If you don't want social media to ruin your Professional Reputation then this is a must read ...

How to Ruin Your Professional Reputation

By ALISON GREEN

Alison Green

Your professional reputation is enormously important; it's what will make people want to work with you, hire you and respect you as a colleague. It can be your safety net – getting you work when you need it, and putting you in a position where you have options and don't need to stay in a bad situation or take the first opportunity that comes along.

But it's easy to squander this incredibly valuable resource, and it doesn't take much to do it. Here are eight easy ways to ruin your work reputation.

1. Accept a job offer and then back out later. People sometimes accept one job offer but continue interviewing in case they get an offer they like better, but there's a huge cost to your reputation for doing this; you'll be known as someone whose word is suspect and who cuts and runs. And people from one company have a way of popping up again at other companies for which you may want to work. Imagine that you really want a job offer in the future, and one of the decision-makers is someone who used to work for this employer. "Jane took a job with us but backed out right before she was supposed to start" are not words you want spoken about you when you're interviewing.

2. Worse, start a new job and then quit after a month for a different one. It's one thing if the job is truly a bad fit and you're miserable or if it's not what you were led to believe it would be during the hiring process. But starting a new job and then leaving it quickly just because something better came along is a good way to do the same damage as in No. 1 – but it's even worse since the company will have invested time and resources into training you, introducing you to clients and so forth.

3. Lose your temper at work. It's normal to occasionally get frustrated, but you're crossing a line if you're yelling, slamming doors or snapping at people. It only takes one incident like this to get a reputation as the angry guy with whom no one wants to work, and that's a label that's very hard to shake.

4. Lie. Whether it's lying to cover up a mistake or adding a few thousand dollars to your salary history in the hopes of getting a better offer, getting caught lying is a surefire way to fatally harm your reputation with anyone who hears about it. The workplace depends on being able to take people at their word; if you show that people can't trust you, you'll have a terrible time building the relationships that you need at work and when you're looking for your next job.

5. Make commitments that you don't keep. You build credibility by showing people that you mean what you say – doing what you say you're going to do and following through on commitments. But if you do the opposite – if you say you'll send that report over by Monday but forget to do it, or promise to set up a meeting about your new account but don't follow through – you'll ruin your credibility and get a reputation for flakiness and unreliability.

6. Recommend someone for a job when you don't really think they would be right for it. When you recommend someone, you're vouching for him or her – you're saying that the person does what you consider to be great work, and that he or she is someone with whom you'd be thrilled to work. But if it's not true, you could end up being known as "the person who felt Joe's work was fine, when in fact Joe's work was awful and he was impossible to work with." After all, your assessment of someone's work says something about your own work, standards and judgment.

7. Quit your job without notice. Unless you have really, really good reason, quitting your job without notice will burn bridges with your employer (and often your co-workers too) and can be the kiss of death for future reference calls. Fair or not, the standard is two weeks notice.

8. Send a hostile email after something happens that you don't like. Whether it's jotting off an angry response to a new policy at work or sending a bitter reply after you get rejected for a job, angry letter bombs are hard to live down. You'll look like someone who doesn't know how to address concerns calmly and professionally, and most people will respond by giving you a wide berth.

9 Qualities Of Truly Confident People

First things first: Confidence is not bravado, or swagger, or an overt pretense of bravery. Confidence is not some bold or brash air of self-belief directed at others.

Confidence is quiet: It’s a natural expression of ability, expertise, and self-regard.

I’m fortunate to know a number of truly confident people. Many work with me at HubSpot, others are fellow founders of their own startups some of whom I've met through my angel investment activity. But the majority are people I’ve met through my career and who work in a variety of industries and professions.

It comes as no surprise they all share a number of qualities:

1. They take a stand not because they think they are always right… but because they are not afraid to be wrong.

Cocky and conceited people tend to take a position and then proclaim, bluster, and totally disregard differing opinions or points of view. They know they’re right – and they want (actually they need) you to know it too.

Their behavior isn’t a sign of confidence, though; it’s the hallmark of an intellectual bully.

Truly confident people don’t mind being proven wrong. They feel finding out what is right is a lot more important than being right. And when they’re wrong, they’re secure enough to back down graciously.

Truly confident people often admit they’re wrong or don’t have all the answers; intellectual bullies never do.

2. They listen ten times more than they speak.

Bragging is a mask for insecurity. Truly confident people are quiet and unassuming. They already know what they think; they want to know what you think.

So they ask open-ended questions that give other people the freedom to be thoughtful and introspective: They ask what you do, how you do it, what you like about it, what you learned from it… and what they should do if they find themselves in a similar situation.

Truly confident people realize they know a lot, but they wish they knew more… and they know the only way to learn more is to listen more.

3. They duck the spotlight so it shines on others.

Perhaps it’s true they did the bulk of the work. Perhaps they really did overcome the major obstacles. Perhaps it’s true they turned a collection of disparate individuals into an incredibly high performance team.

Truly confident people don’t care – at least they don’t show it. (Inside they’re proud, as well they should be.) Truly confident people don’t need the glory; they know what they’ve achieved.

They don’t need the validation of others, because true validation comes from within.

So they stand back and celebrate their accomplishments through others. They stand back and let others shine – a confidence boost that helps those people become truly confident, too.

4. They freely ask for help.

Many people feel asking for help is a sign of weakness; implicit in the request is a lack of knowledge, skill, or experience.

Confident people are secure enough to admit a weakness. So they often ask others for help, not only because they are secure enough to admit they need help but also because they know that when they seek help they pay the person they ask a huge compliment.

Saying, “Can you help me?” shows tremendous respect for that individual’s expertise and judgment. Otherwise you wouldn't ask.

5. They think, “Why not me?”

Many people feel they have to wait: To be promoted, to be hired, to be selected, to be chosen... like the old Hollywood cliché, to somehow be discovered.

Truly confident people know that access is almost universal. They can connect with almost anyone through social media. (Everyone you know knows someone you should know.) They know they can attract their own funding, create their own products, build their own relationships and networks, choose their own path – they can choose to follow whatever course they wish.

And very quietly, without calling attention to themselves, they go out and do it.

6. They don't put down other people.

Generally speaking, the people who like to gossip, who like to speak badly of others, do so because they hope by comparison to make themselves look better.

The only comparison a truly confident person makes is to the person she was yesterday – and to the person she hopes to someday become.

7. They aren’t afraid to look silly…

Running around in your underwear is certainly taking it to extremes… but when you’re truly confident, you don’t mind occasionally being in a situation where you aren't at your best.

(And oddly enough, people tend to respect you more when you do – not less.)

8. … And they own their mistakes.

Insecurity tends to breed artificiality; confidence breeds sincerity and honesty.

That’s why truly confident people admit their mistakes. They dine out on their screw-ups. They don’t mind serving as a cautionary tale. They don’t mind being a source of laughter – for others and for themselves.

When you’re truly confident, you don’t mind occasionally “looking bad.” You realize that that when you’re genuine and unpretentious, people don’t laugh at you.

They laugh with you.

9. They only seek approval from the people who really matter.

You say you have 10k Twitter followers? Swell. 20k Facebook friends? Cool. A professional and social network of hundreds or even thousands? That’s great.

But that also pales in comparison to earning the trust and respect of the few people in your life that truly matter.

When we earn their trust and respect, no matter where we go or what we try, we do it with true confidence – because we know the people who truly matter the most are truly behind us. Article by Dharmesh Shah

Negotiating a great pay..

A Quick Trick For Getting A Big Raise

Try naming a precise number, like $94,500 rather than a round number like $95,000.

Every time I’ve ever had a discussion about my salary, it never occurred to me to discuss anything but a round number, in the thousands, and preferably in the fives or tens of thousands. I recall a recent talk about a potential jump to another employer. We discussed numbers and they were all in denominations of five thousands. I stayed put, but in retrospect, I realize I felt locked into those big round numbers.

Now new research by professors at Columbia Business School suggests that we may be losing out by getting stuck on multiples of five and ten, instead of breaking our salary requests into less-common fractions. In fact, if you zero in on a more unusual request, say, for $94,500 instead of $95,000, you may get closer to your goal in the final negotiation.

Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal reported on a paper by researchers at Columbia Business School who found that by staying away from round numbers, especially in your initial request, also known as the anchor number, you will be more likely to come out of the negotiation with a higher figure.

The Columbia researchers didn’t look at salary negotiations per se, but it makes sense to apply their conclusions. The more exacting you can be about your anchor number, the more a hiring manager or supervisor will think you’ve done your homework to come up with such a precise calculation. If you use a round number, it’s a way of telling your counter-negotiator that you don’t have specific knowledge of what the job entails and what the market will pay for your skills.

The lead author on the paper, Malia Mason, teaches a course in managerial negotiations. She told the Journal that she got the idea for the study after taking a cab in Prague and finding herself trying to figure out the fare with the driver, who wanted 1,000 korunas ($50), which she knew was arbitrary. “It made me think about how we use round numbers and what they convey about the state of our knowledge,” she told the Journal.

Mason set up several experiments to test her idea about arbitrariness . In one, she had 130 sets of people haggle over the price of a used car. Those who started with a round number wound up paying $2,963 more than those who gave a more exact number to start, who paid an average of $2,256 more than the initial offer.

Mason says the best strategy is to start with a high number that is not round, like $94,500. Apply that to a salary negotiation and a hiring manager may be inclined to talk you down to $93,000. That’s much better than if you asked for $95,000 and the person on the other side of the table wound up getting you down to $90,000. “We often think a higher anchor is the way to go,” Mason told the Journal. “But you risk upsetting people if you’re too extreme. We found that you could be less extreme if you were precise and still do better in the end.”

The best strategy: Start with a high number that is not extreme but that is also precise, hopefully based on numbers you’ve gleaned from research on sites like Glassdoor.com and Payscale. I just searched for my title, senior editor, on Glassdoor, and found some good, un-round numbers, like $118,000, $101,000 and $93,000. Glassdoor also helpfully has a column of “average starting salaries” at each company, and those are quite precise. At Conde Nast, the average for a senior editor is $98,733. At Houghton Mifflin Harcourt it’s $59,992. Those numbers are probably too granular even for Prof. Mason, but they are helpful in setting a benchmark based on research, like, say, $98,750 if you are applying for a senior editor job at Conde Nast.

I like Prof. Mason’s idea of proposing specific anchor numbers but in the salary context, I am reminded of what many coaches have said to me as I’ve written stories on the career beat: Don’t be the first one to name a number in a salary negotiation, especially if it’s for a new job. When asked how much you are currently making, say, “I make a competitive salary,” and how much you want to make, say, “I hope to make a competitive salary for this field.” Once the other person has named a number, you can come back with a higher figure. But Prof. Mason’s research suggests you shouldn’t name a number in the fives of thousands. Try a more specific figure and you’ll likely do much better.  When it comes to raises, do the same. Try checking on the rate of inflation and adding it to you salary, plus whatever merit you think you deserve–say a bump of 10% or 15%. That will likely yield you a precise number and you will have substantive reasons behind it that can back up your request if you wind up negotiating further by Susan Adams.