Wishing You a Season of Growth and Reflection

Wishing You a Season of Growth and Reflection

As the year draws to a close, we at Ashlin Associates want to express our heartfelt gratitude to you — our valued clients and partners. Your trust and collaboration fuel our mission to foster growth, inspire high performance, and cultivate exceptional leadership.

The holiday season offers us all a chance to look inward, celebrate our progress, and set our sights on new horizons. We encourage you to embrace this period of self-reflection and consider how you might continue to develop as a leader — in your career, your community, and your life.

May the new year bring you continued growth, bold new opportunities, and the courage to lead with positive accountability, a big heart, and great results!

Thank you for being a part of our community. We look forward to supporting your leadership journey in the year ahead.

With warmest wishes for a joyful holiday season and a bright new year,

Paulette

I wrote the following article about leadership diplomacy and the holidays a couple of years ago and, every year since, I have been asked to re-issue it. I hope it helps you professionally and personally!

Diplomacy In The Office and At The Dinner Table

Successfully navigating tricky political issues in an organization requires the same skill needed to successfully navigate this season’s onslaught of holiday dinners and family gatherings – diplomacy.

I recently coached an executive facing difficult organizational issues. Drawing on considerable interpersonal skills, he had to maintain excellent relationships with diverse constituents, while delivering absolute and defined results – the very definition of diplomacy.

As we met, I was reminded of a college mentor, who was an actual diplomat – an ambassador to another country. Although I didn’t know the term at the time, I now recognize that this wise professor had high emotional intelligence (EQ), a behavior essential to diplomacy. At the time, diplomacy seemed to come naturally to my wise friend. I recognize now that diplomacy is a behavior that can be learned.

4 ways great leaders (and dinner guests) can behave like diplomats:

1.    Exercise Self-Control

Successful diplomats have the maturity to control their behavior and words. They recognize that   words carry enormous power, so they are deliberate about the words they use and the impact they have on other people. Good manners – at work and at family gatherings — also send a clear message of respect for others.

2.    Prepare

Diplomats prepare and do their homework. With the fast pace of change in business and politics across the globe, great leaders are calculated in their preparations for meetings — big or small. They rarely try to “wing it.”

3.    Adapt to Others

With so many different constituents, great leaders are great at adapting to different groups of people. They do this in a genuine and natural way that endears their audiences to them.

4.    Negotiate

If you need something from somebody, make it easy and pleasant for that person to give it to you. Diplomats aren’t necessarily the loudest voices in the office or at the dinner table. Instead, they exercise the art of winning through influence. As they negotiate, they have the uncanny ability to make constituents feel heard and understood, while remaining assertive and strong.

This holiday season, and throughout the year, I wish you great diplomacy – both in the workplace and at the dinner table.

Paulette Ashlin’s Books:

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