Entries by Noelle Mykolenko

Building Trust in the World of Zoom

Zoom and other virtual meeting spaces helped save personal and professional relationships across the globe during the COVID-19 pandemic. While we all adjusted to an explosion in the prevalence of virtual teams, which have since revolutionized the modern workplace, the challenges were — and still are, quite honestly — clear. The lighting. The sound. The […]

How to Get Clients to Take Your Advice (Quickly and Willingly)

There are seemingly endless reasons our clients do not take our advice. Challenges like internal disagreements, budget constraints, and rotating decision-makers can cause countless proposals to be refused or ignored, regardless of how obvious the need may appear. While clients may say they are hesitant to rely too heavily on vendor advice, have had negative […]

When Focus Becomes Tunnel Vision

Let’s talk about focus. Many respected authors will tell you that focus is essential to achieving success. They call it concentration, determination, single-mindedness, resolve – whatever the word, the message is that by focusing on the outcome you want, you are more likely to make it happen. And it seems hard to argue that being […]

Ten Skills to Lead with Trust

I recently shared my point of view on The (R)evolution of Trust-based Leadership. In that post I concluded that new leadership requires versatility and depends more on influence and collaboration than hierarchical authority and procedures. And that requires trust. Leadership is complex. Successful leaders master a range of functions, from finance and operations to strategic […]

The S Trap: Is Self-orientation Destroying Your Trustworthiness?

Since The Trusted Advisor was first published in 2000, the most popular theme in the book has been the Trust Equation. And within that equation, the factor that has stirred the most interest over the years has been the denominator, self-orientation. In the trust equation, since the S factor is in the denominator, a high level of self-orientation reduces […]

The 80/20 rule for Virtual Relationships (Part IV): Double-Down and Ramp Up the Rational Trust Builders

The initial post of this blog series introduced what we called the (new) 80/20 rule for virtual relationships, warning that focusing too much on the “virtual” part of “virtual relationships” could lead to missed opportunities and damaging long-term consequences. In that post, we pointed out that relationship-building and selling aren’t really different these days, in […]

The 80/20 rule for Virtual Relationships (Part III): Double-Down and Ramp Up Intimacy

In the first post of this four-part blog series, we introduced what we called the (new) 80/20 rule for virtual relationships. For anyone seeking a “silver bullet” to build virtual relationships, focusing too much on the “virtual” part of “virtual relationships” becomes an easy distraction from what really matters. Now is the time for 80% […]