Check-in The Right Way in Your 1:1s

Here are my 3 interesting things for this month…

1. An easy way to build trust from your LinkedIn profile

Whether or not you’re taking part in the great resignation, it’s important to have a quality LinkedIn profile that represents your brand. Even internally within your own organisation, people will look you up ahead of a meeting.

One of the most important ways to build trust, either internally, at an interview or in an external meeting, is to avoid surprises. An easy one to avoid is looking completely different to your LinkedIn picture, due to using a very out of date picture! 😊

So here’s how to take a great photo for your profile that looks like an expensive corporate headshot, but takes 2 minutes. If you (or someone you know) has an iPhone X or newer, ask someone to take a picture of you against a non-white background (it doesn’t really matter what, but greens work nicely!).

You don’t need particularly fancy hair, make-up or clothes, just go with how you think you would look at a normal meeting. Think ‘eyes and teeth’, smile, look welcoming and authentic without being manic. No need to overthink this!

They will need to be using ‘Portrait mode’ for this to work. But once you have taken the picture,  tap ‘edit’,  then click on the little ƒ in the top left corner and use the slider to make the ƒ-number as small as it will go. This should bring your face into sharp focus and make the background very blurry (like the picture below).

Then tap ‘done’, upload the photo to LinkedIn and crop the photo so your face is in the middle and the bottom of the LinkedIn circle frame touches your collar bones.

If you would like more help with this, or more specifics on a great LinkedIn profile and CV – check out this excellent online CABA coaching session here, or book some time with me here for a chat.

2. PowerBI’s stellar growth as the analytics market leader looks set to continue

PowerBI is a Microsoft analytics tool that allows you to make engaging visualisations of data and analytics. It effectively sits on top of excel, so is accessible for most finance professionals. But a few years ago, it wasn’t that great. Microsoft has put a lot of focus into getting the most out of it in recent years, and it’s really showing! I have plotted Gartner’s annual view of PowerBI vs the rest of the market below. You can see that it has accelerated away from the pack.

PowerBI skills will soon be some of the most sought after in finance, only 2% of my finance clients are skilled with the tool, and only 30% really know what can be done with it. In order to stay relevant, it will be important to understand when PowerBI can be used, and how – even if you’re a manager or leader.

Last week, Dan Stockdale and I launched a brand new PowerBI course on getting to month end. We’re really proud of it – you can book a place on the next running of the course here. Our goal is to get you from Xero to really useful in just 2 days of training.

3. Check in the right way in your 1:1s

How much time do you spend talking work in your 1:1s with your team? If it’s all business, are you making sure that you know how they’re doing and what’s going on with them, on a personal level?

Most of us start the meeting by saying: “What’s going on?” or ” How are things?” However, people tend to take this as a work based question, even if it’s not.

So, to find out how people really are, make your first question: “How are feeling today?” It’s generally much harder for the answer here to be about work. 😊

It might take a few asks before people start to share, but it will be worth it! Especially if you and/or your team is more remote.

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