Posts Tagged ‘Leadership’

When creating a author expert media bio for book promotion or business promotion keep in mind that the primary goal is to include the information the media needs to know make a decision whether to consider you for the media opportunity. The first thing to do is to lead with your most impressive achievements, your education, your degrees, your credentials and awards or recognitions.

2. The next element of your media bio should contain information about your books including the complete titles that you have published, any special paper or reports or studies you have created. 3. It is important to list your topics, areas of specialty and area of expertise that include your main expertise and associated areas as well. 4. Include how many years you have worked in your industry and this showcases your experience and helps build up credibility for you. 5. Be sure to include your membership in associations, any peer recognition, special awards as well as this can set you apart from the others in your field.

6. Appearing on radio shows, TV shows or being the author or quoted expert is media such as newspapers, magazines or been showcased online, now is the time to add it into your bio. Media is a powerful positioning tool and list your media appearances. You can include the name of any exceptionally well-known media but only include the top media. You can get into more detail on your website in an expanded bio. 7. Keep your media bio focused without distraction. Personal information such as where you were born, your hobbies should not be in your media bio unless it supports your overall subject matter. You can add more personal info on your website, if you like.

8. Information has to be absolutely accurate, up to date, and easily verifiable as the media has resources to check out your information. 9. Be sure the bio on your website is exactly the same and consistent with the bio that you are presenting to the media. You can always offer an expanded version on your website. However, you should not be inconsistent with your bio. You can certainly have other info on your website but the bio must remain consistent with the one you present to the media.

10. The purpose of a professional bio for use in the media is to give them a snapshot of your expertise and your platform so they can determine if you qualify as the expert for the segment or article they have in mind. In addition to the bio, have a professional .jpeg of yourself in your professional capacity and jpeg of your book cover ready to email to the media upon request.

Access more tips on book promotion and creating a influential BIO for the media. Authors, experts and business professionals and promote a book or a business with a top quality media bio.

Leadership communication is so much more than letting employees know what is happening in the organization and the reasons why. And whilst information tools such as the corporate intranet, town hall meetings, CEO emails and blogs are important they are only part of the communication mix. Transformational leadership is about engaging employees on the journey of change to ensure that the business objectives are met. The only way to successfully achieve this is by designing employee engagement strategies to compliment information on the change process.

Transformational leadership is about engaging employees in changing behaviours to support the new business objectives. However whilst information is important, as part of leadership communication it only serves to provide information on what is changing and when, it is not an engagement tool.

Here are 5 ways you can ensure that your leadership communication approach will achieve those outcomes.

1. The first step is to review the current ways you are communicating with employees and determine whether your leadership communication methods are engagement tools or simply information tools. So this first tip is to gather up all the ways you communicate with employees and decide whether they are one way or two way communication vehicles and whether the messages are information or could be enhanced with an engagement strategy.

2. The second tip is important because your ultimate aim as a leader has to be to create the “Aha Moment” for employees. The “Aha Moment” is based on information that challenges the employee’s belief about an aspect of the business. The information that suddenly helps employees say, “Now it makes sense”, “Now I understand”, “Now I can do something about it”. Once you know what the “Aha Moment” is this will form your key message and the basis of your design of your employee communication strategy.

3. This third step is about conducting focus group research to find out what employees actually think about a particular topic and then what information you have to counter their views and to create a change in how they think. The objective is to find out what information will make employees stop and say, “Aha! now I get it”. Once you have the answer to this it is easy to design engagement strategies that will focus employees on the change to the organization and the work that they do.

Focus groups are a good format as they allow issues to be explored further and sometimes will uncover issues or ideas which hadn’t been considered prior to the session. Focus groups generally are held for one and a half hours duration and in groups of 8 – 10 participants. The facilitator’s role is to lead the discussion but leave the actual dialogue to the participants, bringing them back to the main issue if they have gone off on a tangent or to ensure that all the topics that you wanted to cover within the allocated timeframe are covered. A well facilitated focus group will identify the key messages for your communication strategies as they relate to a particular business issue.

4. This fourth step is all about what you do next with the outcomes of the focus groups. It is important that you have identified clearly what employees actually think about a particular issue and the reason for that opinion. If that opinion needs to change then you need to identify specific data that is based on facts to successfully create a paradigm shift in the thinking of employees. Once you do this you will create the “Aha!” moment.

5. Step five is all about taking the information you have gathered from the focus groups sessions and with that identify a business goal that you feel confident that your leadership strategies will impact. Use of that research data forms an essental part of your leadership communication strategy that can be measured by business achievements.

When you have gathered all the outcomes of the focus groups you will then be in a position to identify the key messages and data to bring about change in your organizaiton. Transformational leadership is about understanding what is of concern to your employees and what they need to know to support your business objectives. Development of an employee engagement strategy that focuses on “Aha!” moments and information is the essence of transformational leadership.

For more information make sure you obtain our excellent free report on how to design transformational leadership communication strategies.