In The News

Soft Skills In The News

Peggy helps professionals "Survive the Slowdown"

Likable Dale Kloefkorn is an affable, gracious family man who has a free spirit and sported a rock 'n' roll hairstyle. But after nine years as a data analyst he was laid off. "Nightline" arranged for him to meet with straight-talking super coach Peggy Klaus, who wrote "The Hard Truth About Soft Skills." Kloefkorn was in for some tough love when he spent a four hour session with Klaus, which Nighline taped. VIEW THE CLIP.

The New York Times: Shifting Careers
Selling Yourself by Showing Yourself, in a Good Way
Melinda Ligos

Klaus doesn’t see anything wrong with the self-promotion label. “I’d be worried if someone said you were bad at self-promoting, which could mean that you are ineffectually humble or self-aggrandizing or obnoxious,” she said. “But if someone says you are good at self-promotion, why is that any different than saying, ‘You’re a wonderful writer’ or, ‘You look terrific’? It probably means that they know what it is that you’re doing and that you’ve done it in an interesting and compelling way.”

Publishers Weekly
Review: The Hard Truth About Soft Skills

Publishers Weekly recommends The Hard Truth About Soft Skills to those needing a personable approach to rising up professionally. It says the book’s practical advice is “delivered in the conversational style of a one-on-one session with a personal coach.”

CN8's Money Matters Today
Get a Job! (live broadcast from Drexel College)

Peggy Klaus coached soon-to-graduate students in how to prepare themselves for job interviews by teaching them how to better present themselves to potential employers.

The Jim Bohannon Show

Top radio personality Jim Bohannon interviewed Klaus about her soft skills strategies for making the most out of the networking opportunities afforded by holiday office parties.

 

SFGate.com: On The Job
Pay me more for this column!
Chris Colin

When journalist Chris Colin wanted a raise but didn't know how to ask for one, he approached workplace communication expert Peggy Klaus, author of The Hard Truth About Soft Skills, for some coaching. "As I soon learned," wrote Colin, "very few of us—men and women, young and old, janitors and CEOs—are actually together dudes. On the contrary, we're dull, unrefined, uninspiring bores. Or we're uptight, steely dweebs. We're grossly cocky or unpleasantly modest. We say 10 times more than necessary, and do so in a fugue state of unintelligible, incoherent mumbling. This is the stuff of Klaus' new book, which seeks to improve our workplace comportment." As for that raise, once Klaus finished training Chris?" The day before I filed this column," he said, "I received an update on that raise from my editor. The powers that be, she reported over e-mail, needed to 'crunch some numbers, but we could probably do something.'

 

INDYSTAR.COM: Real Life
For crying out loud: Shedding tears at work can hurt your image
Dana Knight

When Hillary Clinton's eyes welled with tears on the campaign trail in New Hampshire, she was downright dogged and chastised for it. If a male candidate had done the same thing, Knight wondered, would he have also been put down and called a fake? Or would he have been praised for a sincere ability to be real? "One of the first things a man thinks of when a woman cries (in the workplace) is: 'Am I being manipulated?' " says Peggy Klaus, author of The Hard Truth About Soft Skills. "It really can be looked at as a weakness and inability to manage one's own emotions," says Klaus. Her solution for women who want to land the same high-ranking jobs as men is to fight back the tears at work. Try to think about how you are being perceived because perception weighs much more heavily than reality in most situations. Translation: Save the tears for home. It might save your professional reputation.