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Category: Leadership

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Best Practices Entrepreneurship Leadership Skills

Need to Make Connections? Get on the Phone!

The key to breaking the ice with someone new is meeting them face-to-face. You can immediately judge the impact of your words by their facial expressions. Their face has 43 muscles that are able to produce more than twenty expressions. Some of these are negative. If you see a negative one, you know right away how to direct the conversation. But you can’t see those facial expressions through email. If someone doesn’t like what you have to say in an email, you’ll never know until they’ve already digested and reacted to it. And, even then, you still may not know for sure.

When you meet them face-to-face, they know that you are giving them your undivided attention. You now have the chance to demonstrate who you are. This can be the beginning of a fruitful long-term business relationship.

If you can’t meet face-to-face, choose video conferencing. For at least the first meeting and any important conversations thereafter, you will notice physical feedback better through a video conference. Then, both of you will be on the same page.

The next best choice is the telephone. But why not email? You can’t hear the other person’s intonation through email. There are no moments of silence through email. The intonation in someone’s voice can say a lot—are they interested? Pleased? Confused? On the phone, you have countless chances to win someone over just by adjusting to their intonation.

Jeff Stevenson, our client at VinoPRO, says a phone number is worth more than 100 times as much as an email address. According to him, he’s in “the relationship-selling business”. He has the top telephone sales company in the wine industry, and he’s done this by mastering “an ancient form of communication: the telephone!”

More and more companies today prefer email marketing. The first challenge is to get people to open your email. Then, they have to want to read it. And finally, they have to make the decision to invest in your product. Sure, you can reach tens of thousands of people at once, but there may be only 50 buyers. Most email recipients see these types of emails as intrusive and impersonal, so why would they buy?

Jeff uses the “ancient form of communication” to his advantage. He made the Inc. 500 list (with three years running) and is currently developing his third call center. Why? People want to talk to a real person, especially when it comes to luxury items like wine. People want a real relationship. They want to talk to someone who has their best interests at heart. What makes real-time conversation so effective is personalized attention—it just isn’t possible through email!

Being in business through the “ancient” age of fax machines, snail mail, and the telephone has taught us that those technologies work! This isn’t to say we’ve abandoned email or text-based communication, but there is a time and place for them. Our experience with face-to-face interaction has shown us when we must be more personal. For example, when it comes to settling a mix-up, email is completely unreliable. For us, the place for email is recording correspondence, conversation history, and keeping track of documents. Again, it has its place. But you can’t un-send an email!

As convenient as email may be, sometimes you really have to just pick up the phone!

For more, read on: http://csnetworkadvis.staging.wpengine.com/advisor/michael-houlihan-and-bonnie-harvey/

 

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Growth Leadership Personal Development

Trust Is Essential for the Health of an Organization – Part 1

The health of an organization is directly dependent upon the level of trust between employees, management and customers.  Results cannot be predicted when the health of an organization is threatened. Therefore, results depend on the level of trust.  Exceptional leaders recognize all this and will work hard to build and maintain trust.  In my experience however, they are often frustrated with their efforts to build trust.  This is often because their theory of trust is incomplete, and therefore their methods of building and maintaining trust are often ineffective or prove to be short lived.

More and more CEO’s are becoming convinced that the soft skills of building and maintain trust is at least as important as technical skills for individual and organizational success.  According to Stephen M. R. Covey, a 2003 study by Watson and Wyatt showed how a high trust organization can return 286% higher total return than low trust organizations. (Covey, June 2007)

Furthermore, high trust organizations require less bureaucracy, enjoy lower turnover, are better able to manage change, are more collaborative, and can manage growth more effectively and quickly. (Covey, June 2007)

What should be our strategy to build trust? Of course, one can just trust others and hope they reciprocate.  Ernest Hemingway once said, “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”  This may be true, but a leader must have a predictable plan to build and maintain trust or risk wasting time and increasing costs.  We cannot afford increased costs, nor can we live with wasted time.  We cannot afford to just trust others and hope. As Rudy Giuliani once said, “…change is not a destination, just as hope is not a strategy.”

If one of the most important responsibilities of a leader is to manage the variation in trust, then a he/she must have a theory and method.  The purpose of this 4-part series of blogs is to clarify why trust is so important, define and appreciate a definition for trust, to clarify the most effective way to think about trust, and to provide a framework for a predictable method for building and maintaining trust.  It needs to be predictable. We cannot depend on hope.

Part 1:

Our bodies self-regulate.  Water is essential for good health and performance of bodily functions.  When our bodies need water, we become thirsty.  Our thirst motivates us to drink and therefore satisfy the need of our bodies.  Without water our bodies have trouble performing basic functions such as digestion.  We can become lethargic, develop headaches, lack concentration and can even stop performing our responsibilities.

Just as our bodies send signals for water, our organizations and employees can send signals for the need for trust.  With low levels of trust people can become disengaged, unproductive and even cynical.  Successful leaders will not only trust people to do the right things, they will know how and when to provide the “water” necessary for healthy organizational function.

Some leaders still create environments of distrust.  Often there are a few untrustworthy employees who continue to perform poorly.  Their presence, and the leader’s inability to know how to act cause the perceived need for rules and policies which damage trust for all.  Even though there may be a few bad ‘apples”, why not create a system that sends a message of trust instead of distrust?  What we need is a system that allows us to provide the ‘water’ when needed while eliminating the opportunity for the few ‘bad apples’ to influence policy.  This four-part blog series will help us do just that.

To accomplish this requires an appreciation of the right definition of trust. I suggest we adopt The International Association of Business Communicators definition of trust:  “a willingness to be vulnerable because of the presence of integrity, concern, competence and shared objectives.”  Knowing that trust can be defined with four key elements, managing each of these four elements can provide us with a framework to become more vulnerable while concurrently creating a trusting environment.   A trust environment will help us to bring out the genius in every employee.

We also need an effective leadership model and theory.  The leadership model best positioned to create a trusting environment is called THINK – BEHAVE – IMPROVE (TBI).  TBI clarifies how an optimum leader thinks in order to create a trusting environment, how he/she must behave to create trust, and how he/she takes action to improve the organizational trust.  Because trust is not a destination and because of the speed and frequency of change, trust must be managed constantly.  Just as one can’t just have one glass of water a day and expect to maintain personal health, a leader must be able and willing to provide ongoing trust when needed.  It never ends.

Soft skills are needed more than ever today and the ability to build and maintain trust is one of those critical skills.  “…the types of skills increasingly in favor are strong communication, empathy, collaboration, and trust building.” (Boris Groysberg, March 2011)

The following three blogs will describe the detailed method of how to think, behave, and improve trust in an organization.  Stay tuned.

Boris Groysberg, L. K. (March 2011). The New Path To the C-Suite. Harvard Busienss Review.

Covey, S. M. (June 2007). The Business Case for Trust. CEO Magazine.

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.

 

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Best Practices Growth Management Personal Development Technology

Cybersecurity Resources That Your Organization Must Have

This article is part of a series where we are discussing your role as an organizational leader in the cyberwar that has been all over the news on regular basis lately. I started with a frank discussion on whose side you might actually be on when you don’t protect your organization’s network. In the second article we discussed creating a culture of security and the third article was all about strategy. This is the fourth and final article in this series and we are discussing resources for your security team and organization.

In order for your security team to be on the front line of this cyberwar, defending your network and your data, they need to have the best resources available in order to defend against the many threat actors attacking organizations like yours every day.

One of the biggest challenges in this war we defend against in cyberspace is that it is always changing. The adversaries continue to get better and change their strategies, and if we don’t arm our people with knowledge and skills we will continue to be on the losing side. Depending on your industry that could result in a loss of data, intellectual property, or national security secrets, and could literally be a question of life or death for those in the healthcare industry.

New technologies emerge at lightening speed, which provide hackers new ways to launch their cyber attacks that we need to keep up with. Every time a new application is deployed, a new line of code is written, or a new Internet of Things (IoT) device is connected to the network, we invite the bad guy in. Not because we are asking to be attacked, but because they know how to use our technologies against us for their gain.

Let’s look at the three categories of resources and the key factors they address to win this never ending cyberfight waged against us on a daily basis.

People

Have you created your cyber team with the best offensive and defensive players? Like sports and traditional war, you have to have the best players or soldiers to win in a cyberwar. Not only does that mean that you have the right people in the right roles; it also means you have trained them and continue to train them. This applies to your internal employees and any third parties that work on-site or off-site to help secure your organization’s cyberspace and data.

Security personnel are in a constant state of adversity, trying to keep up with new technologies and threat actors. They almost never hear “job well done.” Often your security team is only recognized when something goes wrong, but not  for the success of stopping a breach, which is their job every day. Other employees are recognized for a job well done, for doing their job well, but the security team is often overlooked since their success is typically invisible.

People want to be recognized for what they do and often the security professional goes without such recognition most of their career. You want to help your team avoid burnout and apathy, this is going to be one of the key ways you can do that.

Time

Time is most definitely a resource and if you have ever said “I don’t have time for that” you know what I’m talking about. I’ve seen it myself, too many times, good people leave due to overwhelm and exhaustion.

This is a team of highly specialized people where you can’t afford high turnover. Not only because turnover is expensive in and of itself, but because these individuals have such specific knowledge that when they leave the time it takes a new employee to catch up is dangerous. In the time spent ramping up, they can easily miss what their predecessor would have seen. While you can’t avoid all turnover, it will happen, you can reduce the amount of turnover by understanding how much your team can actually do and providing additional resources like contractors, third parties, and tools where needed.

Whether you hire more staff or outsource, you must remember that time is a resource that cannot be changed and security is a role that cannot be given to just anyone or ignored due to budget constraints.

Tools

Every good mechanic needs a set of tools and the same is true for your security team. The problem often becomes which tools to use within your security team since there are so many and the tools can be very noisy. Noisy being all the alerts they can generate if not configured (or tuned) properly.

The best way to ensure you are getting the right tools for your team is to include your frontline defenders in the vetting process for new tools. Who knows better what you need, the person doing the work day in and day out or their manager or the executive team? You want what’s best for your security team so ensure the users are part of the decision making process.

It is often good to include a vendor-neutral security consultant who can ask questions of the vendor that you and your team may not have thought about and do it with complete objectivity.

  • What is the tool truly capable of?
  • Does your team already have a tool that can do something similar they are not fully utilizing?
  • Does the new tool integrate with the current infrastructure?
  • What alerts will it generate?
  • How hard is it to configure?
  • And often missed but extremely important, will you need a support contract or consulting contract from the vendor just to make it work?

With the right team doing the amount of work that makes sense with the right tools, you are setting your organization up for success in the fight against cyber attacks. If you have not given this issue much thought or deep thought before, that’s okay;, you’re not alone in that. It’s time to get started and the sooner the better because as we continue to see there are more and more breaches, attacks, and threat actors in cyberspace than ever before. As we continue to put more in the cloud, connect more devices, and have a larger remote workforce, this becomes more and more part of your everyday operational concern just like keeping the lights on and the water running.

If you want to discuss any of these resource concerns with a vendor-neutral consultant email sharon@c-suiteresults.com to start discussing the resource questions you have now. Sharon provides virtual Chief Information Security Officer (vCISO) and advisory services, consults with clients on security strategies, writes policies, and helps organizations of all sizes become and maintain security and compliance.

Categories
Growth Health and Wellness Management Women In Business

Where to Begin Mindful Leadership? Centering

Our world is overwhelming. This is the third week of the last fifteen that a major shooting has been in the news as I write.

Our fear of being alone, or missing out on something important makes us feel we need to sift through the constant, unprecedented deluge of information coming at us, even though we know most of it is just noise. We have less recovery time between events, and we’re getting less of the sleep we need to rejuvenate. It’s unsustainable, it’s exhausting, and it leads to a mindlessness that takes a toll on our personal and professional lives.

Enter mindfulness.

Mindfulness is the practice of becoming fully present in the moment. It is often confused with meditation. While meditation is one form of mindfulness practice, it’s not the only one. In today’s 24/7/365 world where stress is rampant, mindfulness has been scientifically proven to reduce stress, decrease health challenges, and increase focus, resulting in a better quality of home and work life.

Mindfulness has seven practices. I’m going to guide you thru these steps. I intend this series will educate, connect, and hopefully inspire you to try each of the seven for just two to five minutes on the next seven posts—and all week long.

Week 1 Mini-Practice: Centering
Centering is practicing the process of reconnecting to the still, small voice inside of you. Centering in partnership with breathing and small hand motions will bring you back to you.

Today, push yourself away from your desk for just two minutes.  Yes, you can set a timer if it reduces your stress. Feel your breath enter through your nose and move through to your heart center, then exhale through your mouth. Do this three times. When was the last time you took a mindful breath?

Next time you are heading to a conversation that may be less than mindful, try centering. This practice, while simple, is not easy.  The more you try it this week, the more you are likely to let go of mindless and become more mindful.

Mindful Matters!

 

 

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Best Practices Entrepreneurship Human Resources Management Marketing Skills Women In Business

3 Bad Speaking Habits You Don’t Know You Have

If you’re like most people, even if you consider yourself to be a “pretty good” speaker, you know you could always be better. The irony is that, while that’s generally true, you probably don’t realize the actual problems you need to fix.

So let’s turn the microscope to three of the most common pitfalls to effective speaking.

  1. Fillers

We’re all familiar with the sins of the repeated “um,” “uh,” and “like,” “you know” and “I mean,” but fillers get much more sophisticated and subtle.

Words like “actually” and “really” can transform into what I call educated fillers. They seem to fit into the conversation, but repeatedly sneak into speech in places where they have no inherent value. They just chop up the sentence, making it harder for the listener to cognitively process the underlying message.

But where most of us get tripped up is the variety of fillers used. If you alternate between them as you speak, they’re less likely to be noticed… but still detract from the fluidity of the point you’re trying to make.

  1. The Vocal Cliff

The “vocal cliff” is what I call the habit of trailing off at the ends of your sentences. This happens for a variety of reasons. First, we tend to speak in a stream of consciousness, which is full of commas rather than periods. As you’re running along, you run out of air but don’t know where or how to refuel, so your voice creaks its way to a slow, grinding halt, much like if your car ran out of gas in the middle of the road.

Another cause of falling off the vocal cliff is when you’re halfway done with your point but your brain is jumping ahead, cueing up the next point you want to make so you don’t forget it, while your mouth struggles to catch up. Your lack of attention to what you’re currently saying comes through as your voice falls off the cliff. Stay present.

Or maybe you trail off because you lose confidence in what you’re saying after reading some displeased faces in the audience. This causes you to hold back, and you fall off the cliff, which projects your self-doubt.

  1. Negative Facial Expressions

As you listen to people, chances are, you don’t even know what kind of facial expressions you make, but more often than not they can convey negative thoughts. Maybe you’re just thinking about what the person is saying, but your “thinking face” has furrowed eyebrows and an ever-so-slight frown. This leads to two problems.

First, people will infer anger or disagreement, regardless of how you genuinely feel. Second, when you do speak, those down-angled facial features actually flatten your pitch and tone, making you also sound displeased. Even if that’s how you feel, do you really want to telegraph it so transparently? And if that does not accurately reflect your feelings, then you’re sending mixed messages and sabotaging your own credibility.

To avoid any of these pitfalls, awareness is the first and most important step. Don’t assume you know which habits you do or don’t have. Try video recording yourself talking on the phone. When you watch it afterwards, do you hear fillers creeping in, or does your voice fall off “the cliff”? Do you appear anxious or irritated? You’ll be amazed at what you discover, and what adjusting such small behaviors can do for your overall executive presence and leadership image.

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Do you have questions or comments about your bad habits or how to avoid them? If so, contact me at laura@vocalimpactproductions.com or click here to schedule a 20-minute focus call to discuss them with me personally!

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Growth Health and Wellness Management Women In Business

What is Mindfulness?

What is Mindfulness?

We live in world that demands our immediate attention 24/7/365.  We have created a culture that rewards busy, but also punishes it with poor health, stress, often relationship crisis and often-mental fatigue.  As the world seems to speed up year over year many professionals are opting for a different way – mindfulness

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is the process of bringing your whole self, body, brain and spirit, awareness to the present moment.  It is taking moment to pause and calmly acknowledge how you are feeling and thinking in the present moment.

Mindfulness is not simply meditation.  It’s a way of being and a choice on your leading and living.

Mindfulness was named one of the 2018 business trends. There are seven practices to become a mindful CEO running a more peaceful, presence filled, and profitable company. I’ll share with you the strategies and research behind the companies applying mindfulness in the next 7 weeks.

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Best Practices Entrepreneurship Human Resources Management Marketing Skills Women In Business

You Always Have Control

“Change is ever occurring. Thus, you can embrace change and control it, or you will be controlled by change. The choice is yours but if you don’t make a choice, change will make the choice for you.” -Greg Williams, The Master Negotiator & Body Language Expert

www.TheMasterNegotiator.com

No matter what occurs in your life, you always have control. That’s true because you have the power and ability to change anything that doesn’t suit you. That change may be limited and limiting, but there’s a degree that you can influence change, you just have to seek what it is and what it means to change.

So, when you don’t like the outcome of a situation, seek to change it or the way you view it (i.e. change your mind per the meaning it has). Once you realize that you don’t have to be held captive by the outcome that change thrust upon you, you’ll feel better about how you can control the change that has occurred. That will allow you to see the perception of negative change from a more positive perspective … and everything will be right with the world.

 

 

 

 

Categories
Entrepreneurship Human Resources Management Personal Development

A Lot of Talk About Leadership, But…

I recently saw of list of what an organization considers the top 50 leadership gurus in the country. There were several familiar names on the list. Scott Love was not on the list. In this day and age, I see and hear a lot of talk about leadership, but I don’t see that much real leadership taking place.

Scott is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. When he was a twenty-two year old Ensign in the early 1990’s, he was in command of a U.S. Navy minesweeper. Yes, a minesweepers job is just what the name says. Scott Love has gone on to a successful career.

Leaders don’t become leaders because they write about the topic. They live it. They model it. They have followers. They are TRUSTED. They make positive things happen.

Yes, we do have leaders in our families, communities and in our workplaces. But don’t get confused with all the rhetoric – a real leader has a history and a life that clearly shows WHY we should follow them.

I think you will enjoy my conversation with Scott Love.

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Entrepreneurship Management Marketing Personal Development

Strategy and Strategic Thinking

When starting or expanding a business, having a strategy is important. A strategy is simply an action plan. It may be as simple as how will I get my first paying customer or how will I / we penetrate a new market with an existing or new product or service.

To develop a strategy – you need to continually get better at strategic thinking. This simply means how does your community, region, state and the country perceive your product or service. What’s in the news – real or fake – what are people believing and talking about? Understand what is going on around you. Then decide if you want to join in the flow or you want to “go against the grain”. Strategic thinking is what you will build your strategy or action plan around.

Learn for many sources. Ian Bremmer is a great source to learn about global issues, Tom Friedmann has his finger on the pulse of world and the United States politically and culturally, Mark Sanborn helps you become a better leader, NPR delivers great news updates and Ari Weinzweig is the best in the world at helping you develop a vision for your future. And, of course choose your own industry information sources. All this will help you to join in the flow with your startup or business expansion, or to decide to stand out from the competition by going against the tide.

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Best Practices Entrepreneurship Management Personal Development

7 Ways Entrepreneurship Can Be Incorporated into Your Company Culture

Company culture is the foundation of relevancy for your business. A positive company culture fosters creativity, outside-the-box thinking, and imagination. Changing your company culture is not easy, but the benefits speak for themselves.

While building Barefoot Wine into a bestselling brand, we relied on seven steps to build a positive company culture:

  1. Remove Roadblocks: Structure can be limiting. If an employee’s great idea has to pass through more than one pair of hands, they can become discouraged and may even lose recognition for their work. At Barefoot, employees were able to present their ideas directly to management, avoiding unnecessary compliance processes.
  2. Acknowledge: When creative, thorough, and efficient work is recognized publicly, all of your employees are more likely to respect others as team players. On every employee’s work anniversary with Barefoot, we sent out a memo that outlined their accomplishments during their last year. Recognizing employees’ efforts sends a message that good work does not go unnoticed.
  3. Have Fun: Vendors, employees, and consumers alike all want to do business with fun people. Going along with the Barefoot brand, Michael was “Head Stomper” and CEO; Bonnie’s title was “Original Foot” since her foot was on the label. Doug McCorkle was our Controller and “The Cork”—because who else but our Controller would put a stop to it? A fun environment allows creativity to flourish.
  4. Make Mistakes Write: Don’t just make your mistakes right—make them write! Mistakes happen. Establish a culture that embraces this, as long as all of the blunders are identified. Allow any mistake to be an opportunity to put processes in place that will prevent it from happening again. Identify which documents need to be updated for the future, whether that’s a checklist, a new procedure, or a new policy. Establish a culture of permission—a culture that says, “Be creative and make mistakes as long as you hold yourself accountable.”
  5. Have a Two-Division Company: What set Barefoot apart was having two divisions, compared to a vertical structure with the CEO at the top and numerous departments on the bottom. We had Sales and Sales Support. That’s it! Product development, marketing, accounting, and the CEO were all part of the Sales Support division. If your company is all about the consumer experience, sales should be on top with everyone else supporting sales. Think of where your company would be without sales—it wouldn’t be!
  6. Pay for Performance: Paying your employees right will not only keep them there—it will keep them motivated. We established our pay structure with teamwork in mind. Since our employees’ bonuses and employer’s contribution to their 401k were partially reliant on performance, they were determined to excel, and to encourage their teammates to do the same.
  7. The Money Map: Set the precedent for your employees right when they start. We distributed an infographic that showed exactly how the money traveled from the consumer’s pockets into their In that moment, the sales process became transparent to the employee, and the stage was set for a positive sales culture.

Making changes to company culture starts at the top and radiates through the rest of the company. So, take a look at your management’s attitude toward everything from pay, to making mistakes, to having fun, and you will soon see where the changes are necessary.

For more, read on: http://csnetworkadvis.staging.wpengine.com/advisor/michael-houlihan-and-bonnie-harvey/