Jodi Glickman is an amazingly good communicator. She is so good, in fact, that she has built an entire business, Great on the Job, around teaching young professionals how to communicate.
She also has a new book on the topic, Great on the Job: What to Say, How to Say It. The Secrets of Getting Ahead. This week, Jodi took some time out of her busy schedule to answer a few of my questions.
Q: I love the concept of your company, Great on the Job. Can you describe what you do and why you started the business?
A: Great on the Job was founded to teach young people how to talk to one another at work, every day in every situation—when you’re on top of you’re game and when you have no idea what’s going on.
I started the business in 2008 after realizing I had been highly coached and scripted at business school during my interviews with investment banks and consulting firms. There’s a whole lot of networking and interviewing support out there when you’re looking for a new job. But the minute you get to that new job, you’re left to your own devices to figure things out.
There’s no roadmap at work that teaches you how to ask for help in a smart way or answer a question you don’t know the answer to. No one ever teaches you how to raise a red flag in advance of a problem or tell the boss you’ve just screwed up. Great on the Job was launched to meet that need— to give practical, tactical advice for all of those mundane, daily one-on-one conversations that make up 80% of the workday and are so critical to success yet are overlooked by academic and corporate training programs.
Q: In your new book, Great on the Job, you give some very specific communication strategies. I particularly like your strategy for effective phone calls and use it all the time. Can you describe that?
A: The beginning of every phone conversation should start like this:
IntroductionPurpose of your callKey question: “Do you have a few minutes to speak?”You can’t assume everybody is just sitting there waiting for his or her phone to ring. Even when someone picks up their line, they aren’t necessarily ready and willing to engage with you. Give the other person an “out” if it’s not a good time to speak and offer to call back or find another time that works better. Great on the Job is all about generosity—asking someone if they have time to speak before you start talking is the generous thing to do.
Read the rest of this post in the Experis Career Center..
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