Patty Azarello (@PattyAzarello) has been offering top-flight Business Leadership Advice about growing businesses and people in guest posts on Liz Strauss’ (@LizStrauss) Successful Outstanding Bloggers Blog. Liz is described as “perhaps the most influential non-celebrity blogger on the Internet”.
I recommend following BOTH of these really sharp women and the bloggers Liz discovers who write guest posts on Successful-Blog. We all benefit from following Liz’ lead as she discovers top blogging talent.
I am blessed to have crossed paths with Liz many years ago and have been proudly displaying her SOB Badge for years now. Liz is a top Success Coach and CEO and Founder of SOBCon.
Patty’s post today is for people who are highly intelligent who may be challenged in the people skills department. As sometimes happens, my comment in her post turned into this post because I believe people need to listen to the messages she is sharing them and I would like to offer a few more insights.
Some people are brilliant and can pick up most anything quickly – but since experience IS very important – brilliance is usually specialized. You may be one of the top experts in your field but you are NOT an expert on everything. It makes sense to find out what others around specialize in and tap their knowledge. As the saying goes,
“The wise man learns more from the fool
than the fool learns from the wise man.”
That means being wise enough to LISTEN even to fools because anyone may have an insight that will prove valuable.
What the least tolerant people need is a lesson in humility. I bet there is someone in some field you could NOT easily follow. That is YOU among others. Often they are NOT as stupid as you think they are – YOU are just really poor at teaching and communicating.
Here is a true life story that illustrates why it is important to recognize when others are exceptional in OTHER subjects even if they seem slow to you about YOURS.
IBM introduced a very bad process called PBC360 that has the other people you work with evaluate your work. (Bad because positive input doesn’t help you and negative input is another excuse to pay you less, demote you or “down-size” you.)
I worked with a Sales Manager who was a brilliant programmer – he could code in hours what took good programmers days to do. He was very quick but he knew he was far more intelligent than anyone around him and looked down on everyone else.
One day I overheard him bragging that he had single-handedly caused a fellow employee to get the first bad appraisal of his career thanks the PBC360 and his intolerance. WHY? Because the other man was simply not good at sales. What is sad is that he was the best Systems Analyst bar none I had EVER worked with and THAT was HIS brilliant niche.
IBM had foolishly tried to get brilliant technical people to sell and sales people to do technical things which is a major mistake. They are totally different aptitudes and few excel at both – Sales Manager being one of those few. (Corporations do the same thing routinely using a Management track that moves people between field and corporate office positions that ends up leaving people in the positions they are WORST at – unless they are wise enough to ask to step back one.)
Overhearing what I said about Sales Manager turned out to be what he needed to finally be promoted – a reality check. I remarked to a fellow Computer Tech that it was unprofessional of him to reveal that a fellow-employee had received a bad appraisal and to brag about being the cause showed him to be intolerant and not wise at all.
I continued, Since HE is the brilliant one, he should know better than to treat others so badly and then brag about it (which confirmed what everyone already knew – what a pompous you know what he was).
He should have recognized the company was failing and not that employee because that System Analyst was extremely talented at analysis but not good at sales. It was HIS FAULT as a Manager that he had inappropriately assigned the wrong duties to the right person – not the fault of the person who was struggling to do a job he was ill-suited for while his many talents at what he was best suited (in the entire region) to do were wasted!
I did not know he heard my comments until later, but apparently they changed Sales Manager. He started treating people with the respect they deserved. Instead of looking for what they were NOT good at he started focusing on what they did well. Within a few months he finally got promoted because his people skills had improved so much.
Each of us has specialized knowledge. We are experts at
some things but we are NOT experts at EVERYTHING.
I especially want to encourage my readers to not put those you admire on a different level than you. Respect their talents and knowledge but know that even those who are mentors also HAVE mentors to learn new skills faster.
I commented in Patty’s previous post on the importance of finding mentors because I want to encourage everyone to ASK those they admire if they can mentor you. They are NOT “above you” or “better” than you – they are just people who have more experience at something you’re interested in than you do.
The people you admire have mentors too – others
who have more experience than them in OTHER things.
If someone can not mentor you, ask them if they can recommend anyone else who might have more time or be more interested in mentoring. (Not everyone who can DO can TEACH and not everyone can make the time to assist you right that minute.)
I find that the most brilliant people that I go out of my way to seek out and offer mentoring often have poor self esteem because they were never ordinary enough to fit in. The more brilliant they are the more they usually believe there is something wrong with them because they aren’t average. I seek them out to tell them they are gifted and invite them to collaborate with me.
If you’re concerned about being rejected, look for those like me who continually invite interaction. Read how people talk to others and avoid those who are mean and contact those who are consistently sweet. IMHO, the best mentors are kind – not ego-maniacs driven to succeed by walking all over others.
If any of this sounds like you please contact me. I know many people who can assist you for free. For fastest results consider hiring a coach like Liz (this is her blog) or Patty (who wrote this post) or Donna Fontenot or AskKim. Choose the one who fits you best and has an opening – they will all be very busy because they’re worth it.
I now feed content from all three of these blogs into my Twitter accounts and recommend that other influencers who have followers interested in what they write use my TwitterFeed process to do the same. (You can use any tool that feeds RSS content to Twitter using the explanation in that post).
Bloggers: please consider pro-actively growing your online influence because you are part of the solution that will create a better world for all and improve our standard of living as the dollar continues to slide. Start by implementing Twitter Best Practices and DO connect with me on Skype, Yahoo Messenger or Twitter. Connect with the other bloggers listed in my Small Business Advice BizSugar post.
Gail Gardner
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Great post! It really resonates with me.
I can be in both camps. I can be arrogant and look down on people (probably comes from an insecure place), and other times I see the best in people and try to make them see it as well.
Posts like this are good to read every now and then to not forget and respect other people while still respecting yourself.
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“The wise man learns more from the fool than the fool learns from the wise man.” I have never heard this quote before but i might get a tattoo with this phrase.
I totally agree with you. Trying to build a good relationship with other bloggers can be a great great help in building a good relationship to them.
In winning friends and influence people is one of the harder parts of life yet it is also interesting enough to be part of because by doing such exciting task makes us strong and did our best for us to take the will, the reason is it works. Relationships are the single most powerful element to success in business and life…online and offline. That’s why we must believe our self that we can do it, we are highly required to always keep on doing such good things because everything is under control and every trials or maybe problems had the solution to make it right.
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Thank you so much for this article!
I agree with you that unique and useful content attracts more users, but constructive commenting is a necessary tool because we don’t just post articles in order to be appreciated… we all want to grow and improve too. A simple “Great job!” or “Awesome!” or “Cool!” just won’t cut it. While others may think that this is just a means to pander to our vanities, the truth is we need others to point us in the right direction, or to let us know that we are indeed going in the right direction. I don’t know about the others but I sure could use all the help I can get!
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We should only focus to our field not divert our attention to many fields . A program cannot be a good sale manager and a good sale manager cannot be a good programmer.
“They are NOT “above you” or “better” than you – they are just people who have more experience at something you’re interested in than you do.”
– 100% true! People learn and discover things not at the same time. Obviously, older individuals have all the experiences and knowledge that they can share to those younger ones. In the long run, things maybe different like all students will eventually gain more knowledge than their mentors. But it doesn’t matter, what will stay forever is the respect they have to their mentors anyway.
By good, unique and informative content , you can easily attracted by users and you become a great blogger with lots of friends.
Hi!
A lot of great advice in this post. I like the idea that everyone has something that they can teach you if you can just uncover their area of expertise.
SEO usually takes place in a very specific area and we usually do not incorporate traditional methods of marketing, which is an unbelievable mistake. I think your title of the article is an appropriate one as it pays homage to the great Dale Carnegie’s book How to Win Friends and Influence People, a book on more traditional methods of marketing. For you to tie websites in with this method of influencing people is brilliant!
-Katherine
Great article. And i’m completely agree with the statement that wisemen learns more from fools. And i really like it’s title.
I liked the title here, very appealing! I got interested on this how-to. Thanks for the share I wanna be like you, Gail. You’re such a Brilliant most influential blogger!
I got excited for a second there, I thought that title said “How to Win Friends and Influence People” 🙂
LOL Ayden,
Bloggers are people too. 🙂
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Hi Vernessa,
Thank you for your comments. It was our extended phone call about offering Local Search Listing services to clients that I was thinking of as I answered Dennis’ comment above.
Ours is the perfect example of the benefits of recognizing expertise and collaborating. Thanks to you I finally have my Operating System and data in separate partitions on my hard drive – something I have know was optimum since the 1980s but still did not know how to do. Without your expertise that would never have happened.
For those who don’t know the significance, having my data separate makes it easy to repair/replace problems that occur in an operating systems or even change operating systems without losing any data or spending the enormous number of hours it took us to backup and restore all the data I have.
The reason it never happened before today is that I did not know anyone else before I met you, Vernessa, I trusted to efficiently accomplish this complicated task without data loss. (The data on my hard drive is more valuable to me because of who it can be used to assist than almost anything else in my life.)
As I told you I encourage you to ask as many questions as you can think of no matter how many that may be. The more people we can teach to assist others the more we can help – and the more questions intelligent people like you ask the stronger and more clear my posts can be for others (many of them too timid to ask questions themselves).
For every one person willing to comment there are an estimated 100+ more who will not ask. Every improvement I can make helps those silent lurkers to be able to implement what they are unwilling to seek clarification on themselves.
Thank you for being willing to invest your time to help others. I am happy to train at no cost to themselves anyone seriously interested in learning skills they can offer others.
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Hi Dennis,
LOL. Your comment cracked me up. Not much is off-topic when your view is as expansive as mine is. Comments on anything in my posts are always welcome.
I’m going to let you and any readers who come across this comment in on a little secret. My blogs and Web sites started out being ways for me to organize my research so I can use them to remind me what I already know.
Whenever I start down a bad path – which today might mean hours or days instead of months or years – I realize “I should have seen that coming”. I had that feeling when I hoped to work with someone I know is THE most brilliant in her specialty – but found that she was not good at communicating what she wanted or getting the word out about what she was doing in a way that I could share across Social Media. She also did not understand the complexity or time required to develop a complex blog outreach program to increase visibility and rank her business for specific keyword phrases.
That was a reminder that we must not make the mistake of assuming that just because someone knows all there is to know about one very complex topic that they will already have knowledge of related complex disciplines.
This blog is different than most. I continually improve and update older posts so they can be used as references. I clarify points I make and add better examples based on questions others ask that indicate they did not totally understand what I wrote the first time.
Before I go to do any task I have not done very recently, I read my posts as a review so that I can apply all the tips and tricks I picked up the previous times I did them.
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Hey Gail,
Thanks for the kudos! It was my pleasure to help you get your computer system set up just like you need it. 🙂
Hope you don’t mind if I duck in here a moment …
Not sure I know many people who might think I’m not good at communicating what I want. We probably have a bit of disconnect here.
Very much like you, I initially started the business blog as a repository of information, not as a sales tool. I have to agree with you that I don’t really tend to get the word out about what I’m doing. The blog isn’t as much about what I’m doing as it is for those I’m working with to drop in and get a more detailed answer to a question they’ve recently asked or one that is on their minds. That’s pretty much where the topics come from. Some of the write-ups deal with internal business systems that might apply to any small business.
I think I have a good grasp of both the complexity and time involved in doing SEO-related stuff. With numerous projects on my plate, that has not really been the goal of my business blog at any time. I’m not running a blogging business, or a how to make money blog. I operate an offline small business consulting and training business that uses a blog as one of the tools for my clients’ education (and others who might find the information useful).
BUT …. I will readily admit that I am not (nor do I aspire to be) an SEO professional. Can’t say I have any corner on the market when it comes to local search directories. I’ve been getting more requests about local marketing, so I’m happy that I can reach out to someone I consider an expert in that field — happy that you’re on the other end of the phone — in order to bring those services within the reach of my own clients.
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Hey, Vernessa,
The person I was talking about in that comment is not you – you communicate quite well.
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Lol, who can’t understand threaded comment 😛
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what a great post ! thanks for sharing growmap 🙂
Great suggestions! Soon i will open guest posting. So till then i will keep these hints in my mind. Thanks
If you really want to influence others , increase your knowledge in your niche and implement them !
It’s good to see the womenfolks excel in many fields and women like Liz and Patty can become the perfect role models for all those woman who are struggling. Programs which encourages women empowerment should be encouraged.
Hi Karen,
Thank you so much for your comment. There are so many women bloggers who make exceptional role models. Another blogger I love to mention as a role model is Stephanie Suesan Smith. Her interview on Murray Newlands clearly shows why collaborating and mentoring is so important.
There is another great interview on business mentoring with Donna Fontenot there too.
growmap would love you to read ..Twitter Best Practices- How to Use Twitter Effectively
You’ve the point right smack in the middle. Am glad that I stumbled into your post… reminds me so much of how I started my business. It’s always good to have someone to look up to and ask while we’re starting new things.
Hi Andrew,
It is good to see you here. I know that you are very busy assisting others by installing blogs and offering $99 Blog Installations and blog maintenance and teaching others to blog.
Andrew offers Business Blogging Tips you can count on to always be ethical and include leading edge best practices.
Gail Gardner would love you to read ..Best of GrowMap – Our Most Important Posts All in One Place
Great points on this article. I have actually met some people whom I think are so good at everything but they tell me that they are no different from me but they just have a “specialized knowledge” on things they do instead. I have also met some people who surprised me at how good they are at something I do not expect from them. It has actually made me realize to discover myself and seek out the area where I am good at and focus there. We all learn other things from different types of people every now and then no matter how different they are from us!
Hi Tammy,
The more we know the more we realize how much we do NOT know. It sounds like your friends were wise indeed.
growmap would love you to read ..Twitter Best Practices- How to Use Twitter Effectively
Well, I didn’t have a mentor when I started my so called online business and I must say that it somewhat affected me when I had questions and I didn’t had where to turn my attention to.
Sometimes, having a mentor will help you mostly because you can take his/her experience and then add your own, which practically will make you a wiser person and add to your experience. But you can also be held back, because you want to pursue him/her and this might inhibit your own creativity and determination.
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This brings to mind the saying, “Jack of all trades, master of none.” To be really good at something you have to focus on it. That means there are lots of things you barely get by in and need help with. Take gardening, for instance. I am really good at growing vegetables and other things to eat, but kill ivy. So I blog on vegetable gardening and leave the ornamentals to others. I ask them if I need information on that and it allows me to focus more on vegetable gardening.
Stephanie Suesan Smith would love you to read ..Disease Resistant Tomatoes
I totally agreed with you that wisemen learns more from fool than fools learns from wisemen. I’m going to follow you plus other listed bloggers too.
Hey, it’s always great to see women really good at business. I appreciate the fact that you promote such women.
I’ll try and follow both Patty and Liz to show my support.
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You definitely have a point. People are good at different things, and that’s what makes life so interesting.
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I have a hard time finding good mentors in internet marketing. I am learning all by myself.
Wow! That was powerful! I’m left wondering what would have happened if you hadn’t spoken your mind. I’m always amazed when a person’s path forks and they’re faced with the choice of business as usual or learn something new.
I practice martial arts regularly. I feel extremely fortunate to have found a school with teachers who encourage and mentor us. I had to go to about six different places before I found the right match. It was well worth the effort.
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You are right that ” we cannot expert in each discipline “. To show good performance, always focus on one discipline and go to the last mile and enjoy it.