Are today’s yuppies trying too hard to market and sell whatever it is they’re required to do? I ask this question because I always encounter the same faces at the street corner handing out colorful brochures, catalogs or flyers of a condominium up for pre-selling; and every day, I’m still asked to accept those flyers despite repeatedly telling them I’m not interested or not in the market.

I once interviewed one of them and was surprised to find out her daily quota for getting people to sign-up and give their full contact information is sixty. It was already past sunset when she approached me and as I began talking to her, you could see the sadness and desperation on her face – she was just shy of 30 contacts. How on earth is she going to meet her quota? “And why do you have a quota?” I asked, knowing that real estate selling is not a daily activity but a plus-and-minus numbers game spread across a month or more. It turns out she receives a monthly compensation on top of a sizeable commission if she closes a contract; somebody can dictate ridiculous quotas anytime and she can’t do anything about that. And why stand at that corner every day, or the mall booth? A friend of mine once told me that out of the corner-street and mall-booth flyering activities he did in a given period, giving away thousands of those back-to-back, sometimes-glossy sales paraphernalia, only three people became hot prospects; no one bought. Go figure!

In a recent “Social Media for the Workplace” training that I conducted, one question that came up involved customer complaints; and in that query, I was asked my opinion if it was better to disable posting on the wall of their Facebook Page for fear that others will read any complaints or nasty remarks. I revved up back to my years of dealing with customer service – the sound and practical principles behind it, not the call center function – and told the audience my most favorite customer service slogan: a complaint is a gift.* A short eulogy about that phrase just started coming out of my head and my mouth, emphasizing that I’d rather have someone tell me what’s wrong than keeping quiet yet stabbing me at the back (so to speak). Don’t dread complaints. Treat them as gifts you have a bigger chance of winning a forever-loyal customer. Customer service is not about the actual complaint. The true meaning of customer service is “a promise to deliver,” whatever it is you need to deliver to your customer, be it an answer, a solution to a problem, information, a replacement product or an additional service.

Recently, I had coffee with my young friend, probably three years in his working life, who started off as a sales rep of a technology company and for the past year has gone into the real estate business. He asked to meet so he could get counsel from me on the many things I do in social media. Our talk turned the other way, outside the intended topic. I hardly touched on social media marketing and networking because I realized from our discussion that my friend missed the primary step in marketing and selling: define your market first.

I was once consulting for an online newsmagazine company, whose general market was the overseas and migrant Filipinos, and that’s precisely where I began my work with them. “Who really is your market?” By that question I expected a long story describing a person, not a statistical narration with marketing graphs and lingos only Mr. Spock can understand. We ended up with a female named Maria and everyone came up with as much detailed information as possible, from the basics of age, marital status, kids, job, birth place and all, to lifestyle routines and habits, including aspirations and dreams. When we finished the detailed narrative, we had a three-page, single-spaced essay about Maria which we immediately relayed to every writer, graphics artist and photographer through a verbal, story-telling manner. What suddenly changed was a more focused effort from everyone to deliver content specific only to the likes and whims of Maria; anyone else reading the content was icing on the cake. In a few months, everyone saw the hits increasing, with RSS subscriptions, Facebook Page likes, and Twitter followers all rising. What we actually wanted besides these everyday web statistics was the amount of comments per story or article to increase, too; and it did! We didn’t need fancy marketing science but just a common sense understanding of what we wanted to achieve.

Going back to my young friend in the real estate business, I asked him what kind of market he was tapping into. He replied, “young families.” I asked why and he quickly quipped that the leisure place he was representing, which is at the outskirts of the city, provided a peaceful and private sanctuary for the parents and the kids to bond. “Say what?” was something I surprisingly silently uttered, being careful not criticize. “You mean to say these parents with kids ages five and seven and who are making ends meet should buy an expensive real estate property in your private leisure place of four hours driving distance so they can go there every weekend to bond?” Uh-oh.

If companies hire fresh graduates to represent them in the real world, isn’t it their unspoken duty to equip these young, new professionals with the wisdom, and not only skills, to know how to market and sell on a practical, real-life scenario? I remember the strategy that SGV and Company, an auditing firm, used when they hired fresh graduates: everyone was contracted to stay with and work for them for a minimum of two years at rock-bottom rates. However, the return of investing two years with SGV were tons upon tons of training that according to a friend of my Dad, only a trickle really leaves the company before the contract ends. After the contract is up, these yuppie accountants and auditors can opt to stay for the small salary and work their way up the partner level, or venture out into the job market and get a higher-paying job. So, for the latter types, they became accountants and analysts of non-accounting firms and companies. But here’s where the opportunity to SGV lies: these young professionals left SGV in high spirits, silently thanking their first alma mater for all the great training they received, in the classroom and out on the field. Guess who they are going to recommend to their new employers when external audits are needed?

If you are heading a sales or marketing department, or a head honcho of a small, mid-sized or large corporation, you need to go down to your ranks today and find out why things are not working the way they’re suppose to be. Chances are, your young professionals who are armed with enthusiasm and passion to start making a dent in the world are not being given ample, practical, common-sense training they should be receiving. The business world around you is full of people who have a decade or two of real-world experiences, both successes and failures, which can provide better counsel than just selling tips and techniques or team building exercises taken out of context of what you really do. A two-hour session from a two-decades-plus business veteran is not expensive but it can already do wonders for creative planning on what-to-do and how-to-do-it, and a half-an-hour, informal session is not a time-waster. Your front liners are bleeding to death, and they need your help now, before it’s too late. Pretty soon, they will realize it isn’t worth it and they’ll jump ship faster than you can spell Mississippi!

Though Sales is a world filled with people in love with making money, your young, eager professionals still have a lot of the idealism in them, wanting to be recognized as a success and, even better, a hero. By the time they get older, the need for making money catches up on the need for recognition; but then, if they started on the right foot, making money would just be a natural result of things.

Think about it!

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* I actually met Janelle Barlow in 1997 when TMI, her company, was asked to conduct its customer service training to the executives of a company I used to work with. After that session, it just made practical sense to preach all around the company that indeed “a complaint is a gift.”

Sources: Janelle Barlow Video | NuWire Investor | philjcking.com

Title photo by goang at Flickr.com

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Original B&W photo by defrostca at Flickr.com

When I read this article entitled “Sell Online Marketing to Your Boss: 7 Euphemisms Everyone Needs”, I had to laugh out loud (LOL?) Yes, I can just imagine myself looking like a dimwit if I reported to a boss who says he has no time for Facebook and LinkedIn. “Tweet me? What the heck is that? Sounds gay! Are you gay?”

The generation gap is all around us today, especially in the workplace. Men (and women) of the rolling 60′s and 70′s (and I’m guessing the reason why they named it “rolling” was because of a popular plant) have hit the ceiling fan on today’s fourth medium of consumerism – the Internet. The only thing they know about it is e-mail and Google, the kinds of mainstream users who still type the URL or web address inside the Google search box rather than in the browser’s address bar (see ReadWriteWeb article.)

So, how do you sell social media and internet marketing to your “rolling 60′s” boss? Try these euphemisms as suggested in this article:

1. Instead of “Blog,” use “Content Publishing Platform.“
2. Instead of “RSS,” use “Syndication and Subscription Technology.“
3. Instead of “Social Media,” use “Real-time Media.“
4. Instead of “SEO,” use “Unpaid Search Engine Traffic.“
5. Instead of “Social Network,” use “Online Communities.“
6. Instead of “PPC,” use “Click-based Search Engine Advertising.“
7. Instead of “Landing Page,” use “Lead Generation Page.“

It’s not that your boss is having difficulty in trying to understand what is happening in the social media world. It’s actually your job to jumpstart him into the new yet confusing world of social media networking and social media marketing. Fine, he knows what e-mail and websites are; but to go into Facebook and “socialize” virtually? That’s a mighty big leap from his comfort zone. Not only won’t it happen overnight, he may just resist doing so.

Don’t underestimate your boss. He has his strengths, and the general reason why he’s your boss is because he’s still a whole lot better than you when it comes to running a successful business or company unit. But what he doesn’t know is what he’s missing out on the most active medium of business and personal communication so alive since the telephone was invented. There are gazillion of conversations being conducted every so often, and your entire group will be left behind on the opportunities that everyone else is hitching a ride on.

But take heed – many in the younger generations are computer driven and internet savvy, and in no short amount of time will you be able to virtually recreate your boss to believe in the World Wide Web. You, as a matter of fact, also don’t have the time to keep tweeting, wall-posting, blogging and plurking, to name a few of the new verbs of everyday life. You have your real-world responsibilities at work, like meeting your clients face-to-face, conducting Powerpoint presentations, brainstorming and planning, managing your people and host of many more traditional functions.

Old World Meets New Age

Some time not too long ago, I created and developed the customer service department in a company where old-world telecommunications met the Internet. One of the objectives of my new, small group was to empower itself with customer information beyond the everyday trivial ones. To do that meant asking people for endless streams of pocket-sized information each day. If you’ve met a top-seller salesperson, one thing you will notice is that he (or she) generally hates paperwork. No amount of incentives will make a salesperson, much more the top-seller, sit down in front of a computer for endless hours and type the stories of his daily encounters with all his customers. “Information is power,” so they say; in truth, it really is. That was the challenge – how to get the smallest information of daily activities and common yet unasked data from the salesperson into a digitized database that everyone in the company can have access to?

The solution was simple and traditional – buy a help desk solution with good knowledgebase features and hire assistants (with experience or college units in database management or statistics) whose job was to receive calls from the salesperson to help build a power database of bits and snippets of customer information. We had salespeople calling these assistants everyday – every hour if needed – to dictate what had just transpired during their meeting with a customer. No paperwork – just call the Help Desk and yak on the phone about it. In no time were we able to build a growing yet useful knowledgebase, information now relevant to the different groups in the company, like:

• Marketing used it to Wow! the market;
• Sales used it to surprise the customer;
• Finance used it to adjust projections to smaller margins versus what was actually going to happen;
• Human resources used it to manage and re-train salespeople on time management and other soft skills training; and
• General Management used it to adjust corporate polices and business strategies.

And the funny thing about it? The solution was all about recording the “conversations” into digitized and usable data formats, or what I kept mentioning as the knowledgebase. Old-world traditional means meets the new information age.

You Can’t Tweet All Day Long!

The point I’m making in relation to the social media and internet marketing hullabaloo is you still need traditional means to make it work. Someone has got to be doing all the tweeting eight hours a day; someone has to be managing the Facebook Fan Page everyday; someone has to be writing endless amounts of articles to be posted in the corporate blog everyday; someone has to be comparing the company’s multitudes of web pages against competition; someone has to be developing content for the corporate YouTube account; and in this eternal list, everyone is having (or trying to have) a conversation with your customer. The result of these efforts come back to old-world traditional activities with your customers – events, visits, mailers, phone calls, meetings, presentations, lunches and cocktails, and (again) an eternal list of functions that make your customers loyal to the brand, the people and the company.

If you are going to be doing all these internet-related activities while doing what you’ve been doing before social media networking and social media marketing came into the picture, then start worrying about job security because in a few months, sales will go down, revenue will go down, customer complaint will go up and resignations galore will happen left and right.

Social media networking and social media marketing are not quick solutions to your business problems in sales, marketing, service or support. They are not golden dreams of creating corporate wealth, be it in the number of loyal customers you develop or a gateway to increase revenue. Social media is, however, a growing popular medium you cannot turn your back away from anymore. In each country, millions of people have joined Facebook without really knowing how the social media arena is going to help them with their lives except bumping into old classmates or flames, and sharing thoughts, ideas, suggestions and a whole barrage of nonsensical banter. It is the ultimate “new media” in people interaction today. It’s a whole new ballgame and to make it work, you need a good social media plan. But the benefits, nevertheless, are also amazing. A smaller amount of cash (than traditional means) is all you need to get your message across your specific target market where common interests by the end-users police their own ranks to keep the subject matter banter alive and kick out those who have no business being part of it. Now, that’s customer loyalty at its very peak!

It’s A Question of “How?”

Entering the social media field today isn’t late in the game. The entire world is still building the social media road. You can still join in. The question isn’t what you’re going to benefit from it – you know there are advantages in social media networking and social media marketing, and profits to be made out of it. The bigger question is “how” to do it.

After-Message

I have begun offering myself to small businesses or small groups and business units by way of training the people in the workplace how to best use social media networking and social media marketing mixed in with old-world, traditional business methods in sales, marketing, service and support operations. My introductory on-site training takes up four hours of your people’s time while advanced training and in-depth consulting add up more hours up or days, depending on the depth of your needs and wants. Mixing my old-world corporate-driven experiences in selling, marketing, servicing and supporting customers to hands-on personal experiences in social media is what I offer. Of course, I have partnered with many experts in the social media field that deliver specialized work to attain the overall objective.

My professional and personal information are found in the “About” page while you may contact me anytime using the information and form found in the “Contact” page.

It’s been a roller coaster ride from childishness to maturity and fatherhood. I’ve had good successes and disappointing failures. Many of these have affected acquaintances, friends and family. Life is such that you fall down, get up and continue where you left off. Regardless of the gains and pitfalls, life is still good – and I am luckier than many in the world who have a lot less and suffer more.

I love technology, having started my work interests in the field of computers when display monitors was a roll of paper, the keyboard looked and felt like a typewriter, and saving your files meant punching holes on a long roll of paper. Today, we have the means to telecommute and sit in coffee shops while we surf the world wide web. That’s the span of my experience and love of technology.

I enjoyed the challenges and education of the workplace, and the constant movements between organizational people who muster strategies and instructions on what best to do to achieve the ideal profit. I love collaboration and coordination, managing projects, creating new and better ways to do things, daydreaming of ambitious programs that will better a small part of the business or the larger picture. From staff to supervision, management to directing. At one point, I was a one-man department where I prided myself to be able to gain access and support from people belonging to other teams and departments, and succeed in delivering my expected results. Recently, I ventured into entrepreneurship and learned many lessons on how “not” to do things.

I envision a good lifestyle, from fashion to good living standards and the eccentricities of the upper social network that I can share erstwhile to my wife and children. Of course, it’s still a vision that needs to be fulfilled. Though money is not something you bring to your grave or after-life, it is a means to provide others a better life than what you had.

I love having idols in life and business machinations. The movers and the shakers who takes your breath away when their experiences are shared and their knowledge exchanged with you. I continue to add more idols in my life as I continue meeting, experiencing and adapting the best traits I learn from these idols. It’s even much better if your idol is your personal friend or acquaintance – the experience is more livid.

But, life goes on and life is good. God still continues to be part of my being and the way I deliver myself to others. I have been a devout Catholic since childbirth and even if I opened up to be introduced to other types of faiths, I still came back to my Catholic upbringing; and I am very proud of that. I love God as I love people around me, even if others do not understand and misunderstand my love. As humans, it is very important to continue loving others so that we can say, “life is good!”

Now, it’s time to share. Inspired freedom to share my experiences, my ideals, my thoughts, my ideas and my hopes. I once read a book whose title was “Hope Is Not A Method.” True. Don’t make it a method but continue to hope for the best and plot the method to which you could achieve your aspirations in life. And I “hope” I will succeed in my words that it may be able to help you in you path in life, where “life is good!”

Joy and I were met by Oscar, a gregarious fellow with a husky voice who loved to quip jokes. I followed Joy and we sat down on a table where I met another member, Art. In my conversation with Art, I found out he was a former SGV guy whose professional career focused on Finance, the last being the CFO of telephone company PT&T. He’s now semi-retired as he dabbles on consulting and brokering deals.

After a while, the women were asked to separate from the men to start each of their own session where Joy transferred to the adjacent area. Joy said sometimes everyone is grouped together rather than separated. It kind of reminded me about the single Opus Dei session I agreed to attend in behalf of another friend, Trixie. The “center” I was invited to go to was a place only for men only – no women. We attended mass where the songs were sung in Latin and went to the second floor of the building where a group discussion was to be held.

Going back to the BCBP breakfast event, it was very Catholic; I liked it because despite my inquisitive mind wandering to other faiths and religion, I am still a very proud Roman Catholic. The men sang from a hymn book which I tried to follow. An opening prayer was done by Dindo with mention of me and Adam as “first-timers” to the breakfast session.

Teddy was the “sharer” of the morning. He introduced himself as a member of BCBP for already five years but belonging to another chapter down south of Makati City. His story was both sad and truimphant, mostly on the personal side. At one instance, he had to stop because emotions just overwhelmed him as he read from his prepared script with a few ad libs here and there. While listening to him, I was already inside my head thinking when God will grant me the time where things in my life will simply line up and make things happy for everyone, especially my kids.

After Teddy spoke, Dindo introduced another person for some announcements; afterwhich, a closing prayer was done and the closing hymn was sung.

During the session, I also recalled my days as an active member of the “Couples for Christ” group in Richmond, BC, together with my wife. I enjoyed the camaraderie and prayer sessions we had through the year-and-a-half I was in Richmond. I also recalled playing and singing for the choir of the Canadian Martyrs Catholic Church, also in Richmond.

I believe I enjoyed myself and liked the group. They are warm and friendly, and not intimidating as others would be all over you being a first-time member. It is a group of faithful Catholics that have “business” as a common interest yet want to strengthen their relationship with God. Their mission, as I read the one-pager pamphlet on the breakfast table, says:

The BCBP is a body of Christian men and women whose upbringing, education, training and current life situation have placed them in the midst of the marketplace. Theirs, therefore, is a special calling that motivates them to apply their talents and resources on the ordinary as well as out of the ordinary events and situations in their workplace.

Oscar told me that the next session will be on June 13, this time to be held at a restaurant in Serendra inside The Fort. I think I will be attending their breakfast sessions in the months to come.

You are who you are, growing up during your 20-something years in an environment that honed those characteristics of who you are. When you embark in social networks outside your comfort zones, e.g. home, parents, siblings, you begin to realize that some of the things that make you “you” don’t mix well with the network; and so you adjust. Likewise, you do the same thing in the workplace. You also learn and add new characteristics to your self by observation and “trial and error.”

So, when someone tells you (sometimes forcibly) that “it’s nothing personal,” the truth is it’s always personal. It’s always your personal self mixed with some professional requirements or needs. If you fire someone, it’s not as if some robotic supercomputer has commanded you to inform “John” that the robot is firing him. You or someone else made the “conscious” decision to fire John, a decision made by a person’s mind using personal experiences in the workplace plus other networks and environments. Your persona is always involved even if it is in the workplace.

I always tell my personal stories to people that I work with not because they are wonderful stories to tell but for the reason that I need people to know who I am and why I behave the way I behave, think, decide and so on. Many of those I’ve worked with know I have a mother who lives far away from me and my father died two weeks after I got married. Some know where I spent my childhood days and what school I attended. But knowing all these does not mean “kissing up” to them or to me. Here’s another thing you need to consider — you’ve got be consistent all the time. If you’re the smiling person, always be the smiling person even when problems persist at home.

I’ve had the experience of firing people, and I don’t mean one or five in my lifetime. I’ve fired thousands at one point when I was called the “axe man” responsible for deciding which group or department in a failing company must be shutdown and who should be let go. I knew that the personal side of “me” was involved in the decision process. So, how did I become personal in a professional task like this? I helped in the person’s transition from having no job to creating job opportunities for him.

As an example, I’d like to share with you someone who used to work for me in a previous company. Jane is a sweet, friendly person who was hired by someone and placed in my group to work as one of the three assistants that I already had. The few days she started with me told me how industrious she was, always busy and always looking for work to do. However, in the coming weeks, her weaknesses began to appear. Jane did her work a lot slower than the rest of my assistants. No matter how we all pitched in to try to help, her mental capacity to absorb new information and finish work was just not at par to the requirements of the company we all worked for.  Everyone was starting to do Jane’s work because she was slowing us all down.

So, one night, I already decided that I had to fire her. I sat down at the dinner table one night when everyone in the house were already asleep, got some blank sheets of paper and started to analyze Jane — sort of like a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis. Then, I listed down people who I knew that may benefit employing Jane, even fictional types of people like “an Uncle who owned a manpower agency.”

The following day, early in the morning, I called Jane and we went to an empty, private office. I could see from her eyes she was nervous. I used the “Kiss-Kick-Kiss” technique by opening up with her strengths, reading it from the pieces of paper I had scribbled the night before and letting Jane see those pieces of paper flat on the desk. I told her I have decided to ask her to resign. Then, I went to my list of prospective employers where her total characteristics will benefit those companies or places. I also asked her if she knew relatives or acquaintances that fitted the list of fictional types of people and companies I wrote down. We went through a lot of “what if” scenarios and our discussion lasted for two hours. At the end of our meeting, we quickly drew up talking points on what she can honestly answer people if asked why she was leaving, making sure she resigned than being terminated from work. I also told her to give me a call whenever she hits a wall on her job hunting or when she already has work.

I allowed Jane to stay the following day where our group gathered to bid her goodbye with potluck and delivered food and drinks. Like we expected, many asked the same question why she resigned and, at one query, she even winked at me before she answered back. A month later, Jane visited us in the office and told me and everyone else where she currently works and how she enjoys the job. Privately, she thanked me for giving her a sense of her strengths and where she could put that to use.

When I mentioned firing thousands of people, the initial task was an exercise of my brain and my analytical experiences brought into a single spreadsheet. However, in the action of terminating the groups and departments, I ventured into the fire: I personally went to the location of the group and told them that we were shutting them down. Of course, doing so meant a thousand-and-one questions and I was ready to answer their questions. I was also ready to provide post-employment assistance — both monetary and functional — helping them transition to their next job. I prepared all these before I went around the scattered locations, having gotten budgets from my superiors to set up these different support groups. I didn’t get “death threats” but did somehow get course or painful remarks during my face-to-face encounters. But I didn’t chide these remarks; rather, I faced them with truthful answers. If I didn’t know the answer then, I promised to get back to them personally and I did. The moment you become personal with people — letting them know who you really are and seeing how honest you are to them — their anger or frustration dies down and become more open to solutions or next steps.

Whoever your boss is, they should also know the real you. It’s not “ass kissing” as most employees label such action. In my experience, letting my boss know who I am has always worked to my advantage without going against any company policy or unlawful act. Let’s say you’re late because you had a spat with your spouse. If your boss never really knew anything about your wife — who she really is — chances are your tardiness is grounds for some negative action coming from your boss. However, I’ve always made sure my superiors have always known my wife and kids even if they never met them. If there’s a chance to let my family meet my boss, I always strike upon the opportunity because a face is always a stronger recall than just a name or a description. One time in my career when trouble struck in the family, my boss becomes more understanding of the situation. I explained that my work schedule had been clashing with my family’s need for my time and it was already becoming worse with arguments. What did my boss do? She went out of her way to find me an alternative position in the company, which actually became better for my career.

Spouses (or in my case my wife) have always complained about husbands bringing work to the home where, as most of them would say, doesn’t belong there. “Work is work and the family at home doesn’t need to hear about work.” However, I totally disagree — to a certain extent. In a marital relationship, you spouse has got to be your greatest, best friend or BFF! If he or she isn’t, there’s something wrong. Therefore, in times of stress or distress, there’s one person you can rely on for counsel, inner guidance and down-to-earth advise — and that’s your spouse. However, you can’t just jump into a conversation about the office every now and then. In a personal relationship, there is consistency and routine that human nature expects or looks for. So, sharing your office woes only isn’t the way to go; there’s also got to be good times and positive events or activities that has to be told as well. Making it a daily routine, say 10 minutes about the office, is the best foot forward that allows your spouse to share the good, the bad and the ugly. And when the downtimes hit you, it isn’t hard to explain it to your spouse because he or she already knows most of the things you do and that happens in your office.

Also consider your kids. Who do you think are their heroes or role models? I’m sure there’s a time when your child would bug you to bring him or her to your office — and you do (if you haven’t, you’re depriving you child of knowing more about you). Chances are he or she will tell their friends of their trip to dad’s (or mom’s) office, the experiences they encountered, the people they met, the things they say — I mean, you know children and their animated way of story-telling an experience. After that first visit, your children will continue to ask questions about your work and the office, and knowing you strike a conversation on the dinner table about the office every so often relieves your children that all is well with you — their hero or idol (for now).

When I attend a meeting where I get to meet a new person, I always make sure to bring something personal on the table. I can talk about my family and our travels, my peers in high school, my personal achievements and so on. For women, showing your family picture to them grabs the whole “personal and professional” mix up one level in the “trust” spectrum. Why? Business transactions are still made and dealt with by people. People always use their hindsight, gut-feel or intuition to decide the better course for their business or work. Telling someone who you really are provides more positive inputs to their decision making. But don’t lie — there are those who are experienced and learned enough to know if you’re lying. Telling a fib can ricochet badly if it’s later known to be a lie — be careful! The internet has flattened our world and news and stories now travel faster than you can spell “Mississippi.” So, honesty and trust adds value to the decision making process of a person, no matter what you are selling, marketing or presenting; and providing more personal truths about yourself brings more credibility to your professional expertise.

The person in you has to mix with your professional persona. That’s the only way everyone wins. Hiding the truth about yourself isn’t a protectionism action against unwanted thwarts, not unless you yourself are doing something bad, illegal or very negative that you fear the repercussion of similar actions. Your peers in the workplace has to better understand you and the way you do things. Your spouse and children have to know what’s going on with you in the workplace so they can also adjust in your personal abode. Your network of new and old business associates need to know more about you and what makes you or the organization you represent the best candidate for their needs. Everything you do at work is the effect of who you were and who you are today. Letting people around you understand your “human nature” allows them to adjust or to counsel you when the need arises.

In the end, it’s a “Win-Win” scenario. Now, who wouldn’t want a win-win result?