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Month: September 2018

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Best Practices Growth Industries Management Skills Technology

Eliminate Cognitive Friction to Maximize Human Performance

By Daniel Burrus and Neil Smith

(In this blog series on how elevating cognitive performance is a game changer for organizations, I’ve invited Neil Smith, CTO at Think Outcomes, to join me in writing on this important topic due to his expertise and the cognitive performance software his firm has created.)

Improving cognitive performance is a strategic imperative for anticipatory leaders. Yet, cognitive performance slows down due to cognitive friction. Cognitive friction occurs when professionals can’t think through uncertainties clearly in their minds. These uncertainties include:

  1. Risks
  2. Opportunities
  3. Outcomes
  4. Consequences
  5. Implications
  6. Impact
  7. Causations
  8. Causes and effects

In an organization, cognitive friction occurs frequently across many professional roles, minds and perspectives. For the 15 areas in a cognitive operation below, cognitive friction not only spans many responsibilities, it also impacts relationships and shapes cultures.

15 Areas of a Cognitive Operation

Cognitive Friction Across Perspectives

Cognitive friction occurs when two or more professionals are challenged to get on the same page. They must resolve their perspectives — which can be very challenging. In business, professionals:

  • Perform critical thinking
  • Make decisions
  • Communicate with stakeholders
  • Collaborate with other professionals
  • React to uncertainties
  • Work with peers and stakeholders to address situational challenges
  • Advise other professionals about their cognitive work
  • Evaluate the thoroughness to think through situations in the minds of their thinkers
  • Review the risk-reward trade-offs among their team members

Cognitive Friction Within the Mind of a Professional

Cognitive friction exists within the minds of professionals and creates undue stress. The six reasons friction occurs is due to:

  1. The processing limitations in the mind
  2. Ineffective communications
  3. Unproductive collaborations
  4. Uncertainties in their minds
  5. Lack of cognitive insights and foresights
  6. Bias that leads to cognitive divisiveness


Processing Limitations in the Mind

When processing multiple data points in the mind, cognitive work can become a highly stressful activity. It’s amazing how many leaders are not equipped with cognitive tools to manage uncertainty across situations, close their knowledge gaps and achieve expected results. When a situation includes more than seven variables, it’s well-known that the human mind is not able to process this level of complexity. Think how we receive, process and remember phone numbers. Our minds are not wired to synthesize 10 or more digits at a time. In the U.S., people think about the 10 digits in a pattern of a 3-digit area code, a 3-digit prefix and 4-digits for the line number; our minds consume, process and recall smaller chunks of information.

Try this exercise in your mind to see how complexity increases quickly: spin all the digits of five phone numbers in your mind as if the numbers were on a slot machine. Can you keep track of the numbers? Most of us cannot; our minds get overwhelmed right away.

When multiple changing variables exist, that’s the type of stress professionals experience every day in their minds as they perform their risk-reward trade-offs. Without additional cognitive capabilities, leaders turn to their gut as a place to find answers; often, though, the gut isn’t a very good logic engine. Operating risk is introduced when critical thinkers and decision makers do not have access to complementary, cognitive tools to perform their cognitive activities at their best.

Effective Communications Accelerate Buy-in and Decisions

The challenges increase further for critical thinkers and decision makers when they communicate with their stakeholders, peers and dependents to gain agreement about multiple, interdependent variables. These heterogeneous thinkers add new perspectives to the decision process, which increases the complexity.

That’s when members of decision teams communicate from their emotional viewpoints. Decisions stall, lasting impressions impact culture and relationships, and people experience an impasse.

Productive Collaborations are Needed to Achieve Better Outcomes

Google Hangouts, Skype and Zoom represent a step forward in collaboration and reduce travel costs. Yet, as professionals move between face-to-face and online meetings, they still struggle to innovate with breakthrough thinking.

Often, we hear professionals say, “if I could see what’s in the minds of the people I’m working with, that would help me address the challenges I’m aware of, too.” Yet, given human limitations, most professionals can’t bridge that gap effectively. If meetings involved the ability to demonstrate thinking patterns, that would help professionals overcome this human hurdle.

As professionals join meetings, they commonly bring their mental models and biases from years of experience. Their mental models create barriers to synthesizing other people’s perspectives as well as new ways of thinking into their own thinking. Where they use their voices and presentation software to convey their thinking, most attendees try to follow the logic rather than elevate their own thinking. If they had a way to unify their thinking through the visualization of evidence that focused on addressing questions of uncertainty and their critical thoughts, they’d optimize their time, learn to pre-solve issues and focus on better outcomes together. That would advance productivity in thinking in a visual way.

When professionals conclude their meetings with follow-on questions, leaders wonder which questions weren’t brought up? Are their teams going down the wrong paths? How do these questions connect to the stakeholders’ objectives? Are they considering the Hard Trends based on future facts that are shaping the future? Professionals expend valuable time to get to clarity as they reflect on their learnings when they need insights and foresights more quickly. Anticipatory leaders seek to institute advanced collaboration processes that yield greater productivity among their teams. They see everyday innovation and breakthrough thinking as a competitive advantage today as well as tomorrow.

Uncertainties, Cognitive Insights and Foresights

As connected teams in today’s data-driven world, data scientists and stakeholders strive for better outcomes together. Where data scientists focus on big data and use machine learning to ask questions about data, stakeholders focus on decision information and ask questions to solve situational challenges. The minds of stakeholders are as effective as the:

  1. Quality of their questions to resolve their problems and uncertainties
  2. Cognitive insights and foresights that arise from their mental models

Bias and Cognitive Divisiveness

In the minds of professionals, cognitive friction results from their cognitive biases and the synthesis of disparate data. Cognitive divisiveness exists among professionals as data synthesis and bias differ across perspectives. Cognitive friction and divisiveness affect velocity and outcomes.

In their roles, professionals:

  • Are often unable to access data structured the way they think about risk-reward trade-offs
  • Don’t know what they don’t know during decision making
  • Are challenged many times to demonstrate their points of view
  • Are frequently challenged to see alternative points of view during communications
  • Struggle to shape the thinking of team members due to predefined mental models
  • Are challenged to arrive at strategic foresights and engineer outcomes

A Critical Thinking Advantage

To gain an advantage in today’s world, cognitive teams must pre-solve issues through a continuous flow of cognitive insights and foresights. To achieve their objectives, they must find new wisdom within the cognitive gaps in their minds — i.e., to get from “here” to “there.” “Here” is where they are today in context to their cognitive responsibilities. “There” is where they need to go. This cognitive gap represents their current state and target state of their subject profiles. Their stakeholders depend on actionable knowledge and wisdom from their team of thinkers to improve business results. This starts with the capabilities of their cognitive resources and tools.

Learn how to elevate your planning, accelerate innovation and transform results with The Anticipatory Learning System and how to maximize the cognitive performance of your team with Cognitive Performance Software.

Categories
Entrepreneurship Management Personal Development

Employee Retention: What Today’s Employees Are Looking For

Today’s workforce is a different breed from the dedicated 9-5’ers of yesteryear; this makes employee retention an entirely new ballgame. The current financial landscape has a great deal to do with it. The internet allows consumers to buy more than ever before with a few clicks of a mouse, while real estate prices continue to rise and income rates remain relatively static.

Decades ago, 40 hours a week at a menial job could buy a house, a car, and a middle-class lifestyle for an entire family. Those days are over. Today’s workers may not intend to create a family and sustain it in the traditional sense; both partners in a relationship usually go to work every week. Therefore, the landscape of employees’ expectations has changed, as they attempt to derive deeper satisfaction from employment than ever before.

Employee retention is a matter of ensuring that their expectations are met.

I recently had the opportunity to partner with a company called Beaconforce. They have built software that allows managers to survey their employees a twice a day to determine their employee’s mindset: how satisfied they are with their work, and how comfortable they feel with their managers.

In the process of building the software, Beaconforce learned that the key expectations for today’s employees include a feeling of purpose and belonging, autonomy, freedom, clear goals, continuous feedback, and a sense that they are growing and improving over time. Today’s employees also want to be challenged and have an aversion to boredom.

The software Beaconforce developed creates a chart demonstrating the employees’ level of satisfaction in each of these areas, along with their level of trust in their managers (and the company at large.) It also indicates how often they are in their “flow zone”—feeling fulfilled and constructive in their work, as opposed to stagnant and/or confused.

So, let’s say the software reports that employees are not entirely satisfied. Perhaps they don’t feel a sense of autonomy, they are bored or, worse, they don’t trust their manager. What’s next?

That’s where my partnership with Beaconforce comes in. As a transformational business coach, I work with managers to identify their blind spots and determine which ideas and behaviors are creating a less-than-ideal environment for their employees. In the days that follow, managers have the opportunity to make choices regarding how they relate to their employees, rather than continuing to act in the same way that generated the problems they want to address, to begin with.

If you are in a management position, with or without the Beaconforce software, it is very important to pay attention to each individuals’ satisfaction to ensure employee retention for your company.

If employee retention is something you are struggling with or something you simply feel you could improve, consider a three-month coaching package. Six sessions (once every-other-week) can identify blindspots you were completely unaware of. The resulting changes in management style will make a huge difference in how your employees feel about working with you.

Contact me to set up a free consultation to discuss what this particular program looks like, and how it can benefit you. Also, if you have any questions about employee retention (or how you might create a better work environment for your employees) feel free to contact me directly, or leave a comment below!

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Best Practices Body Language Entrepreneurship Human Resources Management Marketing Negotiations Sales Skills Women In Business

How to Make ‘You’ a Better Negotiator

 “Small increments add up. Observe the small increments that make you a better negotiator.” -Greg Williams, The Master Negotiator & Body Language Expert

Did the word, ‘you’, draw your attention to this article? If you don’t think it did, think again. If not at your conscious level, subliminally, it did affect you. Knowing when to use ‘you’ in a negotiation can make you a better negotiator.

The Story:

“I’m canceling my monthly subscription”, stated an irate customer. “Why”, asked the service manager. “Because I didn’t like the way you resolved my issue”, replied the customer. With that, the service manager crossed his arms and retorted in a defensive tone, “what did you expect me to do? I told you we don’t settle that type of claim!”

‘You’ can be an insidious or gravely dangerous word if not used correctly in a negotiation. ‘You’ is very directive. It’s not me, or someone else, it’s directed at a single individual, you. When negotiating, be cautious about when and how you use that word.

The following are ways to use ‘you’ to enhance your negotiation efforts, while making you a better negotiator.

Using ‘You’ Strategically:

  • Consider the other negotiator’s demeanor. The opposing negotiator’s mood will affect his perception. In some cases, depending on his mood, the word ‘you’ can be perceived as being accusatory.
  • Inflection impacts the perception of ‘you’ (e.g. you need help? you need help!) – In either example, the question or statement could be perceived as being heartfelt or sarcastic depending on the inflection of how it’s posed.
  • Since ‘you’ grabs the attention of a person, use it to command attention (e.g. I need you to consider this, now.)

Using ‘You’ Haphazardly:

  • Some negotiations can become very heated. During such times, be aware that ‘you’ can ramp temperatures higher (e.g. you do it too!)
  • Not being strategic when using ‘you’ can dilute its value (e.g. do you mean that? You don’t mean that!) When ‘you’ is the first word in your statement or question it becomes more poignant.
  • Don’t overuse ‘you’. To make it more impactful, use it to stress and/or highlight a point (e.g. that is good versus, you are good.)

Body Language:

To assess the effect of ‘you’ during the negotiation, observe hand, head, and eye movements. Immediately after stating, ‘you’, observe your negotiation counterpart’s body language.

  • Hand – palms extended facing you, he’s defending himself against your proposal/accusation (i.e. whoa, not so fast.) – palms up and shoulder shrug (i.e. what do you want me to do?) – palms down, after having been up (i.e. rejection) – fist (i.e. anger)
  • Head – moving away (i.e. putting distance between you and your assertion) – moving toward (i.e. willing to embrace or confront (definitive action noted by demeanor)) – head tilted (i.e. in thought mode)
  • Eyes – narrowing (i.e. focused, attentive to what’s being conveyed and how it’s being stated) – wide (i.e. excitement, can be good or bad – assess meaning based on demeanor)

When seeking to enhance a negotiation, or threading the needle of doubt, consider how you can employ the usage of ‘you’. When used appropriately, you’ll expand your negotiation position exponentially. You will experience greater negotiation outcomes … and everything will be right with the world.

Remember, you’re always negotiating!

After reading this article, what are you thinking? I’d really like to know. Reach me at Greg@TheMasterNegotiator.com

To receive Greg’s free “Negotiation Tip of the Week” and the “Sunday Negotiation Insight” click here http://www.TheMasterNegotiator.com/greg-williams/

#Opportunity #Power #secrets #HiddenOpportunities #Mistakes #Management #SmallBusiness #Money #Negotiating #combat #negotiatingwithabully #bully #bullies #bullying #Negotiations #PersonalDevelopment #HandlingObjections #Negotiator #HowToNegotiateBetter #CSuite #TheMasterNegotiator #psychology #NegotiationPsychology

Categories
Growth Leadership Personal Development

Use the Barefoot Spirit to Ignite Entrepreneurial Culture Within Your Business

After selling our business, our acquirer asked if we would work for them as brand consultants, to “keep the Barefoot spirit alive,” as they put it. We liked “the Barefoot spirit” so much that it led to our first book’s title—The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle, and Heart Built America’s #1 Wine Brand. 

We’ve since spoken at over 30 national and international universities that teach entrepreneurship. We’ve also had the pleasure of giving keynote speeches for conferences and events of all kinds, where audiences see us as a real example of entrepreneurial success. Everyone wants to know our secret.

We encourage our audiences to use our guided principles as described in The Barefoot Spirit—many of which we learned the hard way. With these principles, we want our listeners to create a positive company culture within their own businesses.

We spoke at the second C-Suite Network National Conference, where more than 400 C-Suite executives sat at the Ritz Carlton in Marina del Rey to get the scoop on the latest best practices, disruptive business approaches, and up-and-coming business philosophies. They heard from truly successful entrepreneurs about how they found success.

Along with our story, we shared some guiding principles we’ve used to empower and engage our people, to make work more comprehensive and fun, and to shake up a stodgy industry. We first discussed our initial misconceptions and mistakes that wound up costing us. We then shared what we learned, and how we applied this knowledge with a new entrepreneurial spirit to our vendors, customers, staff, and community to develop a best-selling brand.

Barefoot Wine’s foundation was the two-division company. Many companies go with a top-down structure with the CEO and president on top, followed directly by senior vice presidents, junior VPs, division leaders, department managers, lower groups, and so on. Just one of the silos in this pyramid structure contains customer service and another sales. This led us to ask, “How can you put the customer on top if you put sales and customer service on the bottom?” Pyramids aren’t for businesses—they’re for dead pharaohs.

Barefoot had just two divisions: Sales and sales support. That’s it! Each person who was not in the sales department was in sales support, from the CEO to administration, from production to advertising, from finance to compliance. Each earned bonuses based on sales, development, and profitability.

Our corporate culture wasn’t stiff and rigid. It was based on acknowledgement, permission, and, of course, fun. Since we operated on a know-the-need rather than a need-to-know basis, people had the permission and confidence to contribute. The most successful marketing solutions came from our own staff. They also had permission to make a mistake as long as they claimed responsibility, understood how it happened, and improved our procedures for the future. We didn’t hide our mistakes. We celebrated them. Barefoot was created on the backs of mistakes.

On each team member’s work anniversary, we sent a company-wide memo that appreciated them and validated their efforts. It highlighted what they did in the past year to boost growth, sales, and profitability. This way, everyone else knew what their colleague accomplished, and how they could be acknowledged, too.

We embraced a fun and lighthearted spirit. We made adversity into a game. What’s more adverse than being told “no”? So, we started playing the “no” game, where each team member tallied how many “no”s they got. 7 was the average. You needed 3 to start playing, and once you got to 15, you were considered overdue for a “yes”!

We made the choice to release our second book at the C-Suite Network Conference. The Entrepreneurial Culture: 23 Ways to Engage and Empower Your People is written for corporate leaders who want to bring the Barefoot spirit to their own people. You can find our second book at www.thebarefootspirit.com. Happy reading!

 

For more, read on: http://c-suitenetworkadvisors.com/advisor/michael-houlihan-and-bonnie-harvey/

 

 

Categories
Best Practices Entrepreneurship Management Marketing Negotiations Sales Women In Business

That Which Gets Rewarded, Gets Repeated

“Watch what you reward to ensure the value contained is worthy of being rewarded.” -Greg Williams, The Master Negotiator & Body Language Expert 

Are you mindful of what you reward? What’s rewarded gets repeated. That means, you set a precedent when you reward an action. That action then becomes a guideline to which you compare future actions. Those future actions may serve you to a point and then lead you astray. Thus, you must always be attentive to the actions you reward.

Action Drivers:

Do you note what drives you to action, when it occurs, and the spark that ignites it? When actions lead to positive outcomes, you should note what gave them life. Those are actions that warrant rewarding; they’re serving to advance your goals. Never ignore something that adds value to your life. To ensure that you don’t, note when such value exists.

Routines and Processes:

Do you observe the routines you engage in that lead to greater satisfaction? At the end of the day, take a moment to reflect on the activities you engaged in during the day and assess your degree of satisfaction. By measuring your satisfaction, you’ll note the routines that allowed you to experience it. If you’re truly satisfied, incorporate the routines that serve you best into a process you engage in whenever you wish to experience those sensations again.

Message and Image:

If a message is too harsh, at some point, the recipient may turn a deaf ear to it. One must always be open to matching the delivery of a message to the way the listener wishes to receive it. The better that match is, the better the probability that the message will be received.

Watch the message delivery you reward. If you reward the wrong delivery, the further you’ll be from success.

Aches:

Heart aches, stomach aches, headaches, are all signs that something’s out of kilter. Always be alert and apprise when life tosses you warnings. The thought or action that promoted it should be a sign to not reward that action in the future. You don’t want to be in that place again.

The more aware you are of what you reward, the more aware you’ll be of how to progress your life. If you note when you receive the greatest return for the efforts you exert, that’ll lend insight into what you should reward … and everything will be right with the world.

What does this have to do with negotiations?

Negotiations are intensely entangled by rewards and penalties. If you observe what fears motivate the other negotiator, you can use negative stimuli to motivate him to action. Then, you can reward him for adopting your perspective by lessening those fears.

When engaged in any negotiation, consider the topics mentioned in the headings above. All of them impact the flow and outcome of a negotiation. Thus, the more aware you are of the stimulus that promotes them, the better you can utilize them to enhance your negotiation efforts. Therein will lie what you should reward during the negotiation.

Remember, you’re always negotiating!

After reading this article, what are you thinking? I’d really like to know. Reach me at Greg@TheMasterNegotiator.com

To receive Greg’s free “Negotiation Tip of the Week” and the “Sunday Negotiation Insight” click here http://www.themasternegotiator.com/greg-williams/

#Rewards #Mind #Brain #Thinking #Success #Emotion #Business #Progress #SmallBusiness #Negotiation #NegotiatingWithABully #Power #Perception #emotionalcontrol #relationships #liars #Mask #HowToNegotiateBetter #CSuite #TheMasterNegotiator #ControlEmotions

Categories
Best Practices Growth Personal Development Technology

A Strategic Imperative for Anticipatory Leaders Is Cognitive Performance

By Daniel Burrus and Neil Smith

(In this blog series on how elevating cognitive performance is a game changer for organizations, I’ve invited Neil Smith, CTO at Think Outcomes, to join me in writing on this important topic due to his expertise and the cognitive performance software his firm has created.)

AI and cognitive computing have grabbed headlines. Yet, anticipatory leaders know that the elevation of cognitive performance among teams is key to maximize results. Leaders need to help their teams of professionals improve how they envision opportunities, manage downside risks and achieve greater results. Cognitive computing has to do more than deliver data-driven insights to their minds. It must help teams shape outcomes, act on implications and professionalize role-based, cerebral processes in the form of software processes. That’s where cognitive performance is front and center.

Cognitive performance involves how well professionals perform their cognitive work. Specifically, how they:

  • Establish vision
  • Identify problems
  • Ask questions of uncertainty
  • Arrive at critical thoughts
  • Analyze situations
  • Synthesize information
  • Reason
  • Judge
  • Solve problems
  • Communicate
  • Collaborate
  • Define follow-on actions

They perform these cerebral activities with their thoughts and their communications. These mini processes in their minds are nondeterministic and lead to decisions within organizations. As machine learning and deep learning move into organizations, professionals who want to increase their cognitive performance must step up their game at the same time. They must center their attention on addressing uncertainties and advance their abilities to identify and create greater certainty. In doing so, they must raise their levels of quality in decision-making processes and stakeholder communication processes that take place in their minds. Their stakeholders, customers, suppliers, employees and their industries depend on it. The status quo of gut-based decision making and misunderstandings among viewpoints leads to operational inefficiencies and monetary waste in downstream activities.

Change is accelerating in business, which creates more uncertainties that find their way into enterprises across all functional responsibilities — in strategies, integration, operations, supply chains, human resources, research, engineering, finance, process management, product management and consulting, to name a few. Today, cognitive performance is based on role-based experience, learning, frequency, recency and luck — all of which vary from role to role and person to person.

The cognitive activities in the minds of professionals are ripe for optimization. Optimization is possible by learning anticipatory skills and applying cognitive performance technologies.

The human mind is limited when it is engaged to:

  • Structure decision data
  • Process situational information
  • Store organized knowledge
  • Recall situations with specificity
  • Understand alternative viewpoints
  • Engineer outcomes with greater clarity

Although these are human limitations, the mind is extendable through the use of computing, which does a very good job of augmenting the mind for these activities. In today’s era of cognitive computing, the human mind can benefit from a digital extension to achieve the cognitive capabilities it cannot — and does not — realize on its own.

At work, professionals who think for a living formulate how to execute their work in their minds. They’ve built their cognitive expertise over time through on-the-job experiences and homegrown cerebral processes.

Business operations are both transactional and cognitive

Before transactional software systems codified the operating processes of transactional work into the business infrastructure – i.e., ERP, SCM and CRM processes – organizations created homegrown processes and systems to manage their transactional operations. ERP, SCM and CRM systems optimized task-oriented processes before, during and after a customer transaction within organizations, in supply chains and in demand chains. As a result, the transactional side of the operating model has become relatively frictionless.

Today’s friction exists within the minds of professionals on the cognitive side of the operating model. A key to future success is to eliminate this friction. That’s where anticipatory skills, combined with cognitive performance software, comes into play.

Learn how to elevate your planning, accelerate innovation and transform results with The Anticipatory Learning System and how to maximize the cognitive performance of your team with Cognitive Performance Software.

Categories
Marketing Personal Development

Your Corporate Website: The Cyber Face of Your Company

As a C-Suite executive, you take direct responsibility for many aspects of your business. This also means that you know the necessity to delegate specific responsibilities to those who have expertise in these areas.

You don’t take direct charge of the payroll or personally hire everyone who joins your company. You don’t play lawyer, accountant, or personnel manager.

You also don’t play webmaster. An expert designed and set up your company web site. However, your web site is an aspect of your business to which you need to pay close attention.

Many prospective clients get their first view of your business online. They’re searching for a product or service, see a listing for your company, and click on the link. What happens next can determine whether you gain a client or prospect or someone who immediately clicks out and goes on to click the link of one of your competitors.

Visit your web site at least once a month and do your best to see it with the eyes of someone who’s viewing it for the first time.

Is It Visually Appealing?

  • What’s your immediate impression?
  • Does it look inviting?
  • Does it make you want to explore further?
  • Does it appear to be professionally designed?

Does It Provide Easy-to-Find Information?

  • Can you glance at your site’s home page and know immediately what services your company provides?
  • Does the page feature your mission statement in succinct, direct language?
  • Does the home page (and all other pages) have a navigation bar that shows the visitor how to find information on specific aspects of your company?
  • Is the contact information (phone number, address, email address) clearly shown on each page?

Does It Offer a Way to Persuade Your Visitor to Provide Contact Information?

This is vital. Even if the visitor doesn’t decide to pick up the phone or send an email message, you can still benefit from his or her visit.

Some businesses, for example, in exchange for the visitor’s email address, offer ebooks, white papers, checklists, videos and other free irresistible free opt in offers. This is an excellent way to build an email list.

Does It Look Friendly?

This may be one of the most important factors in your web site’s qualities. To turn the visitor into someone who contacts you, you need a web site that projects a quality of being approachable. This is less difficult to convey than you might think.Having a photo of the CEO is one excellent way to project a friendly quality.

  • Use photos of your main corporate headquarters, both outside and inside.
  • If you manufacture physical products, show photos of them.
  • Many web sites effectively use short videos that act as a tour of your business.
  • Have testimonials strategically placed on the home page and throughout all the pages of the site.

Study Your Competition

Now that you’re thoroughly familiar with your company’s web site, visit those of your competitors. This tour may leave you very happy with your site, but if this is the case, don’t become complacent. Look for details or design features that you believe would make your web site even more appealing.

Be Vigilant

It’s never been more important to have a dynamic, vibrant corporate web site that appears welcoming and inviting. First appearances count everywhere, but they assume special importance in the virtual world.

Pat Iyer is a ghostwriter and editor who has been online since 1996. She works with C suite executives to polish their written communications. Reach her at patriciaiyer@gmail.com or through her website Editingmybook.com

Categories
Growth Management Personal Development

Great Leaders Use and Encourage Experimentation

Have you ever wondered where and when the medical profession learned about germ theory?  Thanks to someone who was willing to challenge the existing surgery methods and experiment to uncover new methods, surgeons now thoroughly scrub before surgery and wear protective gear during surgery. How did that significant change in thinking and behavior occur?

In 1847 Hungarian-born physician Ignaz Semmelweis, while working at an obstetrics unit in Vienna was astonished and concerned with the frequency of child fatalities that occurred after birth when assisted by medical students.  The rate of child death was 10-20 times higher than those that occurred with births assisted by midwives.

Semmelweis’ concern motivated him to do a meticulous examination of the clinical practices.  By experimenting, he discovered that the medical students who assisted in childbirth often did so after performing autopsies on patients who had died from bacterial infections.  He theorized, the medical students were unknowingly passing on the bacterial infections to the mothers and the children.  Semmelweis instituted a strict policy of hand-washing with a chlorinated antiseptic solution and the mortality rates dropped by 10- to 20-fold within 3 months.

Semmelweis used a problem-solving process that exemplifies Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge Theory.  He had a theory.  He collected data to test the theory.  He made a change to the processes.  He generated significant improvement.  He didn’t blame people.  He didn’t try to control people.  He didn’t threaten, evaluate, or criticize people.  He used a sound scientific problem-solving method.  This is exemplary of a great Deming manager. Deming wanted management to work on improving the system in order to optimize that system over-time.  He wanted managers to create an environment which would provide joy and pride for employees while they continuously adding value to customers.  He wanted managers to question prevailing theory.  He wanted management to be able to predict.  Deming created his System of Profound Knowledge (SoPK) to help managers to accomplish this.

Deming believed that management needed a transformation and that first step in that transformation was the transformation of the individual. (Deming, The New Economics – Second Edition, 1994)   He explained how a manager who understands the key elements of SoPK could then apply those same principles to achieve significant positive results just as Semmelweis did.

Are you teaching, coaching, and encouraging employees to experiment?  If you do, employee engagement, innovation, productivity, and customer experience will improve.

Wally Hauck, PhD has a cure for the “deadly disease” known as the typical performance appraisal.  Wally holds a doctorate in organizational leadership from Warren National University, a Master of Business Administration in finance from Iona College, and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania.   Wally is a Certified Speaking Professional or CSP.  Wally has a passion for helping leaders let go of the old and embrace new thinking to improve leadership skills, employee engagement, and performance.  See other resources here.

For more, read on: https://c-suitenetwork.com/advisors/advisor/wally-hauck/

Categories
Best Practices Entrepreneurship Management Marketing Negotiations Sales Women In Business

Game Theory Finite and Infinite – How to Be a Better Negotiator

“The perceptional difference between finite and infinite can belie your thinking. Always be aware of the one that’s serving you and the one that’s not.” -Greg Williams, The Master Negotiator & Body Language Expert

When we play games, we engage in the wonderment of possibilities. When seeking to negotiate better via game theory, the perspective you adopt determines how you’ll plan for the negotiation and how you should engage in it.

There’s a heavy degree of mathematics involved in game theory. Two aspects I relate to negotiations are the perspectives of finite and infinite propositions. The one you adopt should be determined on the type of negotiator you’re negotiating against and how quickly you or he seeks an outcome.

Finite Negotiating:

Finite negotiations have fixed rules that both negotiators generally agree to. The negotiators may stray slightly outside of the boundaries but they’ll come inbounds in an effort not to have the boundaries expand beyond manageability.

Finite negotiations are good when seeking rigidity in a negotiation. There’s an approximate start and end time/date for the negotiation. Rules that dictate how the negotiators will engage in the negotiation must be established, too. Those rules should be rigid enough to maintain control of the negotiation and endowed with enough flexibility to overcome impasses.

Infinite Negotiating:

Infinite negotiations do not have specified end dates. They have mile-markers denoting deliverables at points in the negotiation. The negotiation itself is without hard rules. Thus, the negotiators know that either can change the rules; if not stated, it should be, so everyone understands the rule(s) of the negotiation.

An infinite approach to negotiating takes into consideration how either negotiator might advantage himself by altering the rules of the negotiation. Knowing that the negotiation doesn’t have a set end date means that each of them must consider long-term strategies. That also implies that the negotiation may encounter the changing of negotiators on both sides. This may occur a multiple number of times.

Finite Vs. Infinite Negotiation Strategy:

A finite strategy in a negotiation might entail negotiating with a major supplier, one that provides supplies to you and your competition. To get the best deal, so you can offer your product to the consumer at a lower price, you might make substantially larger purchases from that supplier than your competitor does in hopes of enticing the supplier to give you the best deal.

With an infinite negotiation strategy, you might start off adopting the same position as outlined with the finite strategy. The strategies then differ at the point when you decide that you’re occupying such a large share of the supplier’s business that you begin to dictate better prices than what you received with the finite strategy. At some point, you may even consider buying the supplier’s business or crating a business that competes against the supplier. In so doing, you’re aiming each maneuver at the competitor that you started the original negotiation with. The infinite approach becomes the longer activity you use to deal with your competitor.

Finale:

As the case in most negotiations, in game theory, a negotiator should negotiate from the assumption that the opposing negotiator will do whatever he can to maximize the outcome in his favor; you should view trust as a vestige virgin. Be prepared to thwart his efforts wherever possible. Thus, even when negotiating from a finite position, be ready to shift to an infinite style of negotiation. By doing so, you’ll prime yourself for a long-term negotiation, one in which you’ll have greater control throughout it no matter what course the negotiation adopts … and everything will be right with the world.

Remember, you’re always negotiating!

After reading this article, what are you thinking? I’d really like to know. Reach me at Greg@TheMasterNegotiator.com

To receive Greg’s free “Negotiation Tip of the Week” and the “Sunday Negotiation Insight” click here http://www.TheMasterNegotiator.com/greg-williams/

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Every Startup Needs Employees with an Entrepreneurial Mindset

Paid employees have led to the collapse of many startups. When you first grow your business, you don’t want to hear, “I was there, pay me!” when you’re already strapped for resources, time, and money. Paying for attendance rather than performance will quickly deplete your budget, leading you to miss invaluable opportunities. You don’t have the privilege to pay employees just for their attendance, even if you wanted to.

When you want to hire new employees, look for problem-solvers and self-starters. Look for candidates who have worked on a team, preferably as the leader. Take this one step forward and look for people who have small business experience. In other words, find people who think like entrepreneurs. These people have what it takes to think and act beyond their “job”, and look at the big picture.

One of the biggest problems your business will face is a clear description of the work required to make it run well. In the beginning, you just don’t know what’s necessary for your company to satisfy clients’ needs. You learn as you go. And, your employees need to find every single chance to contribute, whether or not it’s in the job description.

Just like a football player, knees bent; ready to jump in whatever direction necessary to get the ball, your team must be flexible and willing to get the job done. They have to be looking for the ball! You can’t afford to hire people who don’t think they’re responsible for sales. They must have an interest in sales to understand the meaning of urgency. They need to be on high alert—their income and job security are based on sales. They have to do everything in their power to make that next sale happen, and keep ‘em coming!

To emphasize this, as the business-owner, you must be prepared to take a smaller piece of the bigger pie. You need to be willing to share the benefits, and offer frequent bonuses based on growth, sales, and profitability. If you need to pay a base salary to your salespeople, make it an advance on commission. Do anything you can to send a message that their job security, income, bonuses, and benefits all directly rely on sales.

When you hire people who think like entrepreneurs, your employees will bet their paycheck on your success. They truly believe in your mission, and they know they can help make it happen. To support this through and through, you need to provide comprehensive orientation, in-depth training, and access to consistent learning resources. Make sure they understand how they can contribute to the success of your company by utilizing their skills, and how they will benefit when your company expands and creates more profit. Aren’t “investors” more beneficial than “employees” anyway? Think of how great this will be for your startup company culture! Think focus, commitment, and teamwork. Consider how it will lessen your need to micro-manage your team, giving you the space to focus on more urgent matters.

We say, “In a startup, there is no room for passengers. If you’re not steering, rowing, or bailing, you are swimming because you are no longer on board!”

For more, read on: http://c-suitenetworkadvisors.com/advisor/michael-houlihan-and-bonnie-harvey/

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