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Category: Leadership

Categories
Growth Management Skills

The World is Shrinking!

The biggest change in the way we now communicate globally is the revelation of social media. Its impact has been so huge that we can now communicate across the planet with such ease that our marketplaces have got significantly larger, and our networks are now much easier to reach.

For those unaware of what the term ‘social media’ relates to, it is the collective term of platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube, and these forms of media are changing the way that we now communicate. This shift in communications sounds drastic, and for many we are fearful of change – particularly when there is technology involved. However, this is nothing new; this is just modern day word of mouth, and as a tool for building business is like stepping back in time. This is about building relationships with your customers and community, as well as understanding what others are saying about you, to build your brand and grow your business.

In this article, I want to give you the basics in a simple process that all can follow, get you off to a great start with social media and ensure that it can start to help you and your business. One thing I am not is an expert. However, I have used social media with great results for both my own business and for clients, and I am happy to share those lessons with you.

First Impressions Count!

Just like in the real world, you never get a second chance to make a first impression when it comes to social media. Before you open for business, I would seriously recommend that you take the time to fully complete your profiles.

On LinkedIn, this means completing all fields from start to finish. It serves as your online CV, and if you were looking for a new job then you would certainly make sure that your CV shared the right message and was complete. On Twitter, you only have a few characters, so ensure that your biography delivers a strong message that intrigues people to find out more.

On all platforms, the visual appearance is also critical. You can use certain areas to apply your brand identity and convey your business message. This can be done simply and easily by speaking with your designers to create the correct sized artwork. Consider your photography. These are social platforms, so images should be warm, friendly and not too corporate, and I believe should always include the image of a person and not just that of a company logo.

Build Audience

Once you are all set up most people start to worry about their outbound content. Now your content and posts are important, yet only when people are listening. Social media is particularly useful as a communication tool to the people that already know you, so I would start there. If using it for business, then my first action would be to connect with as many of your existing customers and contacts as possible. You can do this by uploading your contacts as a database and sending out an invitation. Additionally you should look to use all current communication tools to let people know that you are active on social media. This means adding social media icons to your e-mail signature and stationery, informing all your customers when you write to them, making it a news story on your website and adding leaflets or posters in the view of your customers to entice them to your profiles. To actually get them to your profiles is harder than just asking though, so running a competition or great offer to reward them for visiting your profiles, and connecting with you, will drastically improve your chances. Remember that investing in this audience is critical in achieving social media success; without an audience, your great work could be wasted.

Be interesting

When it comes to content, the key is to remember that these are social platforms. Very few people are enjoying times on social media because they want to be sold to. To be interesting, you need to be varied with your communication and show yourself as human. If your message becomes
monotonous, you become boring and people stop listening, so keep your outbound content varied. For me this means posting in 3 areas:

    • Firstly, commenting on or sharing useful information relating to your wider industry as a whole.
    • Secondly, presenting your products and services but only with customer focused offers relating to the action that precedes the sale and not the sale itself. For example, if you were a car retailer, you should provide an offer to get people to visit the showroom and not to buy the car.
    • Finally, be human. To succeed in Social Media, you must be prepared to share some personal information. Life and family events, as well as successes and failures, are great ways of starting dialogue.

Please remember that the aim of posting content is to start a conversation or encourage debate. Starting conversation with your contacts opens you up to their contacts and then your network grows!

Categories
Growth Management Skills

Account Management

We All Spend Time, Money And Effort Finding New Customers So We Can Grow Our Business. However, The Opportunity Of Growth Is Typically Among The Customers We Already Have.

Getting the most from our existing customers is a skill that is often overlooked, but can bring incredible results when perfected. I believe that the reason new customers are pursued with such vigor is that they always appear more exciting. The thrill of the chase can be addictive and emotionally more rewarding. By adopting this technique, we are not only overlooking our existing contacts, but missing substantial opportunities.

Ask yourself the following questions:

    • Are you aware of your customer’s future plans?
    • Do your existing customers know all the services you provide?
    • Do you review your customer accounts at least every 6 months?
    • Do you make regular contact with your contacts who never became customers?

If you have answered NO to any of these questions, you are losing out on winning business and making money.

Develop a systemized process

Great sales procedures avoid the requirement of individual brilliance. Integrating your process with a CRM (contact management system) will ensure that nothing gets missed and all promises are kept.

Design a method that details your ideal customer experience. Play out every eventuality from initial contact through to first meeting and onwards to close. You will know how to arrive at the desired outcome and how that is best achieved. Create a template for each e-mail and letter at each stage and develop a flow chart to record your process. Attach the relevant communication to each stage of the process and ensure this policy is followed. Also consider what happens once the prospect has made a decision. Continue this process with a number of scheduled communications, and integrate this into your CRM system.

Create a product matrix

Consider every product and service you offer and every customer you do business with. Plot this information on a matrix.  Can you see the gaps? Now you know exactly the potential new business within your reach and what you need to discuss with each client.

Vary communication methods

Continually change the way you communicate with your clients and prospects. Every method has its place, but bear in mind that all will lose impact and minimize effect if used consistently. Consider social media tools, email with images, text messages, direct mail, pick up the phone or speak face to face. Variety will keep your contacts interested and engaged.

Hold review meetings

Your customers are your most valuable asset. They should be cherished and nurtured. Holding regular meetings with your customers presents you with the opportunity to under sell and over deliver. Introduce them to valuable contacts, techniques and processes that will help them develop their business or reduce costs. The key purpose of the meeting is to establish opportunities and discover how you can help them further. Determine problems you can fix or goals you can help them realize. Understanding your client’s plans and challenges presents you with an abundance of ways you can help them.

These are all practices you can implement immediately.

What are you waiting for?

Categories
Best Practices Growth Human Resources Management Skills Women In Business

Listen Different

Typically, I write about speech. But today I want to take a new look at the role of the listener in leadership communication. As Apple might say, you have to “Listen Different.”

Of course, as the speaker you need to present your information in a way that will make sense to that particular listener, which is an important leadership skill. But that’s only half the story.

Not everyone is going to be good at adapting their speech to fit your expectations for what good communication sounds like. That’s why it’s important to learn to listen differently, so as not to be at risk for missing some of the most valuable pieces of information.

As an example, I work with a lot of women’s groups, and one of the most common frustrations I hear is when a woman makes a comment in a meeting, which gets glossed over, and then five minutes later one of the men at the table says almost the exact same thing, but he is praised for the contribution. The following cartoon illustrates the sentiment.

Gender-bias issues aside, why this is such a common experience, and how can it be changed? The underlying principle stands for everyone – women and men alike. The truth is that the responsibility for change is shared by everyone present Here’s one reason why:

Sometimes the way a comment is framed makes it “fly under the radar” if listeners aren’t tuned into that frequency, so to speak. For example, they say something like “What about X? Should we look at that? Would that work?” If you heard this at a meeting, what would your response be?

While the person is technically making a suggestion, you might not register the value of the suggestion because it is framed as a series of questions that – on the surface – seem to be seeking validation or approval.

Believe it or not, many listeners don’t understand the nature of what they’re really hearing, and need to recognize the speaker’s intent

You might wish they had just said, “We haven’t tried X yet; let’s take a look at that option,” but they didn’t. So you need to learn to hear the message, no matter how it is framed. Make sure you’re fully present when someone is talking, because we first process tone and instinctive feeling before we process actual meaning. Otherwise, you risk missing out on critical information.

But even if you are just a participant in the conversation and you realize that you do hear the someone’s real message but believe the others in the group somehow missed it, or if “Ms./Mr. Triggs” offers an idea that is only praised when repeated by another person, it becomes your responsibility to diplomatically draw it to everyone’s attention: “Yes, Pat, I think you’re reinforcing what Chris said a moment ago about…” After all, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem, right? Passive listening and lack of proactive participation are not qualities of effective leadership.

It may be frustrating to feel like you need to work harder at listening, that people should just “speak clearly,” in the end, communication is a two-way street, so if you want to be an effective communicator, learn to listen different.

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Do you have trouble communicating effectively with someone, or feel like your contributions are often overlooked? If you have other questions or feedback about this issue, contact me at laura@vocalimpactproductions.com or click here to schedule a 20-minute focus call to discuss it with me personally!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories
Best Practices Growth Management Personal Development Technology

The Escape Artist – How to Stop the Data Thief

When you watch Ocean’s Eleven you know that breaking in is only half the battle; you also have to get out unnoticed or undetected. The same thing that is true for bank robbers and cat burglars also holds true for hackers.

If you are a business owner or executive responsible for keeping your customers or your corporate data secure and you think it’s all about stopping the bad guys (and gals) from accessing your data, you are missing what might be the biggest point of failure: their escape.

Over the years we have seen that many breaches are not noticed or identified for months and sometimes even years, which means not only did the bad guy get away with it, he (or she) was then able to unload their loot or start using the data without worry that they would be noticed. That’s good news for them, but not so good for you.

In order to fully discuss the escape portion of the breach, the part that most people forget to talk about or protect against, let’s look at the three main players or threat actors in this scenario. Going forward I will use the common term “hacker” to mean any of these threat actors.

  1. The external hacker with no authorized access to your network: These are the people who sit behind their computers anywhere in the world and try to find networks that are open or system vulnerabilities just waiting to be exploited. Open networks are typically those that do not have good firewall rules, have publicly facing systems that should not be publicly accessible, or have exploitable web application vulnerabilities. It only takes one bad line of code, one misconfigured firewall rule, or one forgotten system on the perimeter to leave your organization exposed.  Once you are exposed and they are in your network, that is where their fun begins.
  2. The third party vendor or partner who has direct access to your network (usually via VPN): These are the organizations outside of yours that you do business with and need access to your network. They might provide you data or receive data from you, they might monitor another system that you manage, or do a number of legitimate activities. However if you don’t know how secure their networks are, which you never truly will, or you don’t know who they employ, you have opened up your network to their network and their people. If they are hacked and that hacker finds the access to your network – boom, they are in.
  3. The trusted employee: Your employees are not going to harm you right? Most of them will not and even the ones that do are often not trying to harm you. But even those employees who mean no harm cause errors or misuse their credentials, which lead to breaches and data loss.

Once the data has been gathered by the hacker they need to get it out of your network and into their control, the escape. Allowing the escape is where many organizations fail by making this too easy or allowing the hacker to get out undetected. You must know all your outbound connections, they must all have a legitimate business need, they must be reviewed on a regular frequency to ensure they are still needed, and they must be monitored.

You may think this sounds like a lot of work, but if setup properly with the right tools and processes it does not have to be cumbersome going forward. If not built right the first time, it can take some time to put in place, but honestly the pain of discipline in this scenario is going to be much better than the pain of regret later.

If you are reading this and thinking, “I have no idea if data can get out of my network unnoticed,” start asking these questions to the people who work for you that manage your infrastructure. Here is the question you can ask, the answer you want to hear, and the next step if the answer is not what you are looking for. The Next Steps are high level and might require outside assistance or third party tools and vendors.

Question Answer Next Step
Do we have all our outbound firewall rules documented with business justifications?

You want the answer to be yes

 Implement a plan to have the network team spend the next few months documenting all firewall rules. This will mean working with business owners to understand what traffic is necessary and where it has to go.
How often do we review the rules to ensure they are still needed? You want the answer to be at least every six months

 

 Implement a plan, either manually or with automated tools to start reviewing rule sets at least every six months to ensure they are still needed, still use secure protocols, and are going to the correct destination outside your network.
What are we doing to monitor outbound traffic? You want someone to be able to give you specifics and have incident response plans that explain what they do if they see malicious or anomalous traffic. Document an incident response plan, determine what third party resources might be needed in the event of an incident, and put processes in place to monitor traffic for anomalies or suspicious behavior.
How would we know if sensitive data left the network? You want a specific answer that should be easy to find if it’s being done. Research data loss prevention solutions or other network detection tools.
Do we allow encrypted data out of the network?

The answer should be no – we only send encrypted data to organizations that we have vetted and only to specific IP addresses they have given us.

 This is important because malicious users and hackers will actually steal your data and encrypt it with their encryption keys so that it is undetectable by Data Loss Prevention (DLP) software and so that no one can steal it from them. Yes they are often more aware of security than you are.

If no one can answer these questions or you are not happy with the answers, take a deep breath and start a new conversation. No finger pointing and no yelling, but an open and honest conversation with your staff about why this is important and how things are going to have to change in order to keep the data secure.

Lastly remember that tools do not solve all problems and only work when implemented correctly. There is no silver bullet no matter what a vendor tells you. Ensure you have the right people asking the right questions of the vendors if you are bringing in a tool or managed service offering to monitor your network.

This is of course just the start of the conversation and the beginning of what needs to be done. If this is overwhelming and you don’t know where to start or what to do next, I can answer your questions. Email sharon@c-suiteresults.com to discuss your questions or concerns on this topic. I am a 12-year security veteran and have seen 100s of different networks and situations and I am happy to discuss your situation with you.

Categories
Leadership Marketing Skills

How to Prove Your Future Worth to Customers

Many of us are great at what we do, and the very fact that you are reading this article demonstrates your desire to continue to grow.  However, many of us do a great job of keeping our fantastic track record a secret from our potential customers.

Sporting greats are judged by what they achieve, and clubs recruit new managers based on their previous results. The same can be said when looking for new suppliers.  If you can demonstrate that you have done a fantastic job for others in the past, it goes a long way towards suggesting you will do a good job for them too.  This is more than having testimonials hidden away on your website, in a filing cabinet or in a folder in your bottom drawer, along with your customer letters.

In today’s age, social proof is one of the best convincers you have and growing your social proof can be a huge contributor in helping you win more business.  Now, the distribution of your social proof is important. However, before you can showcase it, you must ensure that you collect it.

The first bit of advice I would give is that if you don’t ask, then you don’t get. We are all busy people, and taking the time to say nice things about each other in a usable way is rarely top of the list; therefore, we have to help jump it up the list.

Asking after you have delivered your product or service is likely to bring you a better response than after that moment has passed.

Asking in a format that makes it easy for them is also highly likely to bring a better return. The two forms that have worked well for us are video and of course, LinkedIn.

Just asking will bring you huge results, but being prepared will help even further. The ability to record video on the spot will have you leaps ahead of your competition, and asking at every opportunity will give you heaps of great video to showcase what others say about you.

Once you get good at asking you’ll have so much content that you’ll want and need to get in front of people. This is some of the stuff that we do which has had fantastic results, and could work for you too:

  • Point people from emails to your Linkedin profile to read recommendations
  • Leave written testimonials in a folder in the office reception
  • Photograph written testimonials and post on Facebook
  • Distribute video testimonials across the social networks
  • Encourage others to post their positive comments on Facebook and Twitter
  • Update website testimonials as often as possible and ensure they are easily visible
  • Utilize the words of others in marketing literature

The simple lesson in all of the above is to put your social proof in front of as many people as possible. However, the real trick is to ensure that every testimonial can be traced back to its source.

Ensuring that your future customers can see the credibility in the source of your social proof will add to its effectiveness which is the bit that makes it all worthwhile.

Categories
Growth Leadership Personal Development

The Battle Against What Exactly

For some reason, Confederate statues are the center of a recent controversy. A riot broke out in Charlottesville, Virginia in an effort to preserve a Confederate Statue of General Robert E. Lee. Another statue of Lee was taken down in Dallas, Texas. Now the move is to change the schools and churches that have been named after Confederate men. Why and how this was started is unknown. That’s a clue. We have to ask, what sparked this and what the real intent behind it is.

I don’t know the real cause of why these things are striking contention right now. The point here is to question why they are happening at all. What’s behind this battle? Is it white supremacy, racism, or slavery, like the media promotes. Instead of looking at it from what the media tells us or what we hear a few people sound off on (who these people are, we don’t even know), the focus should be to dig deeper and find what else it could be about.

Let’s start with the statues themselves. The two in question are of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The reason given for taking them down, some say, is its ties to racism and slavery. Is this the reason they were erected? In 1917 the Charlottesville statue of Robert E. Lee was commissioned. This was 52 years after the end of the Civil War. The Dallas statue was erected in 1936, which is 71 years after the war.

Why did they create statues of Robert E. Lee? Let’s look at him. Lee was born in Stratford Hall, Virginia. Before the war, he was a West Point Commandant and a military officer in the U.S. Army. At the beginning of the Civil War, President Lincoln, who thought very highly of Lee, offered him a command of the Union Army. Lee was extremely devoted to his home state. He said, “If Virginia stands by the old Union so will I.”

Later, Lee read the news that Virginia had joined the Confederacy. He told his wife, “Well, Mary, the question is settled,” and resigned the U.S. Army commission he held for 32 years. Robert E. Lee became the reluctant leader of the Confederate Army. If not for Lee’s loyalty to Virginia he would have been a general in the Union Army. When he turned down the commission, President Lincoln had a difficult time finding a replacement for Lee.

What’s really interesting is the parish in Virginia that was named to honor him; R.E. Lee Memorial Church has decided to change its name. The Episcopal church did not want to have his name even though Lee went against what he wanted to do, (fight for the union) so he could stay loyal to Virginia, (which decided to leave the Union). The church doesn’t even recognize the sacrifice Robert E. Lee made for them. Instead, they see him as creating racial division.

In Dallas, the statue was erected as a reminder of the sacrifice of the Texans who fought in the Civil War. Many people died in the war. At Gettysburg, the Union lost 23,000 men and the Confederate lost 28,000 men. A total of 51,000 Americans died during that battle alone. Texas sent 90,000 men to fight for the Confederacy and lost a staggering amount of lives. The statue was to honor and remember the men, American men, who fought. Yet the lives of these men are not recognized by those who want the statue removed.

The focus has been just about how these memorials represent slavery, though none of them were erected for that reason. Are racism and slavery really why memorials are being removed and names of places being changed. Or is there something else. We have to dig even deeper.

In 2015 McGraw-Hill, publishers of educational books for schools came out with a textbook that referred to slaves as workers. Consequently, they were challenged on it. Why would they change the word slaves to workers? The term worker implies that the black people coming to America had a choice to come. It didn’t point out the fact that they were forced to come.

A worker also means being paid. Black people were not getting paid for their work. When asked why they changed the term McGraw-Hill stated, “our language in that caption did not adequately convey that Africans were both forced into migration and to labor against their will as slaves.” The textbook was changed for the following school year.

The battle about changing textbooks has been going on for some time. The reasoning is to play down slavery. Under the excuse to bring balance, the rationale is to teach our children that the Civil War was because of sectionalism and state’s rights. Though true, it wipes away a major point, the differences between the free and slave states over the national government prohibiting slavery in new territories. The thinking is to diminish the issue of slavery to be of lesser importance.

Is there a move to wipe out slavery from our history? We have to ask what the real underlying factor is here. It is difficult to even find where any of these actions started. We don’t know who or what is pulling the strings. All we know is that something is stirring a pot, provoking racial tension, and the media is on board because it makes great news.

I’m not saying there is a conspiracy going, that dark forces are maneuvering us to behave a certain way. I’m pointing out that we have to ask these types of questions to get at what is really going on. Jumping onto a cause without knowing who is steering the boat and the real objective of anything is ridiculous. Is the point here to wipe out slavery in our history? We shouldn’t forget it and we certainly shouldn’t move it from our history. We learn from our mistakes. Yet there is a force creating antagonism.  We should be questioning the reason why racial tension is being encouraged. The only way to stop it is to find the source.

What is the real reason behind wanting the monuments taken down? Some people wanting them taken down don’t even know who Robert E. Lee was. Right now when you google Civil War you get the movie, “Captain America: Civil War.” Are we erasing the American Civil War altogether!

And where does it stop?  Should we take down the Lincoln Memorial or the Washington Memorial for some reason? Maybe we should close all the Japanese restaurants in America because their ancestors bombed Pearl Harbor and caused so many American deaths.

As far as the monuments about the Civil War, they are not about race or slavery. That, unfortunately, was part of our history and we need to remember it and learn from it. The monuments are about the men who fought and died for their country; no matter what side they were on. We lost 620,000 American men, black and white, in the Civil War, compared to 407,300 American men killed in World War II. May we never forget what this war cost us.

Categories
Growth Leadership Skills

Winning Language: What to Say on Social Media Platforms

In the world of sales, often the only distinguishing factor that we have is the words that come out of our mouths or the ones that we type. There’s one challenge that I bump into time and time again for nearly everybody in business, and that is to have more useful conversations with people who fit their target market, that have qualified in and which will bring better results.

There are stacks of people right now using the social networks to try and promote their business, and one of the most common mistakes is all that they are doing is trying to sell. They are broadcasting messages left, right and center saying “buy from me, buy from me, buy from me, buy from me” creating a monotone approach that certainly doesn’t engage.

In terms of different platforms, I’m talking about what we do on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube for the purpose of lead generation.

It’s unlikely in your business that somebody’s going to read a Facebook post, watch a short YouTube video, read a tweet or a LinkedIn update and instantaneously jump to the position of wanting to be a customer.

You will rarely win business directly. If we get our minds right, the best strategy for those tools is to generate conversations with our target market. We’re looking to start a conversation, and that’s what our language should dictate. This means asking questions of people as opposed to making statements.

I was working with a business a short while ago that helps people save money. They said “Phil, how do we use Facebook to generate more of the right kind of people to speak to?” What they were doing was making broadcast after broadcast of case studies of people and how it would save them money, hoping that that was going to capture attention. I said “let’s just try something by alternative. Let’s just try a question”.  The question I asked them to try was “if I could show you a way to save $500 a month, then what would you spend the money on?” That was the question I asked in a social context, and rather than the typical response that this client had, add one or two random comments, within 45 minutes the post had 70-80 comments on it. This created an instantaneous prospect list for that  person to follow up.

A travel company wanted to speak to more people about their holidays (I’m pretty sure we could all think of somewhere we would rather be). So the post that we put out on Twitter and LinkedIn and on Facebook simply said “if you could be anywhere else in the world right now, where would you be and why?” A stream of people shared places that they would rather be and why they would be there, which allowed the company to make direct contact with those people to help them to make those dreams into reality.

Instead of making statements, we’re better off asking questions. Not talking about what we do, talking about the results of what we do. Accept that people probably won’t buy from that award winning post but, if we ask them a good enough question, they will join the conversation. We can then educate and understand more about their circumstances and then we can start to recommend our product, service or solution to help them achieve they want.

If you want to succeed in these platforms, be a great conversation starter. Stop trying to do the whole job in one sitting, and you’ll be amazed on what happens onwards from there, purely by starting more conversations, keeping those conversations going and then enjoying the rewards that they bring.

Categories
Best Practices Growth Management Personal Development Technology

Belle’s World – Security

Has your personal information ever been hacked?

There are towns across the world, where people still leave their keys in their car and keep their houses unlocked. However, for many of us in urban or suburban areas that would be unheard of. If we were to do that the likelihood of having our car or having items from our house stolen would increase or has happened. Until people felt the effects of these robberies they continued to leave things unlocked and didn’t prepare with cameras and security systems which became the norm after these types of attacks happened. It wasn’t until individuals experienced it that they felt they should do something about it.

In today’s world we have another growing issue that is similar to the past but different in how its done – cyber security. Many of us have received phishing emails and the stats say that almost 30% of them get opened1. These phishing emails can come in both personal and professional emails. Therefore, as a company the risk is increased because the data is expansive and includes more

than just an individuals information. Why does it take an attack for a leader to realize they need to spend the money before to prevent these attacks versus after. Mostly, it about the human element of feeling too powerful and big that anything would happen to their company. Secondly, they are not truly understanding the power of cyber security to actually keep their companies safe.

One of the stories I heard recently was how the Boomer generation is still all about interacting with humans and the millennials are about interacting with technology. There is a little truth in this statement but it is after all a generalization. As I work with folks who have experience and have been very successful, it is hard for them to wrap their head around how far technology has come and the fact that people who be stealing data. They get the concept but not the enormity of the issue. Unless they get hacked personally they really don’t understand the need for their companies. Large companies are still getting hacked and many times its because the leadership has decided that it won’t happen to them and the financials at the moment are more important than a potential risk. However, the potential risk is much larger than what they can truly understand. The younger folks on the other hard are unable to influence their leaders to make the change and connect with them from the human element and therein sometimes lies the issue.

Even when it comes to cybersecurity, it is all about people. The hackers are people who are preying on companies and individuals. They put phishing emails or hack into systems through individuals. Individuals who are part of companies that house lots of personally identifiable information for employees and customers. Each of our devices are becoming smarter and connect to each other in many ways that we may not even comprehend. These devices are going from our homes to work to public areas. In our home, each person that has a different device is being connected and will be able to “talk” even more. There are so many channels from which a hacker can now infiltrate and do what they need to do. It is a real problem and the leaders who think it won’t happen to them need to spend some time truly understanding what cybersecurity is all about and get the right products and safeguards in place for the benefit of their own career and their companies.

There are too many leaders sitting on their previous knowledge and not moving with the times. In our lifetimes, technology is changing at an exponential pace. If we want to be successful for 50, 60, 70 years (due to us living longer) we will have multiple lifetimes and will have to continue to learn and grow at each step. It’s not easy when you have been the best at what you do for years and now the world is changing around us. It takes times, motivation and the right guidance to change your mindset to be able to handle the new things happening in the world.

How are you protecting your personal and company security information?

Welcome to Belle’s world. Everything in this world is based on a bell curve. Our media concentrates on giving advice to make everyone be a part of the masses.

This is a weekly series of Urvi’s insights on her perception of the world. They say perception is reality and she lives in her own fantasy world. This allows her to delve into the human element of our lives, helping individuals decipher their own souls, to understand, who they are and what they want, in the journey of life.

Belle’s world explores the extremes and goes beyond the surface. Ready to read about some of the “elephants in the room?”

Contact urvi, to discover your self-awareness that will unleash the innovation mindset within you and help you become both emotionally and financially wealthy. https://www.radicalroamer.com/ belle-s-world #thehumanelement

Categories
Growth Human Resources Leadership Personal Development

Diversity Alone Is Not Enough – The 5 Initial Conditions to Optimize Performance

Many consultants and consulting companies tout the benefits of diversity and make amazing claims about the results of having a diverse organization.  Diversity is perceived as a competitive advantage and as a progressive necessity if an organization is going to be able to claim a modern reputation.  I am unconvinced.  Just like anything else in life, too much of a good thing can become a negative.

There is an impressive list of benefits that experts claim diversity generates.  These include improved innovation and creativity, reduced turnover, improved ability to recruit, improved productivity, excellent company image.  Not so fast.  When we read these claims, there is little mention of the complexity of factors that contribute to these desirable results.  Any consultant who claims to be able to achieve these goals with diversity alone is at best unsophisticated and at worst misleading.

Making the claim that diversity alone is responsible for these outcomes, is like saying a certain brand of gasoline is responsible for lower maintenance costs on your car.  There are too many other factors which are contributing to the outcome.

There are five initial conditions a leader needs to manage prior to reaching to achieve diversity goals.  These conditions will have a much greater impact on these desirable results and will help support a diverse workforce.

A Compelling Vision

A vision is an ideal picture of a future state of the organization.  Pete Senge explains, in his book The Fifth Discipline, that a compelling vision is like stretching a strong rubber band. It pulls people toward the ideal picture and so it helps them to be motivated to achieve the description of the future organization.  A clear and compelling vision that is communicated consistently will improve motivation and align people who are diverse in background. A common vision naturally draws a diverse workforce together into an effective team.

A Compelling Mission

A mission is the reason why an organization exists.  Viktor Frankl, author or Man’s Search for Meaning’ once said, “Those who have a ‘why” to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.”  Millennials are famous for needing to know why they are being asked to do something. If we are able to explain “why” something is needed, it naturally creates intrinsic motivation and high-quality work.

On a recent trip to a client I encountered a sign in the rest room.  It read; “Did you know that 40% of people who go to the bathroom fail to wash their hands?  Did you know that not washing your hands properly can encourage the spread of germs that cause diarrhea, the flu, and even hand-foot-mouth disease, and even death?  Washing your hands can protect you from these diseases and others.”

I immediately washed my hands and I do it every time.  No one must remind me because I know why it is so important. A well communicated mission will bring a diverse group of people together to achieve a vision.

A Clear Set of Values

Values describe how we want to behave while working toward the vision and mission. When people know how they are supposed to behave with each other and they can agree on that behaviors, it makes the environment safe for communication.  Diversity consultants claim that communication is improved because of the diversity. I disagree. It improves when people share the same values.

It is because of an aligned set of values that make it safe for people to converse even when they are diverse in background. Again, an aligned set of values enables diversity to work as an advantage.  Values comes first, diversity next.

An Aligned Strategy

A strategy explains the priorities of an organization. People who join an organization often have their own ideas about what the priorities must or should be.  Individuals in an organization are not authorized to decide priorities for the organization.  Effective leaders clarify and communicate the priorities of objectives people need to accomplish.

Without an aligned strategy, people can have competing priorities.  When there is competition of priorities there is waste and increased costs.  An aligned strategy will save the organization money.  It will also compel those with diverse backgrounds to work toward the same goals.

The Most Effective Leadership Philosophy

For 20 years I have asked senior teams this question, “What is your leadership philosophy?”  Rarely can I get an articulate answer to this question.  This is because we have been taught an outdated leadership model which is holding us back from optimizing employee engagement.  Frederick Taylor was an engineer who formulated a specific leadership model in the early 1900’s which requires employees to follow a specific set of actions to meet performance standards.  The outdated policy of the typical performance appraisal is consistent with Taylor Philosophy.

We need to evolve our leadership model. We need a leadership model which provides greater opportunity for higher trust, more cooperation, productive conflict, effective leadership and self-management.  We can have a diverse workforce but we also need an aligned leadership philosophy which brings us together as a team.

Diversity is a factor in a high-performance organization. It is not THE factor.

 

 

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Leadership Marketing Personal Development

How to Get More Out of People Around You

Today’s blog is all about understanding the art of sales management, and understanding how to manage even that proportion of yourself or that proportion of other people that can help you get better sales results for you and your business.

We first need to understand a little bit about the makeup of a sales person.  In my experience in all the sales people that I’ve worked with, I found that sales people are hugely competitive people, often highly strung, perhaps even egotistical, and certainly outspoken and just south of arrogant. Sales people are notoriously difficult to manage. If you try and control them too much, they will revolt. Give them too much time, too much freedom, and they’ll exploit you, become lazy and take advantage of your situation. So mastering this art form really is a massive challenge, which is regularly overlooked.

Many businesses go out and recruit experienced sales people, based on their previous track record, and think they have people ready-made for success. Management and leadership of these people is a daily, weekly, sometimes even an hourly task to get the best out of the sales people in your organization. We need to understand what we can do with these people to get them performing and continuing to perform at their best.

Below are 5 key areas to the art of sales management:

1. YOU NEVER GET THE SECOND CHANCE TO MAKE YOUR FIRST IMPRESSION

It may be that you’ve got to set the rules at day one. You could tell people exactly what you expect of them at the very beginning of taking somebody into a sales role. You need to cover everything from company culture to dress code, personal grooming, time keeping and everywhere in between, because if you want to hold them accountable, they need to know the rules. We must also share with them the consequences of underperformance. They still need to know what happens if they don’t achieve what they say they’re going to be able to achieve.

2. SALES PEOPLE ARE CREATURES OF HABIT

You need to show them what success looks like. They’ll need to see it for themselves for them to be able to follow it, replicate it, and maybe surpass it. People do two things in business – what they enjoy doing or what they get checked on. My advice for sales people is make as much of the job fun as you possibly can. Celebrate the successes, whoop and holler at the good times and let them want to enjoy more of that. A regular meeting is important, but consider the timing of the meeting and the location of the meeting–are they congruent with the outcome that you’re looking for?

Also consider they generally don’t take well to change. If your existing routine is not working and you’re going to change something, be very conscious of the fact they’re going to resent it. So, it requires a strong leadership to change it, and if you know the change you’re looking to make is going to make a long-term improvement, they’ll make an instant decision and stick to it. Your sales team is selling all the time. Sometimes to your customers and your potential customers and sometimes selling to you! Maybe it’s the reason they can’t do something or why an idea will or won’t work. So stick to your guns. Be strategic. Know what it is you’re doing and lay down the path for them to follow. They’ll soon come around to your way of thinking, providing it delivers the results.

3. PLAY TO THEIR EGO

Give them a fine reputation to live up to. Great sales people are competitive, and although they’re often employed by your business, the most demanding boss in the world typically manages them –-him/herself.

Remember, however, that although your sales staff may seem thick skinned, they’re often emotional people, so it’s essential that any praise that you give is loud, is lavish, and it’s in public. Any genuine criticism, when you’re looking to be constructive towards how they can improve, is done behind closed doors. You must protect their ego. Their ego is remarkably valuable to you, and a sales person lacking confidence and lacking self-belief will always underperform.

4. MEASURE AND MONITOR THEIR PERFORMANCE

What we’re looking to do is to manage the results and measure their activity. Whether this is you managing others or yourself, set your stall out in terms of the activity levels you’re going to be following, not just the results that you want, then work back from those results. You might be measuring the number of calls you make in order to win appointments or the number of face-to-face appointments and the results that they bring. By chunking it down to the activity, you can find out which part of the machine is broken.

The thing with measuring activity is activity doesn’t lie, yet the results themselves can be influenced from so many different variables. So, record the results of your efforts. Make sure that you’re keeping statistics on the activity levels and patterns that will occur. Ratios will start to appear and you can understand exactly what it takes to get the results that you’re looking for, as well as understand the scenarios where the ratios don’t fit the pattern. This allows you to reward effort, not just results, and allows you to manage complacency where people might be getting great results but only put in minimal levels of effort. Because of the fact they’re above average and better skilled than maybe somebody else in your team, you know that they can achieve a great deal more for you. Identifying those development opportunities allows you to find out which parts need to be improved in your sales team and how you can then provide them the skills to grow in that specific area.

5. HAVE HUGE RESPECT FROM YOUR SALES TEAM

One of the only ways to get respect from people is to earn it. Far too many business owners and business leaders expect respect. In my experience, I found myself in sales roles running large teams of people, all of which were far more experienced in their roles then me. One particular example I remember was at 20 years of age, running a sales team where the youngest person in the team was nearly 15 years older than me. They’d all been doing the job for 5 years or more, so the chances of me being able to have any impact on them initially was slim to none. They’d also already decided there was nothing they can learn from me. In cases such as this, you must be able to adopt a principle that I call, let me show you. This means having the ability to roll your sleeves up and not just tell somebody what to do but be prepared to show them how they’re going to get a result.

This means you go out on appointments with them and demonstrate exactly what success looks like. Pick up the phone and show them how to win appointments for themselves and show them what success looks like. Turn around a customer that previously had said no to you and bring them back into a yes environment, showing them what can be done. And the more that you show people what they’re capable of, the more it will empower them to do the same and the more it will allow you to demand more of sales team.

So I hope this will give you some good ideas of how to get more out of the people that you’re working with right now. You now have some understanding on the art of sales management and what you could be doing to get the maximum amount of effort, the maximum amount of energy and then more importantly, the maximum results out of the people that are selling in your business.