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Why do we gather information from buyers?

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Information, when used to influence or sell, has cost us untold loss in business and relationships. It actually causes resistance.

Information Causes Resistance

For some reason, we maintain a long-standing belief that if we offer the right people the right information at the right time, presented in the right way, those it’s intended to influence will be duly impressed and adopt it. But that’s erroneous. Just think how often we

  • patiently explain to our kids why something is bad for them,
  • present a well-considered idea to our boss,
  • offer great data as rationale to lead change initiatives,
  • offer brilliant pitches to prospects to explain our solution

and how often our brilliant delivery and logical (and probably accurate) argument is not only ignored but rebuffed. Certainly the ineffective behaviors continue regardless of the logic of the information we offer. Are they just stupid? Irrational? We’re ‘right’ of course: we’ve got the rational argument and data points.

But do we?

We don’t. And we’re wrong. We’re actually creating resistance, losing business, destroying relationships, and impeding change.

Here’s why. When we present rational data, or make arguments based on logic or wisdom or knowledge, and hope it will sway an opinion or get a new decision made, we’re putting the cart before the horse. While the data itself may be terrific, the timing we use to present it stinks. You see, until there’s internal buy-in for change people have no place to put the information.

As outsiders – leaders, sales professionals, coaches, managers – we are engaged to amend the status quo of clients, prospects, or staff, using information as the rationale for change. But information does not teach someone how to change: information is a knowledge issue, not a behavior choice. Change is a systems problem, not a misunderstanding problem.

Let me explain. People and teams, companies and families, are each unique systems with components that buy-in to agreed-upon rules -idiosyncratic beliefs and maps of the world – and determine our behaviors. So someone, or a company, with ‘green’ beliefs won’t adopt non sustainable activities, and who/whatever is uncomfortable with these accepted beliefs aren’t admitted into the system.

Offer Information Only When System Ready For Change

It is only when parts of the system seek a new level of excellence and can figure out how to change without disruption will any sort of change be considered, regardless of our initiatives as outsiders to influence the change. If the system had recognized the need to change and knew how to fix it congruently they would have fixed the problem already.

At the point the need for change is considered, even by a small part of the system, the system must get buy-in from everything and everyone that will touch the new solution and knows how to change its underlying rules in a way that insures minimal disruption. In other words, no buy-in/no agreed-upon safe route forward = no change considered = no information accepted: the information doesn’t fit anywhere, can’t be heard, can’t be understood. We end up pushing valid data into a closed system that doesn’t recognize the need for it.

Telling kids why they should clean their rooms, telling prospects why your solution is better, telling managers to use new software doesn’t create the hoped-for change, regardless of how cogent the information except where the kids, buyers, managers were already set up to/seeking change and know how to move forward congruently (i.e. the low hanging fruit).

Here are a couple of simple examples.

  1. As you run out the door to get your daughter to school your spouse says, “I think we should move.” Huh! “We’ll speak more tonight,” you reply. On your way home you notice a great house for sale and you buy it. Do you think the information about the house is relevant to your family at that point (even if it’s the perfect house)?
  2. You and your team are getting ready to launch a new product you’ve been developing for two years. Your boss tells you the company has been bought out and it may affect the launch, certainly effects next year’s budget, your work location, and the team. Then a sales person calls selling team building software. Do you think the information about the software is relevant at this point (even if it’s a perfect solution)?
  3. You’re a consultant hired to lead a team through a reorganization. The team is stable, has been working successfully together for three years and enjoys great productivity and camaraderie. Do you think the information about the rationale of reorganization will be adopted effortlessly and effectively?

It’s not about the need or efficacy: change cannot happen until the system knows who or what:

  • will be affected by the new solution;
  • an acceptable solution should be that considers all;
  • the criteria that must be met;
  • the parameters for change to ensure minimal disruption;
  • the level of buy-in or change necessary;
  • the new rules and norms that must be adopted.

As I say in Dirty Little Secrets: the system is sacrosanct. We learned about homeostasis in 6th grade: anything that is seen to be pushing the system out of balance will create resistance. Giving information to any part of the system before everything is managed first merely causes resistance as the system fights for balance.

And so, our brilliant, necessary, cogent information gets ignored, resisted, objected to, or misunderstood and we must handle the ubiquitous objections and resistance. Hence long sales cycles and implementation problems.

Conventional sales, marketing, training, coaching, and leadership models use sharing and gathering information at their core. I’ve developed a model called Buying Facilitation® which is a generic decision facilitation model that enables a system to manage change and manage all of the behind-the-scenes elements needed to garner buy-in first; information is offered once there is agreement for adoption. If you’re a coach, negotiator, seller, purchasing agent, leader, doctor, or implementer add it into your current skills. Then when it’s to offer information, your clients will be ready for it and eager to accept it.

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]

IT’S NOT ABOUT WORK-LIFE BALANCE. IT’S ABOUT SETTING PRIORITIES: 5 Reasons Why Focusing On Priorities Not Balance Makes Life Better

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As a kid, I spent summers on my grandparents’ farm in Georgia. At harvest time, all hands were required in the field—everybody from my seven-year-old self to my seventy-year-old grandmother. If rain was coming, we pushed hard, missing meals and getting little sleep. Maintenance on the farm would slide. Personal needs would be set aside. Everybody was focused on the most important thing: getting the job done before the crop was ruined.

The concept of balance never entered our heads. Why would it? My grandparents had an opportunity with a time limit, and it was our highest priority.

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About the Author

Larry WeidelLarry Weidel is the author of Serial Winner: 5 Actions to Create Your Cycle of Success (Greenleaf; October 2015). He has spent the past 40 years building a national financial services organization and helping the people on his team achieve the success they want. He helped grow A.L. Williams into the financial services giant Primerica. Today, Larry holds weekly coaching calls for leaders across the United States and Canada. His videos, articles, and other resources on career success, leadership, and sales are widely popular. You can learn more at http://weidelonwinning.com/

What Should Coaches Be Listening For?

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A coach’s job is to facilitate potential change, usually by asking questions to identify the components of the problem and decide between solutions while reinforcing the changes and maintaining a trusting relationship. To achieve the excellence that all coaches seek, it’s necessary to avoid the listening filters that could prejudice the interaction, such as:

Bias. By listening for specifically for elements of the stated issues – problems, hopes, missing skills or motivation – a coach will merely hear what she/he recognizes as missing. If there are unspoken or omitted bits, if there are patterns that should be noticed, if there are unstated historic – or subconscious – reasons behind the current situation, the coach may not find them in a timely way, causing the coach to begin in the wrong place, with the wrong timing and potentially creating mistrust with the client.

Assumptions. If a coach has had somewhat similar discussions with other coaches, it’s possible that s/he will make possibly faulty assumptions or guesses that do not take into account the coaches specific, historic, unconscious, and certainly idiosyncratic challenges.

Habits. If a coach has a client base in one area – say, real estate, or leadership – s/he may enter the conversation with many prepared ways of handling similar situations and may miss the unique issues, patterns, and unspoken foundation that may hold the key to success.

As I write in my new book What? Did you really say what I think I heard? the problem lie in our brains. Once we listen carefully for ‘something’, we restrict all else that’s possible to hear as our brains interpret the words spoken according to our bias, often missing the client’s real intent, nuance, patterns, and comprehensive contextual framework and implications.

To have choice as to when, whether, or how to avoid filtering out possibility, we must disassociate – go up on the ceiling and look down – and remove ourselves from any personal biases, assumptions, triggers or habits, enabling us to hear all that is meant (spoken or not). In What? I explain how to trigger ourselves the moment there is a potential incongruence. For those unfamiliar with disassociation, try this: during a phone chat, put your legs up on the desk and push your body back against the chair, or stand up. For in-person discussions, stand up and/or walk around. [I have walked around rooms during Board meetings while consulting for Fortune 100 companies. They wanted excellence regardless of my physical comportment.] Both of those physical perspectives offer the physiology of choice and the ability to move outside of our instincts. Try it.

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]

Measurement Culture & Five Common Traits of High-Performing Organizations

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While culture was once perceived as a vague concept, many organizations are recognizing its importance. The position of chief culture officer (CCO), is held at a number of progressive organizations. The CCO’s primary duty is to focus on maintaining the core parts of the culture that contribute to the organization’s success.

While organizational culture is increasingly observed as a critical factor in success, the implications of measurement are also significant. To build a culture of measurement certain steps need to be taken.

High-performing cultures have been associated with strong financial outcomes; however, these cultures also have strong employee motivation and performance. Research has shown that there are specific cultural characteristics directly related to organization effectiveness and outcomes. High-performance organizations tend to have cultures that share five common traits.

  1. Empowering Style Leadership: Leaders communicate with respect and lead by example. Employees are empowered to use their judgment to make decisions and take action in their day-to-day jobs. Employees are not present to serve management or reinforce bureaucracy. Leadership is supportive of employees, with focus on helping to support employees so they can focus on caring for customers.
  2. Collaborative Environment: This type of environment is inclusive; employees have a sense of belonging, with everyone sharing the responsibilities of identifying problems and coming up with solutions. These types of organizations are highly participatory.
  3. Strong Core Values: Values of respect, loyalty, and integrity are embedded in leadership behaviors toward employees, and infuse the organization.
  4. Planning: Employees know what the long-term plans are for the company and how to get there. Strategy is well-defined and priorities are clear. Plans are clearly articulated and there are specific measures to assess a plan’s success. Employees know what is important for the organization and what is required to do their jobs effectively.
  5. Measurement and Feedback: High-performing organizations not only plan and prioritize what is most important for the business, but also provide indicators and measures to know whether they are hitting the mark or not. Data-driven organizations is another way to describe this environment. Employees receive ongoing feedback so performance is collaboratively assessed as it relates to the business.

Organizational cultural characteristics play a pivotal role in organization effectiveness. Measurement and feedback is one of the components of a high-performing culture. There are many benefits for creating a measurement-oriented organization culture. The following are just a few at the top of the list:

  1. Measurement cultures lay the foundation for organization learning. Information sharing is leveraged in the organization toward knowledge and growth. Data-driven organizations make this possible.
  2. Measurement cultures provide the way for departments to track their progress. Managers have the ability to track progress toward department goals. What happens if the project that is implemented is a flop? Or if needs are not fully met? Tracking along the way allows for modifications if needed to move outcomes in a favorable direction.
  3. Measurement cultures make data-driven decisions. The use of the hunch takes second place to making decisions based on data. If a project is not going in the direction it needs to go, then the data will validate this point. And collecting the right data should help pinpoint where things broke down.

The Leadership Development Practitioner as a Change Agent

Practitioners often view their role as one who influences an individual, group, or organization toward desired change. The change agent plays a significant role in leading the change effort or collaborating with the team assigned to initiating change. Trying to create an environment that is measurement friendly also involves a change agent— someone to lead this effort and manage the change process within an organization.

It is important to remember that building a measurement culture should be a strategic change. The change agent must set the stage with the ‘why’ behind building a measurement culture, make sure that the change effort is in sync with what’s important for the organization, and include action planning and feedback to keep the momentum building. Involving people who are senior in the organization also helps because they have the clout necessary to pave the way for building a measurement culture.

Identify a System to Routinely Review Measures

Adopting a systematic way to plan, collect, analyze, and report on initiatives in the organization sets in motion the process of communicating and reinforcing what is important to the organization, while sending a clear message to key stakeholders as to what needs to change to improve outcomes. This is particularly true when measurement has been planned in advance to collect data points that will tell the story in a comprehensive way.

When leadership development programs are aligned with results-based initiatives or what’s important to the organization, it becomes more likely that Leadership Development initiatives are easily measured and supported. The old adage rings true in this context: What gets measured gets done.

Adapted from Measuring the Success of Leadership Development: A Step-By-Step Guide for Measuring Impact and Calculating ROI (ATD Press, 2015) by Patti Phillips PhD, Jack Phillips, PhD, CEO/President and Chairman of ROI Institute respectively, and co-author Rebecca Ray, PhD., EVP of The The Conference Board.

About the Authors

Jack PhillipsPatti PhillipsPatti Phillips PhD is president and CEO of ROI Institute, Inc. and renowned expert in measurement and evaluation. She helps organizations in over 60 countries demonstrate the value of investing in programs of all types. Phillips serves on the faculty of the UN System Staff College in Turin, Italy. She is Distinguished Principal Research Fellow for The Conference Board and an ATD Certification Institute CPLP Fellow. An author or editor of more than 50 books, Phillips’ work has been has been featured on CNBC, EuroNews, and over a dozen business journals.

Jack Phillips PhD is a world-renowned expert on accountability, measurement, and evaluation. With expertise based on more than 27 years of corporate experience, Phillips has served as training and development manager at two Fortune 500 firms, as senior human resources officer, as a bank president, and as management professor at a major university. He is the author or editor of more than 75 books. SHRM has recognized Phillips for his publications and contribution to the human resources industry. ATD awarded Phillips its highest honor, Distinguished Contribution to Workplace Learning and Development. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and Fortune.

Rebecca Ray PhD is executive vice president, knowledge organization and human capital practice lead for The Conference Board. In this role, she has oversight of the research planning and dissemination process for three practice areas: corporate leadership, economics and business development, and human capital. She is the leader of the global human capital practice.

How to Employ Leadership Fundamentals… or Falter

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StrategyDriven Management and Leadership ArticleReddit, the on-line bulletin board system that posts entertainment, social networking and news content, gained a high profile, attracted Rock Star investors and a $500 million valuation. Then, it executed several strategic moves with seemingly little communication and proceeded to churn its executive ranks through a revolving door.

In the process, Reddit upset nearly everyone; investors, employees and its fanatical community of users alike. Those users architected, for all intents and purposes, a coup de ‘tat that resulted in Interim CEO Ellen Pao’s departure.

There has been no shortage of prognosticators who have offered their own diagnosis and cure on this self-policed and user-directed site. The sacred cow has been Reddit’s free speech and privacy policies. How can the organization create guidelines for socially responsible submissions when some negative offshoots of free speech-extremism, sexism, hate mongering and vigilantism—threaten Reddit’s integrity?

While addressing the sacred cow, the company failed miserably to articulate its strategy and gain support for its direction. Confusion reigned. There appeared to be a thrash-about in several simultaneous directions. If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.

There’s been plenty of unsolicited advice on what to do. Here’s a piece of advice about how to do it. Advance your organization while leading from the front. Employ some leadership fundamentals. Your team and your user community will follow you up the hill, help you capture the enemy flag and celebrate victory with you. I look forward to the party.

First, to hatch a credible plan that has a daylight of a chance to succeed, gain the support of the people who must execute that plan. Collaborate with your people AND your user community. Team meetings, user advisory boards and a consensus approach might take a little time, but a plan concocted in a closet and then jammed down everyone’s throat didn’t work, did it? Share the vision and create a collective energy. You can’t do it alone.

Second, to kick off that game plan, a team must be completely aligned. With that collaborative effort behind you to hatch the plan, you’ve got a much better chance to get everyone on the boat rowing in the same direction. Get your team behind a few tangible goals. Common goals make for an aligned team. An aligned team makes for a focused, bold, impassioned execution.

Third, as you execute that plan, communicate like crazy. Heck, over-communicate. The world of social media is transparent. Make highly visible what you’re trying to accomplish and publicize your score card, what’s working and where you need help. Then pass the credit to those who made the contributions.

Reddit is now in the hands of CEO and returning co-founder Steve Huffman. Here’s the deal, Steve. You’re in a jam. You need to practice some leadership fundamentals. They’ll get you out of that jam. They might keep you out of a future jam to boot.

About the Author

Peter J. BoniPeter J. Boni is Managing Principal at Kedgeway, Inc and author of ALL HANDS ON DECK: Navigating Your Team Through Crises, Getting Your Organization Unstuck and Emerging Victorious (Career Press, 2015).