It may seem pretty simple to state this, but the thing that brings people together more than any trust fall is understanding.

As a client’s team member said yesterday during her personal branding consultation, everyone is a product of their experiences and everyone who has an opinion has it for a reason.

What if we gave up the idea that one person’s opinion is more valid than another’s? It’s true that some opinions are more educated than others, but if we stayed open to the idea that even educated opinions are still opinions, not facts, society might make leaps and bounds in innovation. Science is not static and few cause-effect relationships are linear, especially when it comes to people.

For employers who are committed to protecting the health of employees and who are sensitive to their concerns about COVID, team building during a pandemic has to evolve from in-person venues to virtual venues. This may feel like a challenge. The good news is there are equally, if not more, effective virtual options that can not only renew team bonds, but also create greater harmony, increase productivity, elevate engagement, and even help leaders discover new ways to leverage the talents, experiences, and passions of their team members.

Companies already understand the value of corporate branding, even if they don’t invest in it or implement it. For many companies, providing personal branding services may seem like a way to make talent prime for the picking by competition. However, engaging a personal branding expert to help employees, especially executives and front-line, customer-facing employees, hone powerful personal brands has a quadruple bottom line that can solve issues many managers are most pained with right now, such as low engagement, loss of identity, disjointed teams, and risks of or realized turnover.

When a company invests in personal branding, included is an assessment of alignment with the corporate brand. Any deviation from alignment causes exactly the pains described above.

When you combine personal branding with Mindfulness and Emotional Intelligence mini-practices, training, and coaching, employees gain clarity on who they are, why they are there, how they relate to each other, and the greater vision of their future with the company. They learn how to integrate the mini-practices into full-capacity (in terms of time/energy or both) schedules.

In fact, while strong time management is usually given credit for people’s effectiveness to deliver on time, especially during now with the world’s volatile state, energy management is the skill employers want to enhance if they are finding that their employees are not able to work at full capacity, whether at home or in the office, especially if the suggestion or mandate that they will be doing additional training or team building feels more like a burden than a benefit. In fact, energy management training is what most employers can do to alleviate immediate pain and create capacity for additional training.

Ethics training has proven ineffective. However, thanks to breakthroughs in neuroscience, we know exactly what part of the brain is responsible for emotional intelligence, that the brain is “plastic,” meaning that you can develop parts of the brain like a muscle, AND various techniques to accelerate the development of emotional intelligence. Every day I hear people in my HR and recruiting circles talk about the growing importance of hiring for soft skills and developing hard skills, but there are just are some experiences that can’t be replaced. In fact, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, including a story a client told me two days ago, that someone was tolerated by a company because the benefits of their experience outweighed the risks of their behavior. Hiring for soft skills may work for entry-level and junior positions for which you expect to train the employee anyway, but it’s just another hiring fantasy to think that it would be at all cost-effective or beneficial to the company in the short or long-term to hire a senior person who has the right people skills and turn them into subject matter experts. It’s generally accepted that a professional will make an investment of ten years (K. Anders Ericsson) or 10,000 hours (Malcolm Gladwell) to become an expert.

Now, when a company combines on-the-job training with personal branding and MT/EQ training, it has all it needs to realize its vision and mission.

The last quarter of the year is here, and slots are filling up. Schedule a consultation today.