Employment Expert Jason Seiden

Award-winning author and hiring and employment expert Jason Seiden

Jason Seiden is a career consultant with experience working with managers, professionals, executives, and students. He is one of the industry's freshest voices, providing sought-after thought-leadership through the written and spoken word. Jason is an award-winning author, sharp-edged blogger, and a popular speaker on issues related to leadership, generational shifts in the workplace, and the role of personal responsibility in career success, teamwork, and life balance.

Jason joined the WGN Midday News both on TV and on our website. He answered several of your questions about how to manage your career. Check out the discussion:
ngaging and thought-provoking across a host of media, Jason is distinct for his honesty, compassion, and insightfulness. Jason is highly effective at getting people to experience things from a new perspective in order to stimulate behavioral change. He emphasizes a practical, informal, and just-in-time approach to adult learning--an approach showcased in his quick-paced and counter-intuitive first book, How to Self-Destruct: Making the Least of What's Left of Your Career, which won the 2008 Axiom Book Awards' Gold Medal for Best New Career Book.

Jason's next book, Super Staying Power, provides concrete advice for people looking to make themselves indispensable to their employers. Staying Power McGraw-Hill is due out Fall 2009.

Jason works with people at all levels of corporate America, from Fortune 500 executives to business service providers to not-for-profit leadership. He helps entrepreneurs, recent graduates, managers, and individuals in transition.

As a media guest, Jason has appeared on CNBC, CNN, and FOXTV. He holds an MBA from Kellogg with concentrations in Organizational Behavior and Finance, and a Bachelor's of Science from the Wharton School, with a concentration in Entrepreneurial Management. Jason is a contributing author to Fistful of Talent and, along with Willy Franzen of OneDayOneJob.com, runs an online course for job seekers called Found Your Career.


The book is available for purchase at amazon.com: How to Self-Destruct: Making the Least of What's Left of Your Career

Semantics matter: 3 new words I’d love to see

by Jason Seiden

Maybe you’ve heard people say that what you give voice to is what becomes your reality? Maybe you’ve heard of “neuro linguistic programming?” Maybe you’ve had a vicious argument with someone not because of what they believed, but because of the way they phrased it? (We call this “being in violent agreement.

My thoughts on this subject: I think most of it, as executed, is baloney.

I do believe that our perspective drives our behaviors, which in turn drive our results, and that changing our perspective will lead to new outcomes. But. I also believe that humans have not yet reached a point where we’re good manipulators of this process. We can understand it far better than we can do it.

Handing people neuro linguistic programming as a tool for success is like handing a weekend golfer a set of cavity-backed golf clubs: sure, they’ll make success a bit easier, but until that golfer gets his stance, swing, tempo, and power under control, the clubs will result in only limited and variable benefit.

There are, however, a few places where I think changing the way we talk could make a huge difference in our ability to excel, both at work and in life. Here are three of those areas, and the new words I want:

1. Politics. Most of the words we have to describe the political process carry a negative overtone. (Politics, logrolling, Machiavellian, two-faced, self-interested.) Still, the process of negotiating for control of a group’s agenda is a critical and natural part of group dynamics. As a concept, this process needs to be divorced from the gamesmanship often associated with it. Agenda Setting! My suggestion: Allow “politics” to refer to the games people play and use “agenda setting” to describe the process of focusing a diverse group on a single issue: “Dave is trying to set the agenda, so he’s out talking to the union leaders right now. I just hope he has enough credibility to get them onboard… otherwise, it’s going to be politics as usual.”
2. Weird/creepy/eerie/freaky. We can’t deny that there’s stuff out there in the world we don’t yet understand… but if every time we talk about it we treat it as something spooky, then we won’t embrace it when we should. Serendipity is a fact of life—haven’t you ever made a fast friend, fallen in love at first sight, or just found yourself in the right place at the right time? Yes? Wouldn’t you like a word to describe what happened other than “freaky?” Happy accidents occur all the time, even at work; I don’t want to talk about them with the same goosebump-raising language people use when they think they’ve seen a ghost. Really nice. My suggestion: Let’s resurrect that tired, bland phrase “really nice” and use it to describe anything good that happens that seems out of the ordinary: “I hadn’t thought of Jim in years, so I called him… turns out he’s hiring and needs someone with my skills! I got a new job today! The whole thing was really nice.”
3. Improve. What does a slow worker on probation need to do? Improve. What does a star employee need do to get ready for a promotion? Improve. Same word, same process, very different realities. To the first person, improvement is a requirement for keeping the job. To the second person, improvement is required only for moving ahead. The problem I have, as a coach, is that if I use the word “improve” with a star performer, I create political risk for that person: someone else in the organization through malice or ignorance ,may interpret that word to mean that this person is not cutting it and needs to get better or get fired. Not good.Nexting. My suggestion is to invest an entirely new word here. “Improve” is ambiguous, “polish” is too surface. I want a word that means “improve in anticipation of reaching the next level, and my vote is for “nexting.” As in, “

So when you see me in the hall, talking about a really nice nexting session, you’ll know what I mean.