Nance Rosen Blog

“When is it appropriate for me to criticize my co-worker?”  I got the question from a young manager in my course: Pitching the Perfect Presentation, on campus at UCLA last week.

I felt flooded by the power to disabuse an entire group of people about an entirely inappropriate – yet pervasive – kind of communication: delivering unasked for criticism. I thought I’d expand on my academic platform and let you in on the etiquette.

Have you ever asked for permission before you criticized a colleague, friend, family member, neighbor or significant other? And not, “Hey, it’s time for me to criticize you: ready?” Nor telling them to brace themselves, “Here’s a heaping cup o’ criticism, coming your way!”

The concept of delivering “constructive criticism” is often obfuscation. It masks the intention of unloading a gnarled mess of “perspective” on someone who is (or is not) living out your dream of how their job (or life) should be done.

Maybe you don’t think you need to ask. After all, if your personal brand is “boss” or “know-it-all” then: fire away, right? Or, because your personal brand is defined as “role-model for those behind me on the path,” you have a duty to be corrector-in-chief, doncha?

So, I stood in front of the class and thought about the God given right to criticize. I thought about when God would give it. Other than “back away: the stove is hot!” do we have a duty to admonish someone on something where we know better? Or, think we know better?

It is a funny question because I teach. I coach. I talk at people from inside the television and tell strangers what I think they MUST do.

My personal brand and my job title invite people to come to me when they want to move further and faster in their careers. When someone signs up for that, I make sure I’ve been deputized to deliver feedback as part of our working relationship. In fact, I make sure that honesty isn’t optional and that I’ll only talk about what I know at a world-class level. Only then can I deliver feedback.

Feedback is not criticism.

What does feedback look like? Direction. Encouragement. And, when necessary: the recommendation to change course, see additional choices or consider that one choice obviates another. You cannot be both an astronaut, and Kate plus 8.

So what’s the difference between criticism and feedback? The giver and receiver must think of feedback as a gift. You wouldn’t package poop and hand it to someone as a gift. You wouldn’t accept that as a gift.

And, you must have permission. As my friend Bob Gregoire says, simply ask: “Would you like my feedback on that?”

Here’s my feedback protocol.

1. Share what you see as positive and powerful about what your receiver is doing – or wants to do – or has made an effort toward doing.

2. Then, share what would strengthen their performance, product or presentation.

And, if you are throwing a lateral – interacting with a peer, co-worker or friend – be as quick to ask for feedback, as you are to give it.  That will slow down the urge to share, won’t it?

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How are you doing amidst the piles you’ve created? You know, the piles of old bills, dirty clothes and detritus of your hobbies (like your carnival stuffed animal collection or unusable swag from less than stellar events)?

Maybe it’s not your clutter. Maybe it’s your roommate’s mess, or your office mate’s. Maybe you inherited it from a well-meaning relative who filled up your place with her old furniture or your work ancestor: the person who sat at your desk or cubicle before you arrived.

Are you worn down, filled with disgust and furious while living in the small margins of space that aren’t covered with dust or mold or worse? Have you come to hate the space you occupy? We know if you have, even if we haven’t seen the place you’re at. Hating disorder and not taking action to clean it up is fomenting a negative attitude toward the world, and making a marked, negative impression of your personal brand on us.

Things that would be trash often surround us in life. Why does this make us mad – either crazy or crazy plus angry? Because it is irrational to be burdened by garbage you must face or sift though in order to do something rational: like live well or work smart.

Don’t kid yourself that someone in Haiti might need a pair of running shoes that are stained from two years of roadwork, accompanied by the molting socks you left in them. Anyway, stashing them in a pile in the corner is not serving the needy, who are not so needy that they want to wear your garbage.

Maybe Your Space is Clean but Your Mind Holds Toxic Waste

Some of us enjoy near pristine physical environments while surrounded by virtual trash: like brain litter born of mean-spirited emails and IMs. Our minds are juiced with the debris of unfair accusations about our talents or intellect. Our honest accomplishments are stacked up on a musty, dusty foundation of “you are less and I am more” reviews of bad bosses, jealous colleagues, dysfunctional family members and BFFs who have breached what you deserve: a sarcophagus of self-worth.

It is my experience that people who come from clutter: space wise or brain wise, speak the angriest and ugliest words. It’s like a haze of brown and grey smog infects them and thwarts oxygen or common courtesy from entering their brains. And, we all have experienced GIGO: garbage in and garbage out. Garbage doesn’t require a fancy algorithm to display results. Garbage is a pretty straight-forward producer of more garbage.

So, how are you doing, as we turn the corner on the second half of this year? It is too late for Spring-cleaning, but you can still lose weight for summer. That is: take the time to toss the stuff that is weighing you down before the days get shorter on their own.

Personal brands: unburden yourself now and let the sunny side of life lift you up and past your old behavior or the behavior of people who should be dropped off in the don’t recycle bin of “toxic people I used to put up with.” Go through your so-called friends or followers and hold onto the real, good ones: the nourishing, wise and in-your-corner ones.

With the spaciousness you create in your real, psychological and social media space you’ll re-gain the ability to map out what you really want in your life. If you got a holiday day off or two, come back into our lives free of the clutter that’s made you mad.

Infuse and surround your personal brand with the best stuff: inside and out.

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Are you playing “dress up” to match the expectations of others? Is there an ever thinning veil, between the real you and the ideal you that you’ve invented and are now struggling to project?

Are you still clenching to maintain the “first date” behavior code with recruiters, your boss or clients? Is your armor cracking (or scorching, if you saw Iron Man 2)? Is it becoming clear that the emperor (or whatever title you hold) has no clothes?

How did you get in this mess?

You pretended to be detail oriented, self-motivated and an early riser. You pretended to be an advanced user of Excel, Final Cut, Wordpress and Spanish. You said you were willing, in fact eager, to work weekends, late nights or be on call 24/7/365.

Are you faking it in hopes that you will be making it sometime soon? Are you keeping the lid on your volcano of real strengths that are now screaming to be exploited while you ply your trade with your weakest suit?

Or have you simply outgrown the persona you still attempt to play by being underemployed or dys-employed or just phoning it in?

What is the naked truth about who you really are and what you really want to do?

The closer you can get to the true you, the happier and richer you will be. Richer: as in making lots of money. Happier: as in rich in every way: spiritually, mentally, physically and once again, financially.

Why? To have phenomenal success in any field or even with any project, you have to have unstoppable, intrinsic and sustainable motivation. Problems have to appear as puzzles that you are delighted to decode.

A deep vein running through you must declare: I would do this even if I won the lottery. I might wear better shoes or drive a cooler car and take way better vacays, but I would still be doing “this” for work, for this company or my own company, and my clients, or whatever the “this” and the “who” are for you.

A lot of us have names for your Highest Goal (Michael Ray), your Sweetest Fruit (Laurel Mellin) or Ultimate Outcome (me). These are just labels for your IT. What is IT? IT is the thing screaming to get out of your mind or body and put onto this planet. It is the truth you may be hiding from yourself, as well as others.

Here’s my embarrassing truth. I am someone who needs other people’s dreams and ambitions in order to be self-actualized. I am meant to help, encourage, find the right way, take the first bullet, stay up all night to get it done on time, and make the most money possible for the people I work for.  I respond so easily to the red light on the camera because I believe I am helping the audience. I teach for the same reason. In fact, it’s why I write to you each week.

My clients often write “thank you” in the memo of their retainer checks.

If I were a dog, I’d be a golden retriever – a working dog that loyally runs into the rushing waters of a cold river to get the stick and get it back to you. Simply put, my personal brand is this: I am a helper, with vision and grit.

If we stripped away all the varnish (and that’s the nice word for it), what is your naked truth?

Planet Earth is 71% water. Take a skinny dip into it, baring your real personal brand.

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“I have testicular cancer,” the late flooring supervisor told me. I don’t mean late as in dead. I mean late as in 4 weeks overdue to put the last bit of my office floor in, and now at 10 PM on Saturday night, culminating three days of “I’ll be right there,” just arriving at my office. That kind of late.

To woo me and blow smoke at me over the last 4 weeks, the supervisor had spun tales of putting in Tom Cruise’s floor, being called to an “emergency job” in Oregon and the ever popular refrain in this town: the “traffic is really heavy on the 5 (freeway, I’m in LA).” He has just arrived: angry.

Why he’s angry, I shouldn’t know because I’ve already paid him and it’s just the last 300 feet in a 6000 square foot job that went undone because he failed to measure right. But, I actually do know why he is angry at me.

When people make a mistake they have two choices about whom to hate: you or themselves. Statistically, it’s not a coin toss. The odds are rigged against you.

The biggest fear I have in business is someone else not doing their job, not because it won’t wind up done by them (or me or someone else I pay double to do it on a rush), but because they are very likely to get angry rather than apologize and do the right thing. In fact, that scenario is pretty much the only time anyone is angry with me.

So if you’re angry, I pretty much know you didn’t do something you promised.

However, the testicle defense? Very original! At first, I thought perhaps his testicles in some way kept him from showing up this morning. It so happens that I’m a woman so how would I know? I’m not a doctor.

In fact, it turns out he had another job also unfinished, located in Palm Springs (probably due to finish last year) and he thought he’d “get that out of the way” before driving up 5 hours to see me.

So what time zone was the “I’ll be there a 8 AM Saturday” zone when in reality he planned to be 400 miles away from me? It wasn’t the US Pacific Time Zone. I was here waiting for him in no special time warp; just 8 AM Saturday. And, as the clocked ticked away time? No supervisor. No flooring. But throughout the day, lots of calls to negotiate a new arrival time – hence he shows up at 10 PM.

Here’s what happened. The supervisor was angry that I failed to greet him like a conquering hero bringing me chocolate and parachute silks. When he read my tired face as: “I’ve been up for 15 hours today and now will be up another 5 while you finally do your job,” he said: “It’s not even worth it for me to put in the floor. You are already unhappy. And, I have testicular cancer.”

So he threatened to withhold my flooring while waving some kind of testicle defense. My response? Remember, I have an unfair advantage in these circumstances: I communicate for a living. I teach people how to communicate with difficult people. Here’s my response:

“You and I are dying before each others’ eyes, aren’t we?”

He let a tear drop out of his eye and silently (hurray!) went to work (finally!).

Personal brands: what excuses are you giving yourself to underperform?

What happens to the personal brand you are trying to build, when you pull out a dopey, lame and TMI (too much information!) response to someone’s well deserved rebuke of you for what havoc you wreaked in their business or life?

We all are living to die. That’s the deal here. You get to make the reality you live in. You get to choose from an infinite spectrum of behaviors and words to describe what you are doing right, and what you are doing wrong.

It’s your choice that matters; it’s what defines you as a personal brand. Not some myth called reality. It’s all perception of you and by you.

Here a tip as you lay the foundation of your personal brand.  Lay down a track of self-talk that soothes you when you make a mistake and gets you back the self-control that saves you from yourself.

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On Saturday afternoon I visited a posh salon in Los Angeles. The place and the people were way cooler than I am but hey, a friend gave me a referral card worth $25 off a haircut there.

It was a lot like I imagine heaven must be. There were endless cappuccinos, people speaking French and an air that everyone is fabulous in that West Hollywood-Beverly Hills kind of way.

In fact, Meryl Streep was being adored next to me, and she deserved it. She emanates a lightness of heart and liquid grace that previously I associated only with crème brule. Creamy goodness.

And, because everyone in the salon was fabulous, someone recognized me from CNBC and told me how fabulous I am. I suspect they Google you before you come in to make sure that if there’s even a hint of celebrity in your body of work, you are celebrated for it. The woman stopped short of asking for my autograph and I stopped short of asking Ms. Streep for hers. My “fan” did press her contact information on me, actually onto my iPhone.

I came away from the experience with my hair several shades lighter and much, much shorter. My bank account was clipped just under $500 (with the $25 off). C’mon, I had to buy the products, because everyone there was doing it, and they are fabulous. I was thinking for a moment that I was fabulous, too.

Here’s where the story takes an ugly turn.

Swinging my shiny new do, I drove to the new building we’ve renovated with just 20 hours to go before the soft opening and about 100 hours of work to do on it. There was paint on coving running around the perimeter of the space, sticky stuff on the bathroom floors, six thousand feet of recycled rubber flooring to vacuum and mop. At 6 PM, it was just the CEO who’s launching this business and me. All the workman, sub-contractors, even the cleaning people had called it quits before it was quitting time. That is if quitting time means the job is complete and the deadline met.

In one last desperate SOS, I offered $50 to two workers scurrying away. I only did it because we needed two ladders to put up the sign, and without theirs, we had just one.

So at 3 AM on Sunday, I dragged myself home and finished the welcome packages, lined up everything to go, and wrote myself a checklist. At 5 AM I crawled into bed. My mind raced back through the day – did I have everything we needed for the opening just 5 hours away?

And in that mental back tracking, I remembered the posh salon, Meryl Streep and the moment of fabulousness.

I doubt Meryl went back to a building and scrubbed floors. Even the woman who played the part of my fan must have enjoyed a more elegant day. Almost everyone had, I felt sure.

But, no matter where they dined or wined or went for amusement, I don’t know that anyone had a better day than I did.  There is something life affirming about digging deep when you are so tired it is impossible to go on, and go on. There is something outstanding about finding the one person, and he’s your partner, who works alongside you and does all the heavy lifting (literally).

Personal brands: don’t quit before quitting time. Stay and get it done. Then, double check your work. Don’t go to bed without making a checklist for the next day. In front of the door, line up all your files and briefcase. Locate your keys.

Successful personal brands much like all star athletes: play tired, play hurt and play as if it’s the last game of the regular season with a championship tournament slot on the line.

That’s how Meryl Streep does her craft and career. I just build companies and wash floors.

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I spent the weekend in bootcamp at UCLA with dozens of amazing people who all were wrestling with their personal brands.  I was their wrestling coach. I was also, at times, their opponent, referee, fan in the stands, hot dog seller, beer purveyor, mother, sister, aunt, and confessor.

I could not be more humbled by their bravery and vulnerability – and their affection for each other, and me.

All of us were strangers on Saturday at 9 AM. All of us were planning our first reunion by Sunday at 4 PM.  This is evidence that the opportunity for collaboration can result in both our finest and oddest moments.

Finest in that we find our true purpose in life when we are group goal oriented. Really odd, in that personal branding seems by nature to be a solo – not team, sport.

What we each accomplished for ourselves is developing personas that are “different in a good way” from our competition. This is the pure play definition of positioning – the marketer’s dream in a competitive environment.

I told everyone to keep a “key learning” journal during camp – a way to capture the “aha!” nuggets that erupted, leaked or somehow emerged as the exercises, lectures, examples and interactions widened our focus and narrowed our legitimate claims on space in our professions, industries, sectors and so on.

The greatest aha moment for me came after I drove off campus early Sunday evening, to dash over to the big, empty space that by May 3 will be my company’s new headquarters. This is now: gaping holes, half-finished walls, primer instead of paint put up and the detris of construction activity – like tools I don’t know the name of. As I sat on a stack of wallboards waiting for my partners so we could make some decision about paint colors, I was the one thing I had not been for days: alone.

My “aha” moment is this: you and I need a safe and nourishing place to ask and answer the really big questions in business. When the defining nature of the business involves personal branding, I am surprised that meditating alone or any type of navel-gazing isn’t very effective. What I now know is this: there is something magical or primal about real human contact. Being with our tribe magnifies our intentions. We seek to make meaning when we take on the responsibility for making ourselves clear to our tribe mates.

This is true even when our tribe is formed ad-hoc, without our qualifying each other, judging each other or knowing anything about each other except that we are all here to do this one thing. In our case, it was defining our personal brands on day one and then tactically planning our brands’ social media campaigns on day two.

How could we each have accomplished so much in such a short time? Is it immersion? Is it competitiveness? Is it the sense of other people in the dark, seeking light?

I think amazing self-revelation demands an audience to share it. Only when you hear the sounds of other earnest voices, the rustling of other’s thoughts been scratched onto real paper with pen, and see others picking out color chips in combinations that would never come from your mind’s eye, do you understand yourself.

I cannot let it go unsaid that having world-class examples and experts as guest lecturers took us all to the summit. Thank you @KarlKasca, @MollyJoRosen, @FrugalDivaAlert Susan Kessler and Jon Weiss Torerk at BioMechanix.net as well as all the personal brands that came and were made.

You made “camp inward-bound” in a lecture room at UCLA as exciting as the “outward-bound” one that has legendary status. We did not just survive the challenges, we thrived because of them and each other.

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