Resolve to Improve Your Company or Career in 2016!

/in /by

The start of a calendar year is usually a great time for evaluating the leadership and growth of your organization, and ways to take your own career or company to the next level. What better way to start off the New Year than assessing areas that need improvement and establishing new goals for the immediate and long term future. For many executives, especially ones who are already somewhat accomplished, this task is easier said than done. From time to time, we could all use a little help figuring out next steps and how to get there, yet not everyone can afford to hire their own personal leadership coach.

Below are a few key lessons from The Strategic MVP on cultivating a personal brand and unleashing one’s ‘inner nerd’ to help you become a true MVP.

1. The Importance of a Personal Brand

Similar to the brand of a company, your personal brand is the feeling and experience that people have when they interact with you, think about you, or talk about you. Do you have an identifiable personal brand? Managing your personal brand can be one of the most important things you do as you progress in business. What do you want to be known for? If your personal brand is authentically focused on your career aspirations, then the right people will think of YOU when the right opportunity arises. Your personal brand should articulate your values, story, message, and things that are important to you.

Hi there! This article is available for free. Login or register as a StrategyDriven Personal Business Advisor Self-Guided Client by:

Subscribing to the Self Guided Program - It's Free!


 

About the Author

Dr. Brandi StankovicDr. Brandi Stankovic is a professor, organizational change expert, motivational speaker and mommy who inspires firms globally with her models of leadership, engagement and award-winning education. Her clients include billion dollar organizations, trade associations and non-profit foundations.

The Strategic MVP (co-authored by Mark Thompson) is an interactive guide offering motivational lessons from the world’s top CEOs (Warren Buffet, Sir Richard Branson, Martha Reitman, Ingrid Vanderveld, etc.) and ongoing workshop-type exercises. These exercises help readers identify challenges specific to them while offering solutions to help develop important business skills that will take their career and/or organization to the next level.

The Dance Between Cozy Warmth and Burnout at Your Job

/in , /by

StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals ArticleI have been spending the last few days in my Canyon Hideaway at the Four Corners. My main heat source in this small house tugged against the Red Rocks is a wood stove. Every time I get here, I’m having problems starting the fire and keeping it going. For me it is always a threshold to cross to a slower pace living.

Clearly I’m lacking patience the first few days. I have thrown too much wood on a fire that just started. I’ve been frequently standing out on the porch to let some fresh air in my smoke filled home. I’m making the same mistake that I help people avoid in my work as business coach & consultant.

After realizing this, I have to laugh at myself. What a great reminder and a powerful metaphor.

What is a simple heat source for me, had a much deeper meaning when people in this area lived in Tepees. The fire was the center of their living space and had to be tended to constantly. During the winter month it was vital for survival. It also marked the center of their circular living space. A reflection of their core belief that everything moves in a natural cycle.

It was said that one who jumps the fire and ignores the circular way and its seasons gets burned. How true that is for our fast paced world. If only they had known that our modern world even found a fancy word for it: Burnout.

This term is widely used for individuals being utterly exhausted. From what I have seen in my work I believe burnout can happen to companies, too. I have seen people of fast growing companies completely drained, which can paralyze a complete organization.

How does one tend to a companies fire?

A spark is not enough – We need to lovingly tend to what we ignite. Be it a company, a new product, a team or a relationship.

Practice patience. A fire needs time to build up, just like trust. It needs a little time before it can bare the weight of a larger log without going up in smoke.

Everything in moderation. How much heat can a team or an organization take? Does all the change have to happen at once? Size new projects realistically. Don’t let your people go up in flames.

Focus on community. A fire was used to gather and share stories. Your company is only as strong as the ties between people. Tend to them constantly, not just once a year during a team event.

Go circular. Respect the natural cycles of planting seeds, growing, harvesting and rejuvenating. We are jumping the fire all too many times by not honoring times to rest and rejuvenate.

Your company is your living space, just like a Tepee. Make sure the fire that is vital for survival is tended to constantly. Make your living space inviting and cozy for those who come to visit.

About the Author

Barbara Wittmann is an IT consultant, leadership coach and a passionate entrepreneur. Her quest for healthy concepts of leadership and growth brought her into the wilderness, where she explored the ancient wisdom of Native American cultures. She integrates their values and rituals, which are still relevant and livable today, into her everyday business life with great success. She lives in Munich, Germany, and frequently travels to wild and untouched places in the US.

For more information visit www.barbarawittmann.com.

The Business of Kindness

/in , , /by

Lately, while listening to an NPR program, I heard a group of business people discussing kindness.

Kindness – not a word historically associated with corporations, those bastions of male verve – is now being equated with the bottom line. How times have changed. In the 90s when I gave keynotes titled ‘Sales as a Spiritual Practice’ I would get asked: “Yes, but how would we make money?”

Imagine embracing the desire to be helpful and considerate, compassionate and generous as part of accepted business practice. We all know what happens when it’s ignored. We know how workplace issues grind people down, and how infrequently those below the top tier get asked their opinions. We know we lose more good employees to treatment issues than to pay issues. We know that 70% of buying decisions are made by women.

And yet we continue assuming the bottom line is about minimizing costs and maximizing profit.

How Kindness Can Effect Our Bottom Line

The costs of degrading and ignoring employees and making customers conform to our money-saving practices cost us high turnover, a paucity of fresh ideas and new leaders, and the need to hire more supervisory managers to handle the fallout. I know a company here in Austin with a reputation of treating employees so punitively that only naïve out-of-towners apply for the many available jobs.

Research has shown kindness actually increases our bottom line:

  • When employees are asked their opinions, treated respectfully, given jobs that enable them to exhibit excellence regardless of their pay scale, they are more creative, responsible, and loyal. They adopt leadership roles, put in longer hours, and have fewer sick days.
  • When we treat our clients kindly we keep them longer, hear about problems (rather than lose them to competitors), are offered new ideas to monetize, and have brand ambassadors to offer free marketing to connections who may become clients.

Here are a few of my personal experiences of monetizing kindness:

1. Kindness with customers:

a. In Portland recently, I couldn’t locate my correct bus stop. I called the Transit help line and a person answered! And he stayed on the line until I got to my destination!

  • Takeaway: the random acts of kindness I found throughout Portland have led me to prepare to move there.

b. After not receiving my NYTimes for four Sundays, I made two angry calls. The first woman said I would need to speak with a supervisor on Monday; the second woman not only called my local delivery folks, she called back to tell me when the paper would be delivered, called again to make sure I got it, and then left me her cell number in case the problem occurred again.

  • Takeaway: I won’t cancel my subscription.

2. Kindness with employees:

a. In the 80s I ran a tech support company in London with 48 tech folks. Annually, I gave them $2000 to take a week off to renew themselves by attending any course they wanted (photography, cooking). I also required them to take off one day a month to do volunteer work. And at least four times I year went to their job sites (and they were not my direct reports), took them to lunch, and picked their brains on ways we could do better for them and for our clients. Their ideas were terrific. As a side note, I often ran into competitors at conferences who said they tried to hire my folks away yet couldn’t pry them from my grip. “What are you doing to those folks?” I was just respecting them.

  • Takeaway: there was no turnover in 4 years; the tech folks called us whenever they heard rumors of new business and I was in place by the time the vendor delivered the product.

b. I hired a full time ‘make nice’ guy whose job it was to visit staff and clients on site to make sure the relationships and programming worked efficiently, nipping problems in the bud. With no fires to fight I had nothing to do but grow my company.

  • Takeaway: revenue doubled annually; I had a 42% net profit.

The How of Kindness: Using Listening Skills Enhance Relationships

I believe the process of listening is one of the skills that will enable us to be kind. Not only do we need to set up client Listening Conferences and staff Listening Hours, we must hear what’s being said between the lines. My new book What? Did you really say what I think I heard? explains whatever we listen for determines what we hear. So rather than merely listen for problems, we must listen for the patterns in the problems: Lots of turnover? What are we ignoring that can be resolved? Bottom line decreasing due to competition? What are clients telling us that we haven’t been listening for?

Through the years, with clients and staff, coachees and colleagues, I have found the biggest obstacle to authentic communication is how imperfectly we hear others. Far too often we enter conversations with a bias and miss what’s being conveyed that falls outside the range of expectation. Imagine if we approach our conversations with the bias of kindness:

  • An employee is perpetually late with work assignments: is there something going on in the department, with other employees, with her work load, that is causing the problem?
  • Customer service folks must recognize patterns in complaints and become leaders in resolving problems rather than maintaining the status quo. I recently heard a rep say: “I’ve had lots of complaints about this. But there are no plans to fix it.”

How can we monetize kindness with staff and clients? It’s possible to make money AND be kind. Let’s begin the conversation.

About the Author

Sharon Drew Morgen is a visionary, original thinker, and thought leader in change management and decision facilitation. She works as a coach, trainer, speaker, and consultant, and has authored 9 books including the NYTimes Business BestsellerSelling with Integrity. Morgen developed the Buying Facilitation® method (www.sharondrewmorgen.com) in 1985 to facilitate change decisions, notably to help buyers buy and help leaders and coaches affect permanent change. Her newest book What? www.didihearyou.com explains how to close the gap between what’s said and what’s heard. She can be reached at [email protected]

Practices for Professionals – Meetings Best Practice 1: Limit Meeting Attendees

/in , /by

StrategyDriven Professional Meeting PrincipleMeetings provide a unique environment that facilitates collaboration through the provision of robust two-way communications. While other communications mechanisms facilitate information exchange, only meetings provide for the synchronous sharing of ideas – the dynamic interaction that enables groups to rapidly build on each other’s perspectives.

Hi there! This article is available to StrategyDriven Personal Business Advisor Remote Access and Dedicated Advisor clients and those who subscribe to one of the article's related categories. If you're already a Remote Access or Dedicated Advisor client or a related category subscriber, please log in to read this article. Not a client? We'd love to have you on board. Check out our StrategyDriven Personal Business Advisor service options.

Back to Basics: Interviewing for Your Next Sales Position

/in /by

Throughout a sales career, it’s all about the small things. When to push and when to step back and wait. Following up on time, every time. Being consistent and being reliable. All basic stuff – and that’s the problem. It’s all too easy to forget the basic stuff – in the bustle and complexity of the day-to-day.

So when it comes to applying for a position in sales, or moving up the ladder it is more important than ever to get the basics right – especially when it comes to interview time.

Some of the tips here may seem very obvious, but ignore them at your peril. As in any career, getting the basics right, first time and every time, is crucial to land that new dream job.

Hi there! This article is available for free. Login or register as a StrategyDriven Personal Business Advisor Self-Guided Client by:

Subscribing to the Self Guided Program - It's Free!


 

About the Author
Stephen AtkinsonStephen Atkinson is the author of Get a Job in Sales: Your Fast Track to Career Success and Simple Steps to Sales Success: Selling – The Easy Way. Both books offer straight-talking advice on how to get into a sales career and how to be successful once you get there. He is also a sales consultant, owns several diverse businesses, and teaches on the world’s leading online learning platform Udemy.