk. A lack of integrity can lead to poor decision-making and have a negative influence on your work and your employer.
Integrity Begins With You
Be well groomed at all times. Keep your work area and your car neat and clean. This habit shows that you care about the impressions you make as a representative of your company. Clients and colleagues will see that you respect your employer’s values and are a responsible person. If you make a promise you must keep it. It proves that you’re a dependable person. Only agree to provide services that you can actually deliver. Don’t over promise. If you do something wrong, fix it as soon as possible.
How Do I Show Integrity at Work?
You have to be honest and ethical in all of your actions if you want to practice integrity in the workplace. Understand that you’re a role model for your colleagues, clients, and vendors. Be consistent about how you apply your ethical standards. Rely on facts at all times in your interactions at work. Never make excuses or avoid sharing bad news. Integrity requires that you speak up when you notice a practice or behavior that diverges from the company’s ethical standards.
Practice Company-wide Integrity
Practicing integrity at work provides positive outcomes for your company. However, you need to understand how your company practices integrity. Become familiar with your company’s core values and use them as a guide for developing your workplace integrity. Allow your team members to share their concerns about anything they see as going against your company’s values. Encourage an atmosphere that supports honesty and fairness.
Integrity Welcomes Risk
Every decision you make will involve some elements of risk. You must be willing to take a risk in order to achieve excellence and be competitive. If there are objections to your suggestions, remain positive. Gaining support from team members and stakeholders requires effort. Do the work. Ask for input from all participants and encourage them to share their concerns.
Practice What You Preach
Your behavior at work must offer a good example for your team members, colleagues, customers, and your community. Recognize your own skills and appreciate the contributions of others. Share your experience with your team and help them to develop their own integrity in the workplace.
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The leading provider of outsourced sales teams, Cydcor is dedicated to helping business professionals worldwide reach success.
Choosing the right words is key to creating a successful resume in 2015. But even before a hiring manager sees your resume, an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) could reject it. It’s estimated that nearly 75% of applicant resumes don’t make it through this automated scanning process. At Cydcor, we value all resumes that have been written well, and showcase the experience we're looking for.
Hiring managers may not understand your “passion” or you skill as a “problem-solver” if you do not explain how you demonstrated this in a work setting. You need to make sure your resume shows how you increased company profits. Use your resume to tell how your record-breaking effort contributed to your team’s success.
Start With a Summary
Your resume needs to let the hiring manager know that you’re the right person for the job and are worth being contacted for an interview. Get the hiring manager’s attention by identifying your relevant experience in a well-crafted summary at the beginning of your resume.
Numbers Tell the Story
Use numbers to define your professional accomplishments. Numbers add focus and scope to your work history. Answer questions like these with facts and figures:
Use Keywords
Highlight keywords in the job description and compare them to related keywords in your resume. If there is a 70-80% match, then you should apply for this position. Only about 20% of applicants applying for a specific job are actually qualified for the position. Online tools like Jobscan analyze how well your resume matches the job description.
Keep It Relevant
Employers want to hire people with relevant experience. Keep your resume to 1 or 2 pages by cutting any experience that is over ten years old.
Get Creative—Within Reason
Colored fonts will make your resume stand out from others—but don’t get carried away. Consider at two-color system—black and one other color, like blue. Test these colors on various screens and printers if possible. You want to make sure it’s easy to read. But before investing too much in design, study the company’s website and get a feeling for their culture to determine if a creative resume will work in your favor.
Cydcor has previously written about Toxic Employee Traits That Can Slow Progress, but it's also important to mention how to continue career progress. You will never advance simply by sitting at your desk, answering emails, and filing reports. A promotion is earned. Achieving a promotion isn’t an impossible goal. But to get there you need a good plan. The following suggestions are your starting points for success.
Evaluate Your Skills
You wouldn’t have been hired if you weren’t good at your job. But are you producing enough positive results to earn a promotion? Before you request a promotion, evaluate your job performance. Ask yourself the hard questions—face your fear.
It’s Not All About You
You will never achieve success by yourself. Your colleagues are an important part of your advancement. Study what they do. Understand their pain points. Improving their productivity is a leadership skill and contributes to your chance for promotion.
Write Your Future
Write the story of your career. Imagine where it will lead. This exercise provides a private place to draft new possibilities for your work life. It’s a safe place to practice taking risks. Don’t waste time creating a fantasy about wealth and power. Your career is serious work.
Become the Resident Optimist
Don’t get distracted by the inevitable complaints you hear during the day. Is it hard to do? Yes, sometimes it is. Everyone has bad days. But remember this: negative is easy, positive is hard. Don’t complain—explain. Don’t spread rumors—educate. Build a reputation for being constructive, informed, and open-minded.
Your Evaluation Happens Every Day
Do you ever feel invisible when your workload is building up? During these times remember that your supervisors are taking note of how you manage stress while you reach your goals. If you feel stuck in a negative take time for a mental stretch. Many corporate leaders find insight and get reenergized when they meditate.
Ask For Help
Sometimes you’ll come across a problem you can’t figure out. You need to be brave enough to ask for help. Find a mentor. Build a resource team from various departments. Share the problem. You will be remembered solving problems with creative strategy. Never ignore the wealth of institutional experience at work.
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Finding new ways to manage a business is something that’s always on the mind of a leader. There will always be new things to try, but meditation, a practice that’s been around for thousands of years, can bring a new kind of thinking to leadership. Meditation can provide a better way to manage ourselves. A few minutes in the morning or evenings is all that is necessary to help bring the right thoughts to center and to help a person focus. Apple CEO Steve Jobs was famous for it, and LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner does it, too. Meditation is something to be taken seriously if you are looking to improve your mind.
A bad day, or news we don’t want to hear, can put a damper on our state of mind. To prevent this from happening, leaders should take ten minutes during the day to meditate. Regardless of your approach meditation, it is just important that you make time for it. It helps get your day back on track, and is a good start to clear your mind.
As a leader, you may find times that its necessary to be brave. Whether it’s going into an important meeting or giving a motivational speech to the team, it’s important to have a confident mindset. Meditation can help get rid of negative thoughts during high intensity situations. By learning to ignore any negative thinking, worries about what could go wrong go away.
Letting go is difficult when there are so many plates spinning at once. So many times, leaders get stuck in a certain way of thinking that prevents them from seeing the whole picture. Meditation can change this way of thinking. It allows a person to attack problems with a different perspective. By getting rid of past thoughts and clearing the mind, answers to questions will appear naturally.
Like most things, it will take effort and dedication to reap the benefits of meditation, including an increase in calmness. You can also have better control over emotions. The key is to learn to focus on finding your own way instead of adopting someone else’s way of thinking.
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At Cydcor, we know that becoming an effective leader does not happen overnight. It takes effort to learn and practice crucial leadership skills in order to be efficient. Still, people can point out effective leadership when they see it. There are great leaders who naturally become successful, but there are also certain traits that they share. These are a few characteristics of what it takes to be an effective leader.
Optimism
It’s difficult to lead without believing that one day, you will succeed the way you want to. Leaders must have some sort of optimism to keep their hunger for success alive. People will always follow a person who dreams big and knows that everything they want can one day be achieved. Optimism is a trait of leadership that is constantly overlooked but can be effective when trying to gain the trust of team members. Leaders should always be preparing for the future, while still focusing on the present.
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Look Out for the Team
Leaders must move and think quickly, but they must also take time to pause and pay close attention to how their employees are doing. As a leader, you can’t prepare yourself to lead more effectively if you don’t know what is really happening with your team members. Always be on the lookout for evidence of their state of mind and what support they need to reach success and fulfillment in their work.
Constant Preparation
If a leader fails, it’s usually due to their lack of preparation. When an opportunity is missed, it’s often because a leader did not plan for themselves or their employees to see and seize it. Preparation requires accountability and is a responsibility with multiple factors. Every leader sees through a different lens – therefore, they should know what the short and long term preparation demands are for their employees and the business to be successful
Self-Assessment
An effective leader should always be giving employees a critique to see if they can find improvements in any areas. By looking at what the team is doing correct and what they need to work on, leaders can better identify with a team. Checking in with ourselves is never a bad idea.
Make Tough Decisions
Without fail, leaders are called on to make choices that impact both their organization and the people they lead. People want to follow a person who weighs all the options. In other words, good leaders make important decisions based on what’s best for the organization -- and they make them confidently. You will have to make a tough call from time-to-time, but with the right amount of sureness and groundwork, anything is possible.
Big bank accounts aren’t the only thing that millionaires have in common. In order to find success, millionaires have to fully develop traits including courage, vision, and passion. Millionaires use a different line of thinking than everyone else. It’s not just about money, but life as a whole. Since thoughts have an effect on actions, people who want to one day be a millionaire should have the mindset to do so. Here are a few traits that many millionaires share:
Vision
Millionaires are creatives who are constantly seeking the next master plan. These people not only have big dreams, but they also believe that those dreams will one day come true. As such, wealth seekers should set lofty goals and not be afraid of uncharted territories. Professionals need to be constantly scheming about the next step and never dwelling on the past.
Passion
In order to fully reach peak potential, people need to be passionate about what they do for a living. Being able to enjoy work allows a person to build discipline and work their hardest every day. Ask any millionaire, and they’ll tell you that they enjoyed their journey to the top, no matter the difficulty. They believed in what they were doing and knew they really had something to work with. Find that passion, and one day you will realize you’ve loved what you’re doing for years.
Salesmanship
How are your sales skills? Millionaires are constantly pitching their concepts and plans, trying to sell others on the idea. Many millionaires also have well-developed social skills. Being able to converse with anyone and tell their side of the story makes things a lot easier. Developing sales skills, either professionally or on the side, can add a lot of weight to their business abilities.
No Fear
No one wants to find out they haven’t been successful with their latest endeavor. Most of us are afraid of failure. The thought of failure brings about a negative reaction and immediately brings up our insecurities. However, being afraid of failure also creates a fear of changing things. Nothing ever grows in the comfort zone. Millionaires know that failure is an essential part of success. We learn many things from falling down, but what matters is how we get back up. For millionaires, failure is just one step closer to real success.
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Cydcor is the worldwide recognized leader in outsourced sales teams and customer satisfaction.
When a business can deliver quality customer satisfaction on a regular basis, they tend to have a greater advantage over the competition. A good experience with a company encourages consumers to go with them again and builds company loyalty. When customers are satisfied, so too is the company that provides for them. Building customer satisfaction and reducing customer overturn is a long and sometimes difficult process. Taking the time to focus on boosting employee satisfaction can help drive sales by providing a friendly, professional, and engaging customer experience.
Listening is key to effective customer satisfaction. Not only does it have potential to boost profits, but it shows that you genuinely care about customers. Listening to their words and tone can tell you many things about the target audience of your business. If you can’t respond immediately to their inquiries, be sure to provide a timeline for response and make a note in to do so. Following up is also key to checking for customer satisfaction and completion. Customers have an expectation of the kind of attention and service that is delivered to them. Always strive to deliver quality results.
Excellent employee training can help customer satisfaction quite a bit. Customers can often tell the difference between an untrained employee who doesn’t care much about their wishes and one who provides consistent service and unmatched attention. Companies need employees who are flexible and can understand why customers are buying their services or products. Unfortunately, customers tend to get a company representative who cannot see the big picture with the company’s goals.
Intuitively, people who are at first exposed to customer satisfaction findings believe that the way forward is to examine individual customer responses and deal with each of them in turn. Salespeople understandably want to visit customers who have given them a low score and put them right. However, this isn’t the best approach. Professionals should take a look at the overall score of client feedback and use that to go forward. Typically, employees make the same mistakes with all customers, and these can be corrected easily. Looking at the whole picture and not just a section will always get you farther.
Building customer satisfaction isn’t an easy road, but it can make professional lives much easier. The way forward is to deal with problems within the system and not just focus on individual issues. A company should always seriously look into how they want to handle customer satisfaction. The company that puts a larger emphasis on this tends to do well.
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Making the most of feedback, positive or negative, is a crucial skill for professionals, especially those that are on the Cydcor team. In order for us to grow, we must know what we’re doing right, but also we need to know what we can improve on. It can be tough to accept feedback because it’s coming from an outside source. We’re used to doing things a certain way, and when someone says it should be done in a different manner, we can get defensive. Accepting feedback isn’t the easiest task, but with experience, we can make the most of it. Here are three steps to accepting feedback:
Listen. Be attentive and listen carefully to what this person is saying. This communicates that you value the feedback, and it ensures that you understand the feedback being provided. Everyone deserves to be heard, so always give people a chance.
Assess. Either the feedback will support the work you’ve been doing, or go against it. If it’s positive, then you have earned another supporter. If it’s critical, you either go with it or go against it.
Negative feedback can hold within it a lot of useful information that is simply too valuable to ignore. Sometimes even when you agree with the contrary feedback, you will be inclined to defend your position. Don’t waste time on this sort of defense! Accept the feedback, analyze its value, and apply it.
Act. If you ask for feedback but do not apply it, then there wasn’t much reason to ask for it in the first page. Take action as soon as possible after you receive feedback, and show your appreciation. If we aren’t able to at least consider some changes after receiving feedback, there’s no point in hearing it at all.
A key thing to remember about accepting feedback: it is one opinion coming from another individual's perspective. It is up to you thoughtfully reflect about it, compare it to other feedback you have received, and do something about it. It’s extremely difficult for us to see ourselves as others see us, but it’s also very important that we don't allow blinders to get in the way of opportunity. As you learn more about yourself, feedback will become less painful. You will learn how to put it into a larger perspective and how to use it to better yourself for the future. Feedback is honestly one of the best gifts to receive from colleagues, and us at Cydcor always try to make the most of it.
A few sentences will rarely ever change our lives for the better. It’s up to us to go out every day and actively seek a better self. Words are just words, but when applied to our behavior in life, they can create a new meaning. The following are excellent quotes that are meant to not only inspire, but to help others think about the potential they have within. In Cydcor’s opinion, these are the most inspirational quotes ever spoken:
“Don’t wait. The time will never be just right.” – Napoleon Hill
Putting things off until later or waiting to start a positive habit on Monday never gets us anywhere positive. Time is never going to be perfect; take action today to start seeing results.
“Do What You Can, where you are, with what you have.” – Teddy Roosevelt
Many people fall victim to feeling helpless, so Roosevelt makes a good point. Doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re located, or how much wealth you have. Do anything you can to keep yourself growing toward positive habits.
“Very often a change of self is needed more than a change of scene.” – Arthur Christopher Benson
Changing habits and things you don’t like about yourself is key, compared to just moving to a new place. Although there will be benefits to starting somewhere new, no real change can happen if you don’t look in the mirror and see what needs to be changed first.
“The creation of a thousand is in one acorn.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
This quotes is largely focused on potential. We tend to look at tough situations and automatically think there’s not much to work with. The potential of each little step we take to better ourselves means a lot. The moral of the story is that big things come in small packages.
“The question isn’t who’s going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.” – Ayn Rand
Never worry how life is going to working out. The only thing we ever need to worry about is if we are putting in the necessary effort. Ayn Rand makes an excellent point that it should never be a question of if what we’re doing is the correct path. Trust in yourself and never let anything get in your way of fulfilling your dreams.
“Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be.” – Elizabeth Gilbert
This is a great quote that speaks to taking the action necessary for any situation. If change is what we seek, it’s required for us to put in the effort. Never just dream about where you could be; get out there and get where you want to be today.
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The amount of companies and brands on social media continues to grow. A large part of reaching an online audience requires excellent social media skills, and companies only hire the best to represent their online interests. The following are a few tips to remember when managing a company profile on social media, and how you can grow your company page into something bigger and noteworthy.
Consistency is Key
Posting on a consistent basis is the first step to managing a company page well. No one wants to follow a company that only updates their account once a month. Post updates on a regular basis, but don’t post so much that you annoy your followers. Balance is always the best way to handle things.
Establish a Voice
A company page’s updates should have a professional voice that can still be approachable. While your posts should be consistent, it’s also important to note the way sentences are phrased and whether or not they fall in line with the voice your company represents. Depending on the type of audience, an online voice can be playful or stern. Realizing which one suits you best is key to establishing a good rapport with followers.
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Know Your Audience
Who are your followers? An online audience on social media for a company is typically made up of fans, employees, family members of employees, and potential employees. Be sure to tailor updates to each part of your body of followers. It’s also a good idea to take note of what times of day you receive the best engagement--use this to guide when you post in the future.
Be Respectful
The worst thing that can happen on social media is to offend a large part of an audience and receive negative feedback. Always try to play it safe while still taking chances and being innovative. Audiences like brands that have a sense of humor but are still respectful of everyone’s feelings.
Showcase the People Who Make Up the Company
People who follow your pages want to know more about the people that make up your company. Be sure to showcase any office goings-on or charitable events. These posts tend to do very well with engagement.
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Most people will find themselves from time-to-time not performing up to their potential. It’s usually one or two things holding them back, and with the right coaching and mentoring, they can correct their flaws. When finding these types of toxic employee traits, it’s important to realize they can be fixed. Office leaders must work with their team to get rid of these flaws and improve on overall performance. A team that focuses on ridding themselves of the following toxic employee traits will rapidly find success.
Frequent Complaining
Everyone needs a few moments to grumble about something they aren’t happy with, but there are always people who don’t do anything about it. Leaders must work with these people to make improvements on their attitudes. By eliminating frequent complaining, a team can work more efficient and not sweat the small stuff.
Excuse Making
A professional always owns up to their mistakes and is willing to work toward fixing them. An employee who makes excuses on a daily basis does not demonstrate much responsibility. Make it clear that excuses will not be tolerated. Taking responsibility for actions is key to maturing into a true leader.
Gossiping
A strong team requires trust and faith in each other, and gossiping goes against both of these things. A team with the strongest bond possible will always trump anyone else. This may require extra time on team building exercises, as well as getting to know a team outside of work. When everyone can trust each other, there’s no point in spreading rumors.
Passivity
People who settle for less have no place on an all-star team. People who take initiative and aren’t afraid to be leaders will find themselves evolving for the better. Stressing the idea that everyone’s future is in their own hands can give a team that final push they’ve been looking for.
Non-Team Players
Everyone can work well solo, but they need to be able to collaborate with a team, too. When someone has an attitude that screams “my way or the highway,” it’s tough for others to cooperate. Let team members come up with solutions together, and reward those who are willing to work with others to get the job done.
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