Public Speaking: A Key Management Skill

I happened to be having a coffee with a friend and his wife when their daughter came to the living room and started to talk about the world of ancient Rome. 

I understood she was practicing for her public speaking competition at school. 

She had to speak for 2 minutes about the Roman Empire or a related subject. She had chosen Julius Caesar. What an interesting topic! I remember reading about Julius Caesar when I was young: "I came, I saw, I conquered". 

I remember Sulla, his enemy and how he conquered Gaul defeating more than 300 different tribes. His adventures are still very present today. You still hear people talking about "crossing the Rubicon River", the boundary between Gaul and Italy, evoking what Julius Caesar did when he was heading to Rome to fight Pompey. His trip to Egypt, Cleopatra... The story that struck me most was his murder. How could it happen? He was the most powerful man on earth. Can you imagine Brutus and a crowd surrounding him? 23 stab wounds in his body! I found it unbelievable.

Learning to Avoid Unconscious Bias in Job Interviews

There is a growing consensus about how diversity drives creativity, profitability, growth and ultimately, success. Workforce diversity is currently at the top of the agenda for leading companies.  Diversity is key to understand customer needs and it is critical to attract and hire individuals with diverse backgrounds that bring different skills and experiences. 

One of the main issues to achieve a diverse environment that allows to get the maximum out of each person is unconscious or implicit bias.

I have recently read the book "The Person you mean to be: How Good People Fight Bias" by Dolly Chugh  published by HarperBusiness in 2018. The foreword is written by Laszlo Bock, former senior vice president of People Operations at Google. Laszlo Heard Dolly make the question at a conference: "How can it be true that some of the time all of us act in ways that aren’t perfectly ethical, but amazingly every one of us believes him- or herself to be a good person?” 

Career Management Cycles to Succeed in the Labour Market

The career is organized around what we call Cycles, that is, the different roles and jobs you have during your professional life. 

There is not a magic number of years you should stay in one job, but the time you spend in each place is meaningful in terms of building up your professional profile.

You will need to make decisions and then execute without looking back. Once you feel the cycle is completed, you will evaluate if the job has fulfilled your expectations, and continue down that road or change course.

If you are a recent graduate, it is not a surprise if you change job as you try to figure out what you want to be. Later, recruiters tend to look for consistency. The average  number of years that workers stay with their employers has decreased during the last decades but changing professional role too frequently will not be positive for your job interviews. When you start in a new job, it is not advisable to abandon or seek a change when the first setback appears. You learn a lot from difficult situations and it is advisable to stay on track during a reasonable period of time, unless there is an exceptional circumstance that advises otherwise.