Sunday, 30 October 2016

How To Connect With Individual Team Members


Here, from the new book, Be A Network Marketing Leader, are some tips on how, as a leader, you can connect with your individual team members:
  • Send cards on their birthdays and anniversary-of-joining dates.
  • Keep yourself updated with what's happening in their personal lives.
  • Show your support during personal or family crises.
  • Schedule weekly one-on-one phone calls or meetings.
  • Pay attention. When you see an increase, decrease or change in results, get in touch.
  • Schedule monthly whole team meetings.
  • Applaud achievements and address concerns immediately.
  • Be consistent.
  • Make frequent thoughtful, spontaneous gestures.
Thank you to the book publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.

Saturday, 29 October 2016

How To Hold Effective Conversations As A Leader


When I read business books, I turn the corner of every page that has something I really like, want to remember and easily reference in the future.

Halfway into the 300-page book, Leadership Conversations, I had turned the corners of nearly every fifth page. So, you can see why I believe this is such a good book. There is so much to learn from Leadership Conversations. It's a must read for today's business leaders. Leaders who are leading multi-generational workforces. And, leaders who want the skills to get promoted and move up the corporate ladder.

Authors Alan S. Berson and Richard G. Stieglitz wrote the book because they believe that a leader's most powerful skill is the ability to hold effective conversations.

So, in their book, they detail the four types of conversations every leader must effectively master.  Conversations that:
  • Build relationships
  • Develop others
  • Make decisions
  • Take action
And, they provide real-world examples and tactical guidance for each of those conversation types.

Here are some of the book's gems:

The breadth and depth of how leaders connect with people determine a leader's ability to influence, and the greater the influence, the greater the alignment and results. Leaders who effectively make those people connections:
  • Have a style and a voice that fit their organization and enable them to form bonds with their followers and ignite their passion.
  • Beget great followers. Leaders learn their people's objectives and guide them toward achieving their full potential.
  • Address small conflicts to avoid larger ones later. They know intuitively when things do not seem right, and promptly hold the conversations required to fix them.
  • Know that creativity cannot be forced. They enable creativity in the natural flow of business by providing the time, the space, and the conditions for people to be creative -- then they cultivate the fledgling sprouts of innovation.
  • Celebrate their people. They are liberal with praise and realize that their personal success is rooted in their people's successes.

Friday, 28 October 2016

Ten Reasons For Embracing Storytelling As A Business Tool


From Paul Smith's popular book, Lead With A Story, here are the 10 reasons for embracing storytelling as a business tool:
  1. Storytelling is simple
  2. Storytelling is timeless
  3. Stories are demographic-proof
  4. Stories are contagious
  5. Stories are easier to remember
  6. Stories inspire
  7. Stories appeal to all types of learners
  8. Stories fit better where most of the learning happens in the workplace
  9. Stories put the listener in a mental learning mode
  10. Telling stories shows respect for the audience
Smith goes on to say that:
  • you don't need a degree in English to tell a story
  • stories can spread like wildfire
  • lessons from a story are remembered more accurately, and for far longer, than learning derived from facts
  • stories spark curiosity and interest rather than the urge to evaluate or criticize
  • stories get your message across, without arrogantly telling listeners what to think or do

Thursday, 27 October 2016

Why You Should Skip The Praise And Give More Positive Feedback


There is an important difference between giving your employees positive feedback and giving them praise.
  • Positive feedback focuses on the specifics of job performance.
  • Praise, often one-or two-sentence statements, such as “Keep up the good work,” without positive feedback leaves employees with empty feelings.
Worse yet, without positive feedback, employees feel no sense that they are appreciated as individual talents with specific desires to learn and grow on the job and in their careers, reports Nicholas Nigro, author of, The Everything Coaching and Mentoring Book.
  • So, skip the praise and give positive feedback that is more uplifting to your employees because it goes to the heart of their job performance and what they actually do.
An example of positive feedback is:

“Bob, your communications skills have dramatically improved over the past couple of months. The report that you just prepared for me was thorough and concise. I appreciate all the work you’ve put into it, as do your team members.”

How To Help People Win At Work

Here are 10 important questions business leaders should ask, according to Ken Blanchard and Garry Ridge, authors of Helping People Win At Work:
  1. Does my business have a clear, meaningful, and easily understood vision/mission?
  2. Do I have the right people in the right seats on the bus?
  3. Do I have a BHAG (big hairy audacious goal), and have I communicated it to my employees?
  4. Are my values driving the behavior I want in my organization?
  5. Am I creating a culture that increases employee engagement?
  6. Am I cultivating a spirit of internal and external learning?
  7. Do my employees know what an A looks like, and am I supporting them to get that A?
  8. Are our products/services creating lasting, positive memories for our customers?
  9. Do I have the best, most timely data and information to help my business make good decisions?
  10. Are our key performance indicators the right ones, and are we measuring what matters?
And, one more questions to ask is:
  • Do we celebrate success?

Wednesday, 26 October 2016

14 Things Great Coaches Do

For those who may have missed this posting from awhile back, I am pleased to share again a guest post from Garret Kramer of InnerSports LLC about how to be a great coach:



14 Attributes of Great Coaches
By Garret Kramer,
Author of Stillpower: Excellence with Ease in Sports and Life 

There are many, many coaching manuals and books on the market today.  Unfortunately, virtually all of them provide an external blueprint or "positive" guide to successful coaching and leadership. Very few, however, point the coach inward to an intuitive understanding that he or she already possesses. 

Below are fourteen examples of the inside-out coaching paradigm revealed in Stillpower.  Consider these attributes of great coaches for yourself; then see how they might apply to you, your team, classroom, company, or family. 

1.  Great coaches think state of mind first; behavior (including "working hard, "staying positive, and "doing the 'right' thing"), a distant second. 

2.  Great coaches know that what they say pales in comparison to the state of mind from which they say it.

3.  Great coaches know that their perception of others is based solely on their own state of mind -- which is always subject to change. 

4.  Great coaches set few expectations if any.  They know better than to make players victims of their own circumstances. 

5.  Great coaches set few goals if any. They know better than to limit possibilities. 

6.  Great coaches act from inspiration (a high mind-set) and pull back from desperation (a low mind-set). 

7.  Great coaches know that a team culture must be flexible or it risks stifling the individuality, intuition, and free will of the players. 

8.  Great coaches burn to win and can't stand to lose.

9.  Great coaches understand that, win or lose, they'll be perfectly okay.

10.  Great coaches value imagination and creativity above a code of conduct or strategic system. 

11.  Great coaches rarely talk about or display past accomplishments. They know better than to take their team out of the here and now. 

12.  Great coaches are models of engagement and passion no matter the external circumstance (score, standings, opponent's actions, referee's call, etc.). 

13.  Great coaches do not force their belief system on others. They know that if a player replaces his or her own belief with the coach's belief, success will be short-lived at best. 

14.  Great coaches love their players -- and their opponents, too. They know that love fosters awareness, resilience, effort, and excellence.   Resentment, disrespect, and hate foster nothing worth mentioning. 

The bottom line is that the best coaches produce intuitive leaders who consistently come through in the big moment.  And you don't do this by dictating behavior or setting external standards.  Instead, great coaches provide failure-free environments, and, thus, the instincts and free will of their players flourish. 


Garret Kramer, author of Stillpower: Excellence with Ease in Sports and Life, is the founder and managing partner of Inner Sports, LLC.  His approach to performance has transformed the careers of professional athletes and coaches, Olympians, and collegiate players across a multitude of sports.  Kramer's work has been featured on WFAN, ESPN, Fox, and CTV, as well as in Sports IllustratedThe New York TimesThe Wall Street Journal, and other national publications. 

Today's Five Leadership Quotes


Some of my favorite quotes for leaders are:
  • A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit -- Arnold H. Glasgow
  • I praise loudly, I blame softly -- Catherine II of Russia
  • Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress -- Mohandas Gandhi
  • A long dispute means that both parties are wrong -- Voltaire
  • The least questioned assumptions are often the most questionable -- Paul Broca
These and many more compelling quotes can be found in Susan H. Shearouse's book, Conflict 101.

Sunday, 23 October 2016

How To Lead Your Boss, Your Peers And Your Team


The Courage Solution, a book by Mindy Mackenzie, is all about the simple truth that the only thing you can reliably change or control is yourself. So, that is why Mackenzie wrote her book -- to teach you how to take actions that ultimately will improve your impact on the job and increase your happiness and fulfillment in your career.

Mackenzie's quick-read strategies focus on these four key areas:
  • Part 1: You First offers techniques to take ownership and accountability for creating a career and life you love.
  • Part 2: Lead Your Boss describes proven techniques to transform your relationship with your boss.
  • Part 3: Lead Your Peers provides methods for accelerating positive peer relationships to improve business results.
  • Part 4: Lead Your Team gives approaches for generating and creating the most effective teams and having more fun while doing it.


Mindy Mackenzie

A preview of Mackenzie's advice on  Leading Your Boss includes:
  • Intensely study your boss to get to know the human being behind the mask.
  • Understand the company you work for, the business you are in, how the company makes money, who the end customer is, and how what you do every day fits into the strategy of the company.
  • Get the boss-employee relationship basics right.
  • Make a concerted effort to elevate your thinking to an enterprise-wide perspective.
  • Get in tune with your boss by knowing exactly what they are wrestling with on a weekly basis.
  • Provide, honest, positive praise and affirmation to your boss--to them directly, and to their superiors and others.
  • Be smart preparing your boss for your pushback, challenges, and disagreements.
Mackenzie emphasizes that this advice is not about giving your boss a pass. Rather, by leading your boss in the manner outlined above, you will have the best chance of creating a positive engagement with your boss. And, when that happens, everything around you at work will also change for the better.

Friday, 21 October 2016

How To Be A Humble Leader


From John Blakey's book, The Trusted Executive, here are these four tips from Jim Collins for how to be a humble leader:
  1. Demonstrate a compelling modesty, shunning public adulation and never be boastful.
  2. Act with quiet, calm determination and motivate others through inspired standards, not inspiring charisma.
  3. Channel ambition into the company, not the self, and set up successors for even more greatness in the next generation.
  4. Look in the mirror, not out of the window, when apportioning responsibility for poor performance.

Tuesday, 18 October 2016

What To Do When You're New


I wish the book, What To Do When You're New, would have been published twenty-five years ago.

Being more introverted versus extroverted, the author's advice and teachings would have helped me during new jobs and after promotions, when relocating to new cities, when joining new clubs and organizations, and whenever I became a member of a new team.

The book, by Keith Rollag, is all about how to be comfortable, confident, and successful in new situations.

"It's nearly impossible to accomplish anything meaningful and important in life without at some point having to meet new people, learn new things, and take on new roles," explains Rollag. So, even for extroverts I believe this book will be useful.

"And as a newcomer, how you think and act in those first few seconds, minutes, hours, and days matters," adds Rollag.

According to Rollag, the secret to newcomer success comes down to willingness and ability to do five key things:
  1. Introduce ourselves to strangers.
  2. Learn and remember names.
  3. Ask questions.
  4. Seek out and start new relationships.
  5. Perform new things in front of others.
"The more confident, comfortable, and willing you are to perform these five basic skills, the more successful you can be as a new leader, team member, student, neighbor, volunteer, and any other newcomer role you decide to take on," explains Rollag.


Each book chapter examines:
  • Why the skill is important to your success.
  • Why it causes so much stress and anxiety.
  • How to get better and more comfortable doing it.
  • How to find or create opportunities to practice.
"We spend our entire lives being new. Still, we're rarely taught how to be a successful newcomer," says Rollag.

In fact, if you are a typical American worker, you will be a newcomer to at least 11 different organizations by the time you are forty-eight years old, often as a result of workplace restructurings, mergers and downsizings. And, the Census Bureau estimates that the average person in the United States moves every four years, and can expect to move over 11 times during his or her lifetime. That puts you in newcomer status in neighborhoods, civic organizations, schools, clubs, etc.

I found the teachings about asking questions as a newcomer particularly useful. Rollag explains how to ask new people questions about themselves in a way that's strategic and inviting. He states that research shows that the more questions newcomers ask and the more help they seek, the better they tend to perform at work. In addition, co-workers see them as more creative.


Included in the chapter about asking questions is this quote:

"He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever."

Rollag, Ph.D., is an organizational researcher and management consultant who currently serves as Associate Professor of Management and Chair of the Management Division at Babson College.

What Employees Say Managers Don't Do


According to David Grossman, author of the popular book, You Can't Not Communicate-2, here are eight things employees say managers don't do:
  1. Don't keep employees informed.
  2. Don't explain the "why" behind decisions.
  3. Don't communicate frequently enough and in a timely way.
  4. Don't update employees on changes happening in the business.
  5. Don't share regular business updates and how the team is performing.
  6. Don't ask for feedback.
  7. Don't ask for or listen to concerns.
  8. Don't act on feedback (or at least close the loop as to why feedback wasn't incorporated into a decision)
This is a great reminder for leaders of what not to do.

And, perhaps number 8 on the list is the one where most managers fall short -- not explaining why they didn't incorporate feedback into their final decision.

Monday, 17 October 2016

How To Be A Superboss


"Superbosses embrace certain practices that good bosses don't, and they do even more of the productive things that good bosses do," says Syney Finkelstein, author of the book, Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent.

What's more, according to Finkelstein's findings from ten years of research and two hundred interviews, superbosses focus on identifying promising newcomers, inspiring their best work, and launching them into highly successful careers, while also expanding their own networks and building stronger companies.

Most important, "regenerating the talent pool is the single most important thing any leader can do to survive and prosper," adds Finkelstein.

Sydney Finkelstein

Superbosses also do this:
  • Create master-apprentice relationships
  • Rely on the cohort effect
  • Say good-bye on good terms
  • Adapt the job or organization to fit the talent
  • Take chances on unconventional talent
  • Look for new talent pools
  • Hire on the sport
  • Accept churn

Finkelstein shared these additional insights into what makes a superboss:

QuestionWhat skill do superbosses possess that most bosses don't even think of pursuing?

Finkelstein: Superbosses are geniuses at helping other people accomplish more than they ever thought possible. This superboss approach is not "team-building" or "mentoring," but something much deeper, that transform proteges from talented apprentices to stars and superstars in their own right.

QuestionWhat is an example of a counter-intuitive thing that superbosses do?

Finkelstein: Superbosses don't fixate on talent retention, like most companies do. If some of your best people leave, your reputation for producing talent grows, and you become a talent magnet. Nobody gets stale, and you become the employer of choice for new blood, known for the person to work for if you want to accelerate your career.

Question: How can job seekers identify superbosses to work for in order to advance their careers?

Finkelstein: While there are a bunch of key markers job seekers should pay attention to, there are three key questions I'd want to ask if I'm looking for a superboss:
  1. Do you like to delegate big assignments to your subordinates, or do you work closely with them on key projects? You want a boss who does both!
  2. How often do people leave your team to accept a bigger offer elsewhere? What's that like when it happens? Beware the boss who can't think of any examples, or whose response implies disloyalty more than pride.
  3. Do you stay in touch with former subordinates who have left the company? You want a resounding yes to this one.
Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and the director of Tuck's Center for Leadership. He has published eight previous books.

Friday, 14 October 2016

How To Energize Your Work And Life

Tom Rath is the author of the incredibly popular Strengthsfinder 2.0 book. His latest book is, Are You Fully Charged?

The book draws on the latest and most practical research from business and psychology and identifies the three keys that influence most of our daily well-being, as well as our engagement at work:
  • Meaning: doing something that benefits another person
  • Interactions: creating far more positive than negative moments
  • Energy: making choices that improve your mental and physical health
"This book will challenge you to stop pursing happiness and start creating meaning instead," explains Rath. And, by doing so, you will rethink your daily interactions with the people who matter most.

"The actions you take throughout every single day accumulate to shape your years, decades and overall life," adds Rath. 

Even brief interactions count, says Rath, such as exchanging a smile or greeting while passing someone on the street. Those moments/interactions give your days a positive or negative charge. And, if you look at moments as three-second windows, there are 1,200 moments per hour and 19,200 in a day. That equates to roughly 500 million moments over a lifetime.

We need at least three to five positive interactions to outweigh every one negative exchange, adds Roth.
  • Leadership Tip: So, the next time you are doing an employee or team performance review, Rath suggests you spend 80 percent of the time (or the vast majority) talking about what is working. Then, use the remaining time to address deficits. In most workplaces the opposite is happening today. Managers are routinely spending 80 percent of their time talking about weaknesses during reviews.
Tom Rath
  • Meaningful Work: According to Rath, meaningful work is driven by intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, motivation. Extrinsic motivation is a nice way of describing when you do things primarily to receive a reward. In contrast explains Roth, intrinsic motivation - or deep internal motivation - is much richer. It stems from the meaningfulness of the work you do. You are driven by what you yearn to do even if there is no reward or compensation.
"The more you focus your efforts on others, the easier it is to do great work without being dependent on external rewards like money, power, or fame," says Rath.

You also create meaning when your strengths and interests meet the needs of the organization you serve. And, according to Gallup research that Rath cites in his book, when you use your strengths, you can double your number of high-quality work hours per week from 20 to 40.
  • Helping Others Tip:  "You are much better at helping yourself if you are also helping another person with a similar problem," says Rath.  
Rath has written five New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers over the past decade, starting with, How Full Is Your Bucket?

Monday, 10 October 2016

Leadership Quotes From John C. Maxwell

The real gems in John C. Maxwell's book, Everyone Communicates Few Connect, book are the abundant leadership and communication quotes, such as these:
To add value to others, one must first value others.
People may hear your words, but they feel your attitude.
All good communicators get to the point before their listeners start asking, "What's the point?"
The first time you say something, it's heard. The second time, it's recognized, and the third time it's learned.
In the end, people are persuaded not by what we say, but by what they understand.
People pay attention when something that is said connects with something they greatly desire.
Maxwell also says that:
Management is about persuading people to do things they do not want to do, while leadership is about inspiring people to do things they never thought they could.
The book covers five principles and five practices to help readers so they can connect one-on-one, in a group, or with an audience.

How To Sell Using Storytelling


Last month brought the much anticipated release of Paul Smith's new book, Sell with a Story: How to Capture Attention, Build Trust, and Close the Sale.

I'm a big fan of Paul's earlier best-sellers, including Lead with a Story and Parenting with a Story. And, the newest installment in the series is equally good, informative, practical and actionable.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews with procurement managers, Paul teaches you how to:
  • Select the right story
  • Craft a compelling and memorable narrative
  • Incorporate challenge, conflict, and resolution
  • Use stories to introduce yourself, build rapport, address objections, add value, bring data to life,  and create a sense of urgency
Storytelling definitely works in sales, explains Paul, "because a great story changes everything. It causes buyers to put down their defenses. It helps them relax. It engages their minds and their hearts by appealing to both their intellect and emotions. A great story builds credibility and properly positions you in the eye of the buyer."

Storytelling is a skill. A skill like any other skills needed for successful selling. Salespeople should, therefore, invest the time to learn how to do it well, and then practice it, so they can master it.

Paul's new book includes:
  • Model stories
  • Skill-building exercises
  • Enlightening examples from Microsoft, Costco, Xerox, Abercombie & Fitch, Hewlett Packard, and other top companies.
Recently, Paul kindly answered the following questions about his new book:


Question: What drove your decision to write this book?

Paul: Unlike my first two books, Sell with a Story was actually a commissioned title, meaning my publisher asked me to write it. (The first two books were my idea, which I had to pitch to them.) Specifically, the idea came from someone in the sales department who’s in touch with the market and booksellers and what kind of books they think readers want. Also, I think after publishing my first two books, Lead with a Story and Parenting with a Story, they thought sales was the next logical place to leverage storytelling skills. 

Paul Smith

Question: Which of the three books (Lead with a StoryParenting with a StorySell with a Story) was the most challenging to write and why?

Paul: Lead with a Story was the most challenging from a time and effort standpoint. But that’s only because it was my first one. I was just learning how to write a book. Plus, I still had a full-time job, so I could only work on it nights and weekends. The whole process from idea to seeing it on a bookstore shelf was 30 months. By book number three, I had that down to 18 months.


But this most recent one, Sell with a Story, was the most challenging in other, perhaps more interesting, ways. Since it wasn’t my idea, I had to generate interest in and passion for the project. Writing a book is a labor of love, and it’s a lot easier to love your own idea than someone else’s idea. And I’ll admit, I had some initial hesitancy about this particular idea.

My first barrier was that if I was going to write a second book about how to craft a business story, I had to admit that I hadn’t done that perfectly well already in the first book, so there would be room to improve on it. There was plenty of room, of course, but I had to get my writer’s ego there. (It didn’t take long).

What took longer was actually convincing myself that writing a book teaching salespeople how to be better storytellers would make the world a better place. Storytelling is a powerful tool. And like all powerful tools, it can be used or misused. Putting that tool into the hands of business leaders to make them better leaders, or parents to make them better parents, seemed like obviously places to make a positive difference in the world with low risk of misuse.

But for some reason, the thought of arming salespeople with that powerful tool gave me pause. In my worst-case scenario, I imagined in some corner of the world I would be better equipping an unscrupulous charlatan to fleece unsuspecting widows out of their life savings. And I had to consider if I wanted to be a part of that.

As I thought about it more, I realized that I was worrying about the small fraction of salespeople who might be unscrupulous, when I hadn’t worried at all about the same small fraction of business leaders and parents who might also misuse the power of story. That wasn’t fair. I was writing my books for the vast majority of leaders, parents, and salespeople who would do wonderful things with what I was teaching them.

That realization went a long way to allaying my fear. But it didn’t eliminate it entirely. I still had some lingering doubt. After more thinking, I concluded the most likely cause of storytelling being used in ways that I would not be proud of was not intentional misuse. It would be unintentional, because most people just haven’t thought much about the ethical and unethical uses of storytelling. Including me. So I did.

Then I decided to make that one of the topics covered in the book, spanning two different chapters. I dedicated one entire chapter to the dangers of embellishing a story to the point that you’ve stretched the truth too far, and how do you know how far is too far. I provide a simple litmus test to decide, plus several solutions to avoid crossing that line. 

And in the chapter on emotion, I address the other major area of storytelling abuse: emotional manipulation. If you’ve simply told your listener a sob story to get them to buy what you’re selling, it might work. But if that distracts them from more important decision criteria, then you’ve abused the power of story. In that chapter, I discuss several tools to help you legitimately enhance the emotional content of your story, and several techniques to make sure that emotion doesn’t become unfairly manipulative.

I think most people who want to learn to be better storytellers want to do so in a respectable way. By including those two additional chapters, I felt like I was giving them a powerful tool, but with the training and wisdom to use it responsibly.

After that, I thoroughly enjoyed writing the book, and am convinced it’s my best work on the subject. 



Question: How has social media influenced the landscape for salespeople and storytelling?

Paul: For the kind of sales storytelling I’m talking about, I don’t think those changes are very relevant. For the purposes of this book, I’m talking about the kind of stories a salesperson tells a prospective buyer either face to face, or over the phone. I’m not considering things like television ads here. That’s marketing, not sales. Similarly, social media is generally the work of the marketing department, not the sales department.

Most real selling still happens in those face-to-face meetings with the buyer or over the phone. Sure, that face-to-face meeting might happen over Skype from a thousand miles away, or that phone call my technically be carried over the Internet instead of a phone wire. But it’s still an oral story told from one person’s mouth to another person’s ear.

The exact same tools and techniques I teach in the book for how to structure and craft a great sales story will work just as well for the marketing and social media folks. I just haven’t included those as examples and haven’t structured the book around that audience. 


Question: Why is capturing attention and building trust so important today versus a decade ago?

Paul: It would be easy to answer by claiming that today people are far more distracted, have shorter attention spans, and are much less trusting than they were a decade ago. And I think that’s definitely true. But if my answer ended there, it might suggest that if that trend reversed itself, storytelling would no longer be as important. And I don’t believe that. It’s the oldest form of communication known to man. We’ve been telling stories since we were drawing pictures on cave walls. I advocate better storytelling because it works, not because it’s trendy. 



Question: What's the best way to tell a quick story in a cold-call email to help gain the attention of a prospective customer?

Paul: In the research for the book, I concluded there are 25 different kinds of sales stories that all salespeople need to have in their repertoire. Those stories span the entire sales process from introducing yourself to a buyer, to building rapport, to the main sales pitch, to handling objections, to negotiating price, to closing the sale, even to service after the sale.

That cold-call email is a good place for two of those 25 stories: 1) an “Explaining what I do simply” story, or 2) a “Who I’ve helped and how I’ve helped them” story.

The first one is a very short, simple, hypothetical story to illustrate what you do instead of confusing and boring your reader with management speak like this: “I represent a company that’s best in class at optimizing the distribution channels between the core manufacturing center and the desired consumer experience.”

The second one is a more detailed, true story about a current customer of yours. It provides a specific example of a problem they had and how your product or service solved that problem. This will be a far more compelling thing for them to read than a list of features and benefits. 


Paul Smith is one of the world’s leading experts on business storytelling. He’s a keynote speaker, storytelling coach, and bestselling author of three books on harnessing the power of storytelling for some of the most important work we do as humans: Lead with a StoryParenting with a Story, and Sell with a Story. He can be found at www.leadwithastory.com.  

Saturday, 8 October 2016

How To Help Your Employees Embrace Change


Change is inevitable. Change is good.  Help your employees and team learn to embrace change.

Here are some solid insights from Dr. Rodger Dean Duncan's (Liberty, Missouri) book, Change-friendly Leadership -- How to Transform Good Intentions into  Great Performance:
  • The kind of behavior change that results in lasting (sustainable) change must accommodate people's feelings--feelings that involve trust, confidence, passion, and all those other intangible but very real things that make us human.
  • It's often the stress that people resist, not the change itself.
  • Continuity gives us roots; change gives us branches, letting us stretch and grow and reach new heights (Pauline R. Kezer).
  • A transformational leader focuses primarily on initiating and "managing" change.  He/she influences people to improve, to stretch, and to redefine what's possible.
  • It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change (Charles Darwin).
  • Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.

Wednesday, 5 October 2016

Six Steps For Discussing Poor Performance With An Employee


As a leader, the time will come when you will have to speak with an employee about his or her poor performance. Here are six steps that will guide you through that process:
  1. Tell him what performance is in need of change and be specific.
  2. Tell him how his actions negatively affect the team.
  3. Let the discussion sink in.
  4. Set expectations of performance improvement and timeframe, and get his agreement on the desired outcome.
  5. Remind him that he is a valuable part of the team and that you have confidence his performance will improve.
  6. Don't rehash the discussion later. You made your point. Give him to make his improvement.

Monday, 3 October 2016

How To Write A Company Policy


Keep these five tips in mind when you craft your next company policy:
  1. Keep the policy short and simple.
  2. Get rid of two old policies for every new policy you implement.
  3. Make sure that your organization's policy and procedures are written to serve your employees and customers--not just your organization.
  4. Don't write a policy in reaction to a single incident.  The problem may never arise again.
  5. Don't write a policy longer than one-page, no matter how large your organization may be.
Thanks to author Bob Nelson for these great tips from his book, 1001 Ways To Energize Employees.

Sunday, 2 October 2016

Seven Ways To Delight Your Customers


If you want to delight your customers, then the book by Steve Curtin, Delight Your Customers -- 7 Simple Ways to Raise Your Customer Service from Ordinary to Extraordinary, is a must-read for you and your employees.

The book explains the seven ways for you and your employees to demonstrate exceptional customer service:
  1. Express genuine interest
  2. Offer sincere and specific compliments
  3. Share unique knowledge
  4. Convey authentic enthusiasm
  5. Use appropriate humor
  6. Provide pleasant surprises
  7. Deliver service heroics
"Exceptional customer service typically costs no more to deliver than poor customer service," explains Curtin.



For example:
  • How much does it cost to express genuine interest in customers or to anticipate their needs?
  • Does it cost more to display a sense of urgency or to pay attention to detail?
  • Do you pay your employees more to smile, to make eye contact, or to add energy to their voices?
Curtin reminds readers that:
  • Customers don't establish relationships with businesses.  They establish relationships with the people inside the businesses.
And, here are some of Curtin's recommended best ways to express genuine interest in your customers:
  • Offer personalized greetings
  • Use names
  • Practice assertive hospitality
  • Ask questions
  • Cosset
  • Anticipate needs
  • Remember preferences
  • Pay attention to detail
  • Display a sense of urgency
  • Solicit feedback
  • Offer personal farewells
  • Follow up on service
And, finally, when soliciting feedback, do so without marginalizing your customers' suggestions or sounding defensive.