How to turn down a job offer

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Even though we are in a recession and so job opportunities are harder to come by, it is important not to leap at the first offer if taking it would force you to compromise yourself further than you are prepared to go.

It ALWAYS pays to talk through the compromises that a job offer represents with someone else, preferably someone who can be more objective than you.

Having decided not to accept, you need to decide how to say NO. In these days of networking, it is vital that you do so in a professional manner that leaves room for a relationship to continue even if you are not going to join their firm, or are being recruited through a third party. You need these people in your network of contacts - you need to be in their mind should a MORE SUITABLE opportunity come up in the future.

So how do you say NO? There are really five key messages to get over:

1 Say how grateful you are for the offer (and mean it!)

2 Let them know how much effort you have put into your decision. It is worthwhile spelling out some of the key factors that attracted you initially. "Your approach to XX was particularly impressive, and I could see how much I would have enjoyed working with the members of your team who were involved in the selection process."

3 Explain the detailed reasons for your decision. These CAN be directly related to the job as it emerged to you through interviews etc, or it may be something professional, longer-term, or personal.

4 Reiterate that you treat the choice of place to work very seriously and feel that you need to be sure that the role will be one in which you can really excel, and that this particular opportunity therefore didn't feel right.

5 End your 'turn down' in a way that demonstrates openness and a desire to maintain contact. Say that you hope that they will still consider you for other positions, and/or that you hope to meet them in a networking capacity in the future.

If they try to press you to join them, then it's worth exploring what would need to change to make it a better prospect.

If not, then move them to your list of networking contacts and begin to build the relationship. It amazes me how many people, having turned down a job offer (or simply not making it through to that stage) sever all contact with the recruiter or the company. It is precisely this group of people that you need to embrace in your network.

Best wishes

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Working behind the scenes, helping leaders achieve things they never dreamt they could
t 07785 222380 | grahamwilson.org - inter-faith.net - thefutureofwork.org - corporate-alumni.info

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Business preparedness for swine flu - oh, come on!

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Yes, I know that it's easy to be cynical, but when you receive an official email from a Government quasi-Quango, with particular responsibility for business continuity in the small to medium enterprise sector, containing important guidance on how to deal with swine flu, you just know that it's going to be a laugh!

Well, Business Link, in a remarkably quick response, have jumped on the bandwagon, and issued advice on just that topic. You can read:

Recommendations for workplace hygiene.

Putting contingency plans in place.

Managing employee absence.

How to cCommunicate with your employees.

Now, apart from the fact that this is addressed to SMEs, where it is as likely to be the owner/sole trader who is ill as it an 'employee', and who can presumably communicate with him- or her-self while recumbent in bed just as easily as when slaving over a hot desk, I doubt if reminding this individual to wash their hands after they have been to the loo is really going to do a lot for the prevention of flu of any kind, let alone swine flu!

However, the idea that to counter this dreadful contagion you should "create a list of the transferable skills of each employee and consider who could be retrained or redeployed in the event of staff absence." is obviously a good one. No doubt your husband or wife will find it helpful being reminded how to answer the phone and reassure customers that it's not really fatal - unless there are underlying health problems (and you don't know of any), but if your partner should not get back to them in a couple of weeks assume the worse and find another supplier. Actually to save spreading the disease through unsterilised telephone systems, perhaps it would be better to record an answerphone message instead.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember though is that before you succumb, you are advised to "ensure IT systems can cope with high numbers of employees working from home." In other words, when the cantancerous old so-and-so is on the mend, make sure that they have their laptop plugged in and connected to the broadband, because as a swine flu survivor they are sure to want to tell everyone about their miraculous recovery and the fact that their business survived too!

Have a laugh, read more here: http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/detail?itemId=5001344587&type=ONEOFFPAGE&site=210

Best wishes

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Working behind the scenes, helping leaders achieve things they never dreamt they could
t 07785 222380 | grahamwilson.org - inter-faith.net - thefutureofwork.org - corporate-alumni.info

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Climate mitigation - McDonalds takes a lead

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Be honest, you didn't expect to read that did you?!

Well, in 2007, the US fast food industry consisted of around 250000 outlets, of which McDonald's alone had 14000 in the US and a further 32000 worldwide. Fast food outlets are extraordinarily inefficient environmentally, so it's good to see that, by the end of this year, the Big Mac will have TEN gold-standard buildings WORLDWIDE. (My emphasis.)

Their first such building opened in Sweden in 2000 (ie NINE YEARS AGO) and they currently have SEVEN. Apparently though, their commitment to such measures is increasing!

These buildings' features include lamps that use light-emitting diodes, energy efficient appliances and heating and cooling systems, daylight-harvesting technologies, sustainable and recycled materials, low-flow toilets and recycling bins. No, that was not a mistake... they are actually going to have RECYCLING bins.

I'm glad that they are taking such a lead. Sadly though, I think this reeks of being an insult to the intelligence of their customers. PR department - shoot thyself in the foot!

Read more here: http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/djf500/200907171300DOWJONESDJONLINE000671_FORTUNE5.htm

Best wishes

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Working behind the scenes, helping leaders achieve things they never dreamt they could
t 07785 222380 | grahamwilson.org - inter-faith.net - thefutureofwork.org - corporate-alumni.info

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The role of a psychotherapist's supervisor

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Wow, I just received a sharp rebuttal for an article I wrote about writing to build your counselling/psychotherapy practice. The individual wanted me to know that she was 'outraged' that I had implied that marketing advice was a part of the role of a psychotherapist's supervisor.

So what is their role?

The textbook definition is that they are there to protect the therapist's clients.

OK that's fine and there are many ways to achieve this. In my experience though this is only a small part of the role. Especially in the early stages of a counselling career, there may be a need to review every client in a selective but 'verbatim' manner. (He said; I said etc) However, this need should soon evaporate and the dialogue can become more expansive.

The four areas that I find most therapists relish are aspects of personal therapy, work around their impact and presence in the world generally, developing their personal brand of therapy, and how to take themselves to market.

Personal Therapy

We are all aware that (from time-to-time, at least, all the time, perhaps) clients bring material that has some relevance to the therapist themselves. If the therapist is in personal therapy on a regular basis, then they can, of course, take this material to those sessions, but the reality is that many practising therapists stopped this some time ago. It is in both the interests of the client and the therapist to work on this in supervision. Of course, it can go deep and that might either mean that the supervision contract needs reviewing, or that the individual decides to go back into personal therapy, but either way the starting point is in supervision.

Expanding their worldly influence

Therapists chose to study and qualify because they had issues with their own history. This is one of the reasons why therapy trainings last so long! We can't be effective until we find some resolution for this material. Relatively few people seek help because they are highly socially outgoing and feel confident in public! (That isn't to say that all people who sustain a strong public profile ARE confident - we all know that most comedians and many entertainers have a long history of personal trauma and mental health crises.) Once an inner resolution is achieved to this, and the therapist finds that they have the resources to offer something to their clients, then I tend to find that they become restless and want to have a greater impact still. I don't think it is any coincidence that many leading psychotherapists, past and present, take a strong interest, and become involved, in social change and politics. As someone with whom they have a personal relationship, who understands their professional pedigree, and who has the skills to help them find voice to this drive, the supervisor is an obvious choice of support. As this often embraces their perspective on clients and their issues too, it again seems to me to be perfectly right for it to form a part of the role of a supervisor. Putting it another way, if a therapist DOESN'T feel a desire to expand their sphere of influence, at least to some degree, then I would be worried that they had not actually found an inner resolution to their own issues and might need to work on them more.

Developing a personal brand of therapy

Straight from training, a lot of therapists fret that they might break some rules, don't fully understand the subject, can't perform perfectly and so on. That's understandable. Some idolise their particular strand of trainings 'guru' - past or present. It slightly frightens me how many graduates go back to their original school, still in love with their trainers, and manage to have affairs with them - which is an indictment of the trainers rather than the graduates, but also reflects pretty poorly on the training itself. But I digress... putting idolatry to one side... Freud, Jung, Adler, etc, all started out as a student, graduated, continued to learn, developed the confidence to assert their own ideas, and did so. They developed a personal brand of therapy. Every practising therapist needs a personal brand. In my experience, far too many therapists complain that they don't get many clients and yet, when you look at their literature and their approach to marketing themselves the image is so cloudy and so confused that no-one seeking clarity (which most clients are) would consider going to them. To do this in isolation is likely to yield to either intellectually interesting but practically useless outpourings, or to dangerous distortions. To do so in dialogue is likely to mature and enrich these personal ideas and themes. Freud and Jung might have fallen out - for which they are famous - but the important thing was that they were engaged in dialogue beforehand which helped them each develop their perspectives. Of course, you needn't use your supervisor for this nurturing of ideas, and some supervisors themselves find it hard to do, but personally, I see it as an important aspect of the work. The supervisor is a part of the mechanism of the ongoing professional development of the therapist and if they aren't up to enhancing the intellectual grasp of their supervisee's practice then I wonder why they are a supervisor.

Helping the therapist go to market

And so to the original reason for this article... Should the supervisor help their supervisee develop their marketing plan and take themselves to market? Clients are protected best by having an experienced therapist with well-founded confidence and clarity of mind. They achieve this through practise. You practise by having clients - therefore you need clients. If a supervisor is to help you achieve your best, they need to help you find sufficient clients. Some will be able to do this by virtue of their position - supervisors at 'centres' usually have responsibility for referrals - some will do so with clients they can't accommodate in their own private practise - others will help the supervisee develop their own marketing plan and help them put it into place. Whatever the means, a therapist without clients is not going to keep coming to the supervisor for long, so it is in both parties interests for the supervisor to embrace this as a part of their role.

I hope that explains how I see my role as a supervisor, and how I experience my own supervisor. If it offends anyone, I am sorry, but there really are no black and white areas in the fields of human relations and perhaps it would be worth your while exploring where your own models have come from - I'm not saying you are wrong, simply that there are alternatives.

Best wishes

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Working behind the scenes, helping leaders achieve things they never dreamt they could
t 07785 222380 | grahamwilson.org - inter-faith.net - thefutureofwork.org - corporate-alumni.info

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Writing to build your counselling/psychotherapy practice

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52 Themes for Counsellors and Psychotherapists to write about in their local paper

This list began with a conversation between two therapists. They wanted to build their local practices, and had decided that they wanted to find a way of getting people to come to see them. They'd tried all kinds of leaflet drops - doctors' surgeries, hairdressers, florists, funeral directors, coffee-shops and so on.

They decided to try to get a regular column in a local newspaper. Having created a list of topics, similar to this one, they scoured the local papers (including the freebies) until they found a couple that looked good possibilities. They wrote up a half dozen themes into short 250-word articles which appeared to be the size of a typical 'column' in the papers concerned, and sent them to one of the editors asking for feedback. Within a month the first appeared. It took another couple of months for the trickle of clients to build up. On occasions after publication, they had follow up calls from the local radio stations and appeared on those briefly too.

Unfortunately, it didn't take long for their creativity to dry up and instead of a regular column they ended up sending ad hoc articles instead. Fortunately, by then they had a steady enough stream of ongoing referrals.

1 New Year Resolutions
2 Why birth can be so painful
3 On death and dying
4 Why grief is necessary
5 When the children go to school
6 Giving up
7 Being yourself
8 Why marriages fail and how to stop them
9 How to find a good therapist
10 Churchill's black dog
11 Whose anger is it anyway?
12 When all your choices seem to go wrong
13 Learning from our own life
14 How talking cures work
15 Feeling deserted
16 When the children leave home
17 Mid-life crises
18 Too much anxiety
19 Why suicide?
20 Getting your bloke to love you
21 There is always a choice
22 Growing old is never easy
23 Do you cry a lot?
24 Helping your child tackle bullies
25 What's this thing called love?
26 The outsider looking in
27 Surviving childhood abuse
28 Building confidence
29 Feeling proud of yourself
30 When Christmas loses its cheer
31 Tackling money worries
32 Falling out of love
33 It was never meant to be like this
34 The human need for meaning
35 Hate is a powerful word
36 No place to hide
37 Why some people are just plain spiteful
38 How fear can grip you
39 How to cope when things go wrong
40 How to cope when you lose control
41 Breaking up is never easy
42 Dealing with addiction
43 Listening skills for parents
44 Putting something behind you
45 Finding meaning in life
46 Building a social circle
47 An unnatural fear of intimacy
48 Sexual healing
49 Patterns from the past
50 What has pain got to do with it?
51 Now you've tried pulling yourself together
52 When you don't look the way you want to

If you want to discuss this approach, explore other ways of building your professional practice, or get the kind of support that you really want from a supervisor, then do get in touch.

Best wishes

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Working behind the scenes, helping leaders achieve things they never dreamt they could
t 07785 222380 | grahamwilson.org - inter-faith.net - thefutureofwork.org - corporate-alumni.info

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