Empathy is the ability to understand and share another person’s feelings and emotions. It is essential to building good relationships, both at work and in your personal life. People who don’t exhibit empathy are viewed as cold and self-absorbed, and…

HEADLINES FROM OCTOBER 1987 I woke up on the Friday morning, October 16, 1987 in my house in London, having been kept awake half the night by a brutal windstorm that resulted in the closing of all financial markets—and a…

Legendary GE CEO Jack Welch recently passed away. He once said, “Only satisfied customers can give people job security. Not companies.” I’ve taken the liberty of paraphrasing and updating this for my own readers to “Only enthusiastic clients give you…

Hello, and happy Valentine’s Day. Speaking of which: I usually write about professional relationships, but today, I want to share six Valentine’s Day lies—and the relationship rules to replace them Our contemporary culture promotes many trite, misleading, and self-absorbed ideas…

How do you develop the relationships that truly matter to your career success? As I discussed in my last newsletter, the first step is to focus on the “critical few.” There are about 15-25 key individuals—not hundreds of superficial contacts—who will…

In a major study I conducted of nearly 3000 professionals, 91% said that trusted professional relationships were extremely important to their success. Guess how many were “very satisfied” with those relationships? Only 30%. So, what’s going on, and how do…

Clients generally don’t voice their concerns with you. Instead, they tend to vote with their feet, gradually and often invisibly shifting their business to a competitor. So you need to seek feedback on a regular basis. Some questions are not…

I recently read Kevin Kruse’s excellent new book, Great Leaders Have No Rules: Contrarian Leadership Principles to Transform Your Team and Business. In my interview with Kevin, I ask him about some of his most interesting—and perhaps controversial—leadership principles. Why…

Today is Veterans Day, which honors military veterans who have served in the US armed forces. I want to especially honor the many members of my family who have served, notably: My father (see below), my mother, who was a…

By Andrew Sobel Welcome to Part IV of my four-part series on building relationships in the C-suite. In this article, I’m going to talk about how you can become a “person of interest” to senior executives, drawing them towards you…