How To Get Promoted by Miguel de Jesus

Ellie Nieves Interviews Miguel de Jesus on How to Get Promoted ________________________________________________________________________________ Ellie:

Hello and welcome to our program today. My name is Ellie Nieves and I’m a speaker, writer and leadership strategist. I’m also the Founder and President of Leadership Strategies for Women where I coach women just like you to help you develop the confidence and leadership skills that you need to achieve your best in every area of your life. To learn more about the leadership programs that I offer, you can visit my Webpage at LeadershipStrategiesforWomen.com and while you’re there you can sign up for my free monthly newsletter and you’ll receive seven leadership strategies for success in life and business. The topic of our show today is How to Get Promoted: Leadership Strategies that Will Help You Get to the Next Level. Our guest is a dynamic speaker and an independent licensed life success consultant; Miguel de Jesus. Miguel has over 38 years of experience leading organizations to high levels of productivity while creating a culture of personal growth, development and achievement. If you have any questions for Miguel during the show, please don’t hesitate to send them via Live Chat on my show page on Blog Talk Radio. Miguel, welcome to the show.

Miguel: Hi Ellie, how are you today? Ellie:

I’m great. It’s wonderful to have you on.

Miguel: Likewise. Ellie:

Miguel, to get started, can you tell me a little bit about your background and 38 years of experience?

Miguel: Absolutely. I grew up in New York City on the lower Eastside and spent a great deal of my childhood in the public school systems in New York. I attended the High School of Music and Art in the Harlem area. I majored in Music and from there I moved on to Long Island University at the Brooklyn campus where I majored in Political Science and a minor in Accounting. I then went on to Columbia University Graduate School of Business for one year and withdrew from the program, because I had the bug to go out and do something and make some money. From there I moved into my initial phase with one of the two Fortune 500 companies that I’ve worked with, which was happened Xerox Corporation at the 1

Ellie Nieves Interviews Miguel de Jesus on How to Get Promoted ________________________________________________________________________________ time. I spent about 18 ½ years there and another 18 ½ years with a company called Paychex. Ellie:

Great. What kind of work did you do with Paychex?

Miguel: At Paychex I was a regional sales manager and also an area Vice President of sales with roughly 15 regional sales managers reporting to me and about 450 to 500 sales reps in my organization. I had responsibility for the sales efforts and results west of the Mississippi for the U.S. operations for that company. Ellie:

How did you get into your current line of work?

Miguel: My current line of work, upon retiring from Paychex, I decided that there’s a great deal of knowledge, information, wisdom and experience that I was capable of introducing and assisting students, mature business people and people of all ages from 15 to 80 years old in a variety of areas. Usually it involved helping them with their thinking to improve their clarity, to give them guidance on how to move along and progress in their chosen fields and specific goals. What I’ve found over time is that most people don’t progress or move along on their objectives for two reasons. 1. Lack of a plan, and 2. Lack of a skill To the extent that I could provide this universe of people to begin to get unstuck and unglued from their previous experiences to move forward then that allows me to benefit them and also help me feel that I’m fulfilling one of my obligations, which is to help and guide people to future and further progress. Ellie:

That’s great. Along your career path, what would you say are the top two lessons you’ve learned on becoming a leader?

Miguel: That’s a great question, Ellie. 1. First, I would say is to ask in whatever environment that you’re in. If you happen to be an employee, ask your bosses for assistance toward guidance and the opportunity to perform at a greater level, so you’ve got to ask.

Ellie Nieves Interviews Miguel de Jesus on How to Get Promoted ________________________________________________________________________________ The second part of that first response is, also, you have to put yourself out into a position of wanting greater responsibility. Nobody in either Corporate America or in the marketplace is going to tap you on the shoulder and say you are the greatest thing since sliced bread was invented. You have got to be good at self-promotion and taking greater responsibility, which means standing out from the crowd. Raise your hand and take a position, however unpopular it may be, because that helps to demonstrate some leadership and then you’ve got to pursue that. 2. The second lessen, I would say, is equally as important and that is to connect and attach yourself to a rising star in the organization or a rising entrepreneur, somebody who is working in your space that knows more than you do. That’s important, knows more than you do or has greater responsibility than you do and then through a great personality, which you have to bring to the table, you request mentorship from that individual. That goes two ways. You can make the request and they can deny, but if you don’t ask you’ll never get attached to the people that can help you rise to the next level of responsibility that you’re seeking. Ellie:

As you’ve mentored emerging leaders in the organizations that you’ve led, what would you say are the top leadership skills that someone needs to develop so they can become promotable?

Miguel: Great question. I would say there are probably a couple of areas that people need to really excel at. I have 12 critical success skills and won’t review them all here because of time, but I’ll review a couple of them.

The first is communication skills.

To the degree that you have great communication skills, not just good, you have to distinguish yourself in the marketplace and one of the ways you do that is by having outstanding communication skills and that includes both verbal and written. When you communicate there is no doubt that the receiver got your message and that message has to be devoid of innuendos, sarcasms, etc.

Ellie Nieves Interviews Miguel de Jesus on How to Get Promoted ________________________________________________________________________________ I’ll recall the old commercial. I think it was E. F. Hutton that said when Miguel speaks people listen. When Ellie speaks people listen. You know you’ve arrived when a room goes silent and they listen to your every word.

The second skill I would say that is essential and important is leadership.

I would define leadership this way– when there is a void or absence of progress or of results in a specific area of endeavor. Whether it’s in education, business or in government, the person who raises their hand, stands up and has a proposal that makes sense to the bulk of the people is demonstrating leadership. You do not need to have authority, in any sense of the word, given to you by anyone for you to exhibit leadership. You are not granted leadership you take leadership. Leadership is something that is done very professionally. Again, let me go back to my earlier statement from that E. F. Hutton commercial I think it was: when Miguel speaks or Ellie speaks people listen. That places you squarely in a position of influence and leadership, because you cannot have leadership without followers. And, followers will not want to follow people they consider to be either weak in thinking or weak in their professional experiences. Does that make sense, Ellie? Ellie:

Absolutely. You mentioned mentoring, how important is mentoring?

Miguel: Mentoring is absolutely essential. I’m going to reference your listeners to a great little book that costs under $10 called Mentoring 101 by John Maxwell. I have no association or affiliation with him and he doesn’t know who I am, but he wrote a great little book on mentoring. Mentoring is important for several reasons. First of all, you have to select the right mentor and you have to have the right mindset. You have to have a student’s mindset, not an expert’s mindset. Once you find someone that you want to attach yourself as a mentor because number one, they are smarter than you, have more experiences than you. More importantly, have the breath of knowledge that you are seeking to acquire, whether in a company, outside the company, in your family, in your associates in life, then you ask them, you approach them. I would like to be mentored by you for these reasons. Could you see yourself mentoring me?

Ellie Nieves Interviews Miguel de Jesus on How to Get Promoted ________________________________________________________________________________ Once you get acknowledgement, now you have a relationship that’s built on trust and mentors like to mentor people who they know, like and trust. You see that often in a university setting where a senior professor adopts, for lack of a better word, a protégé, a student or a mentee and they mentor them through probably higher level experiences than most of the other class, so it happens often in an academic setting. It happens, also, in a business setting, but you have to make yourself available and eligible to be mentored in the role of a mentee; we’ll use that term. Is it important? I say it’s extraordinarily important, because it allows you to get impartial feedback from someone who has more experience and knowledge than you, so you can develop your areas and strengthen them. Is it important also to be a mentee? No question about it. You have to approach everything with a student’s mind. Let me use a metaphor. Most of remember when we first went to school. After the initial one week of trauma going to kindergarten everything became an exploration, it was fun, new and different. That’s what I’m talking about by approaching a mentor as a mentee with a sophomoric, freshman mind, because you have no biases, you are willing to accept and learn. Ellie:

That’s wonderful. I’ve heard a lot of career coaches talk about things like office politics. You have some career coaches that advise that you stay away from office politics and others that advise that you engage in office politics. What’s your take on office politics?

Miguel: Let me talk about two things and I want to position it this way and I invite your guests to do a Google Search for mentors, coaches, etc. I did it this morning and it took about 31 seconds to find 58 million coaches and business mentors on Google. Now 58 million, that’s a lot of people. How do you select the right one? You’ve to have your list of criteria. One is interview your mentor from the perspective of qualifications.

What have you done? When did you do it? What industry did you do it in? How many people have you coached in the past? 5

Ellie Nieves Interviews Miguel de Jesus on How to Get Promoted ________________________________________________________________________________

What’s your track record of performance in your individual area of expertise?

Going specifically to your question, because it really falls under the heading of leadership, you stand up whenever you have something positive to communicate in the environment. Negativity is probably not a good trait to have; therefore, if you can make the situation better either by virtue of a program, process or an idea than you have not only the responsibility, but the obligation to bring that to light. What’s important and what I want to underscore is how you bring it to light. Having a little coffee clutch around the office cooler talking about controversial issues is probably not a good place to position yourself as a future leader. Yet, having that conversation in an environment that was called together by some senior level or mid level manager for a problem-solving event is the right venue. There is no right or wrong answer to your question, because it depends. It depends on what the subject content is, who’s around you, the location and it depends on you. If what you’re talking about is coming through your lips with a very positive tone, a positive choice of words and you’re not engaging in ‘Argumentum ad Hominem’, you’re not arguing against a person you’re arguing against a position, process or argument. As long as you recognize that and you don’t personalize it, I think you’re walking on firmer ground than if you decided to blurt out something and call an idea, position or suggestion as just stupid that’s probably not a good approach for problem solving or promotability. Ellie:

That’s great. Another thing I run into a lot when I coach women is that today’s corporate environment is really about performing and achieving measurable results. So, now more than ever if someone is interested in getting a promotion they really need to be able to highlight and communicate their accomplishments. Can you tell me what the difference is between self-promoting and bragging?

Miguel: Absolutely, great question. I would put it this way. Self-promotion assumes a track record. 6

Ellie Nieves Interviews Miguel de Jesus on How to Get Promoted ________________________________________________________________________________

I’m going to try and give you some distinctions. Professional self-promotion is, first of all and foremost, humble in approach, accurate in content and there is a track record, because success leaves clues, success leaves tracks, success leaves traces. Therefore, if you’ve been in an environment and performing, you’re not bragging when you demonstrate your performance, you’re communicating it. In a professional environment nobody is going to communicate your highlights, strengths or track record generally, other than you, so you have to do that. It’s not will I do it, you have to do that and you just have to do it professionally. You don’t want to be obnoxious about it. Bragging, on the other hand, is talking about yourself from a perspective not of humility, but of being braggadocios. That probably could be a career stopper, because when you are brought into a position of leadership people like to follow the leader. In order to like to follow the leader the leader needs to be viewed by them as working on their behalf, not the leader’s behalf. So, bragging is very personal and internal it’s all about you. Demonstrating your track record for performance is about reflecting on your achievements and accomplishments and you’re not being braggadocios about it you’re just communicating facts. I would say to the people who want to “self promote” that’s fine, as long as you have three things: 1. Track record, 2. Proper tone and 3. The right environment in which to do it. Ellie:

Great advice.

Miguel: People who brag usually don’t do it right, because they don’t follow those three rules. Ellie:

In your 38 years in leadership positions and the manager of people, what are some of the differences you’ve observed between the work styles of men and women?

Miguel: It’s interesting. I find with the people that I’ve worked with, because they have been selected on the criteria I mentioned earlier, track record of performance, an 7

Ellie Nieves Interviews Miguel de Jesus on How to Get Promoted ________________________________________________________________________________ ability to work with people, great communication and great leadership skills, the differences are not that significant, except for maybe one area. I hate generalizations because everybody is unique in their own space, but this is a generalization. I find men tend to be a little more direct in their communications and the ladies, sometimes will be less direct. How does that translate? It translates as follows: if you’re working with a person, male or female, who really wants you to be bottom line in your communications you probably need to understand that before you engage in long, lengthy conversations. By lengthy conversations I mean if somebody’s style and mode of operation lends itself to quick communications, to a bottom-line approach. You as the communicator, male or female, need to know that and you need to adopt a style of communication that resonates with the person you’re speaking to, otherwise you don’t have a communication. Here’s something that I’ve found. Some ladies, not all, have to deal with difficult situations where conflict may arise, they practice a thing that I’ve found called conflict avoidance and conflict avoidance is not attractive. It does not solve problems and is a very strong weakness, not only for women, because I find it in men also. They just cannot, will not and choose not to and usually it’s lack of skill. Usually it’s something that came long before they joined the corporate environment or corporate setting that conflict was a bad thing and they don’t have enough skills on how to resolve conflict. That’s a skill deficiency, which manifests itself in terms of their… people get sick, I mean physiologically, they get sick dealing with conflict situations because they’ve never been trained on how to deal with that. Is that distinction helpful? Ellie:

It’s very helpful and it’s particularly helpful coming from you as a male. I like to bring women leaders onto the show who can also provide insight to women who are trying to become leaders, but I think it’s important to also get a male perspective. Our bosses aren’t just female, we have a lot of male bosses, so it’s important to see a male boss’s perspective on a woman emerging leader within an organization, so we have a better understanding of how we’re perceived from up above.

Ellie Nieves Interviews Miguel de Jesus on How to Get Promoted ________________________________________________________________________________ Miguel: I think that’s a great question. Here’s something you didn’t touch on, which I will comment on, briefly. A senior level executive of a company or any level manager in any company generally has one of the following fears in dealing with emotional content discussions. You’ve seen them in the environment, where people get emotional and begin to tear, it’s called crying. Males specifically have a difficult time dealing with that in a private conversation. It could be performance related, counseling related or a separation from employment. It is something that both sides of the aisle need to understand, males and females, but I have found that on average there’s a lot more emotional content when dealing with conflict when it’s male-female dialogue. The reverse I haven’t found to be often. It becomes emotional, but there’s less emotional crying because of the situation, when it involves the same gender. I will tell you that both sides feel very uncomfortable when that situation happens when you’re trying to coach somebody to improve performance. Again, people react emotionally. There are all sorts of things that are being conjured up by hearing the words, which may not have been said this way, but here’s what a person hears when they’re told there’s a shortfall in performance.

The only thing they hear is I’m failing. I’m a failure. I can’t do it. I’ll never be able to do that.

It requires sensitivity on both males and females to understand that moment, to probably call a pause in that discussion and regroup later, because you really can’t make progress until the emotions are settled. Ellie:

Miguel, you mentioned earlier in our conversation that it’s important that you align yourself with a rising leader in the organization. What are some of your secrets for building relationships with superiors within an organization?

Miguel: I generally don’t use the word superior, I just call them associates who have higher levels of responsibility and get paid more. Ellie:

Great approach.

Ellie Nieves Interviews Miguel de Jesus on How to Get Promoted ________________________________________________________________________________ Miguel: That’s a distinction I will make, because superiors, to me, that word is charged and has a whole lot of different meanings. I’ll just call them senior management for a moment. The senior management is responsible for growing their next level of leaders, in case people didn’t think about it. It is important usually, unless the culture of the company, which again you should have analyzed before you joined the company, is for promotion from within or hiring from without. At certain levels they have to go outside of the company to hire talent, because a talent has never been home grown. Most companies, I believe, would like to grow their people from within, so I would encourage your listeners to ask within their environments. Remember that ask question that we started with almost 20 minutes ago?

Ask, what is the internal development process here in the company? How can I get on the list of candidates of future promotability? Is there a program for development? Is there a program that you would suggest that I could take outside the company, perhaps under a tuition aid program that would be recognized by the company as a good developmental process?

Those are the kinds of things Ellie that I would encourage people who are looking for a bright future to engage in inside the company once they’re inside the company. Outside the company they should take initiative to invest in themselves and take as many programs as they can like workshops, seminars, audios, personal mentorship from people outside the company that they can acquire to help them along their path. I firmly believe that tomorrow we’re going to be exactly the same people we are today Ellie, with the exception of probably three or four things. What are those three or four things? 1. 2. 3. 4.

The people that you meet tomorrow that you didn’t know today. The audios you listen to in the area of self-development. The books that you read and the seminars. The workshops that you attend.

Ellie Nieves Interviews Miguel de Jesus on How to Get Promoted ________________________________________________________________________________ If you take action in any one of those four I guarantee you; you will move forward in the area of self-development and not have to look outside of yourself for your own self-development. Ellie:

In terms of self-development, I think that’s key in today’s environment. We need to acquire as many skills as possible and I think there was a time in work history when the buzz was, you really need to become an expert, you can’t be a jack of all trades. What’s your perception on that now? Do you think you need to focus in on one thing and become an expert at that or do you think we now need to have multileveled skills?

Miguel: I think you need to have multi-level skills. I’m going to use the term mastery to replace expert, because expert is fleeting and changes, but you can master a course, a skill, a test and do very well at that moment in time. Mastery requires evolutionary training, thinking and staying on top of your profession. A perfect example would be dentists, doctors and CPAs. They have to be recertified and retested on either an annual or bi-annual basis in order to maintain their certifications. Why? Because stuff changes, technology changes, there are new concepts, new laws, and new approaches. So, from the perspective of mastery, I absolutely believe that you should be demonstrating mastery through results and that’s the only way you can demonstrate mastery. For example, if someone in an environment said you’ve got to do these five projects at these levels in the next 120 days and you did it, it was acknowledged and it was beyond acceptable, it was a WOW moment, you will be recognized not only as an expert, but way beyond that, as a master at getting those types of activities done. People will seek you out and want you to have greater responsibility and usually with greater responsibility comes a greater pay grade and/or income. Ellie:

That’s great. Miguel, can you tell me when you think an individual should consider moving out of an organization? What are some of the things that might be happening in an organization that you think would trigger possible consideration for leaving?

Ellie Nieves Interviews Miguel de Jesus on How to Get Promoted ________________________________________________________________________________ Miguel: Great question again. I think if it’s an organization that’s in decay. That’s determined by their top line revenue results, the attitudes and actions of the senior and mid-level management in terms of soliciting, asking for opinions, engaging and involving their employees in problem-solving. To the degree that it is a totally top down, one way direction organization, what I call a command and control organization, not everybody responds well in those types of organizations. Command and control is what you see usually in military. Why? Because you can’t over think every issue. In a battle combat situation you need to take action, protect the team, the platoon, your member’s life and it’s a life and death situation. It’s no different than you’d probably see in an operating room in a hospital, the chief surgeon is responsible. Everybody else listens and follows the directions of the chief surgeon. You can’t have a debate on the operating floor. Was that distinction good enough? Ellie:

It is. Miguel, how can our listeners get in touch with you?

Miguel: A couple of ways, but I’ll give you two. One is a website called AskCoachMiguel.com. They can reach me through my social network site LinkedIn.com/in/migueldj. They can also reach me by phone at 760-438-9907, which is my office. Ellie:

Miguel, thank you so much for coming on the show and giving us insights on how to get promoted. To all my listeners, thank you for tuning in. If you like what you heard today you can go on to our newly created Women’s Leadership Network online and tell me what you think. You can find the network on FaceBook if you run a search for leadership strategies for women. You can also find a direct link to the network on the Blog Talk Radio Show Page under Ellie’s Women’s Leadership Network. I look forward to connecting with you. Thank you so much for tuning in. Until next week, God bless.