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Author: Evan Hackel

A dynamic, innovative, thoughtful and inspiring leader with 30 years of experience in franchising, distributed networks and cooperatives. Successful history of: (i) turning around a $700 million distressed franchise system into a $2.0 billion revenue business in four years, (ii) reviving and re-energizing a $3.5 billion revenue franchisor and (iii) founding three franchise systems. Experienced corporate board member.

Currently, a consultant to some of the largest franchise systems in North America. A franchise industry leader, widely published, keynote speaker, member of the New England Franchise Association Board, and Co-chair of the International Franchise Associations Knowledge Share Task Force.|A dynamic, innovative, thoughtful and inspiring leader with 30 years of experience in franchising, distributed networks and cooperatives. Successful history of: (i) turning around a $700 million distressed franchise system into a $2.0 billion revenue business in four years, (ii) reviving and re-energizing a $3.5 billion revenue franchisor and (iii) founding three franchise systems. Experienced corporate board member.

Categories
Growth Human Resources Leadership Personal Development

Remember that Benefits Matter

Offering excellent benefits to the people in your company is expensive – no question – but it is critical to cultivating and retaining a strong employee base. And as we noted at the start of this chapter, your staff is your greatest asset.

Benefits keep people within your organization. If you are not providing comprehensive healthcare coverage and another company offers a better package, people in your company will look for work at that other company. The same is true in relation to funding a 401(k).

Investing in benefits ultimately means that you will keep good people and reduce your turnover. And remember, the turnover is expensive. To find a replacement for an employee who leaves is expensive and time-wasting. You have to spend money and time to recruit each new employee – usually, while the job of the employee who left is being handled by other staffers or being left undone. After you bring your new employee on board, it costs money for the training that gets him or her up to speed. And in some cases, the first person you hire doesn’t work out. He or she fails to serve customers well while getting up to speed, for one example, which costs you money and business. And if that new hire doesn’t work out, you have to repeat the entire process a second or even a third time.

Those steps are hugely expensive. Yet in many cases, you can prevent them by simply having an excellent benefits plan.

I have been a small business person and I have worked for large companies, too. I am fully aware of how time-consuming and expensive it is for small businesses to offer good benefits. But the reality is that doing so is worth it. The money you invest is money well spent.

Categories
Growth Management Personal Development

Stop Telling People What to Do, Ingage their Hearts Instead

I am a CEO, and I have worked with many other top executives during my career. So I speak from experience when I say that this could be the biggest day-to-day frustration many leaders face . . .

“I tell people what to do, but they don’t do it.”

This issue comes up time and time again. It makes being a leader much harder than it should be.

You talk, you communicate, you spell things out, but somehow only a small percentage of your initiatives come to completion. So you bear down, discipline people, or offer incentives, and those solutions don’t work either.

And do you know what could be an even bigger problem? People do what you tell them to do but there was in fact a better or simpler way that you didn’t know – perhaps one that your people could have told you if you were willing to listen.

I have found a solution to this problem, which I call Ingaged Leadership, let me summarize a few of its key points here so you can test it and get it working for you.

What Is Ingaged Leadership?

Ingagement is founded on the belief that when you align people and create an organization where everyone works together in partnership, that organization becomes vastly more successful. It isn’t a single action you take just once. It is an ongoing, dynamic business practice that has the power to transform your organization, your people, you and ultimately, your success.

What Do Ingaged Leaders Do Differently?

Ingaged leaders believe that it is not enough to tell people to do. They understand that if they want to unlock the full potential of any organization and its people, it is necessary to involve people’s minds, creativity and emotions. I called it Ingagement with an “I” because it gets people Involved, Invested and Inspired.

Getting Started as an Ingaged Leader

That all might sound theoretical. But it isn’t. Here are some ways you can start Ingaged Leadership today. I invite you to try them and see for yourself how quickly they can improve your effectiveness as a leader.

  • Set aside personal opinions about what works and what doesn’t and let people test their own ideas. Of course, any good CEO will stop employees from doing things that are sure to be disastrous. But the fact is, too many leaders step in, err on the side of caution, and stifle people’s inborn drive to strive for great things. I would urge you to get your ego out of the mix and let people try things that are unproven or even risky. More often than not, the results they achieve will greatly surpass your expectations.
  • Don’t just listen well, constantly look for nuggets of value in what other people are saying. Early in my career I thought I was a good listener. In fact, people told me that I was because I sat quietly, didn’t interrupt, and paid attention. But a time came when I realized that although I was attentive, I was only listening closely so I could catch faults in other people’s statements so I could prove them wrong and advance my own plans. I turned that around, began to listen for nuggets of high value, then developed them in concert with the person who had suggested them. The result was a quiet revolution in my leadership effectiveness.
  • Build a top management team that is positively disruptive. That means resisting the temptation to surround yourself with “yes people,” “people who are just like me” and people who prefer the comfort of “group think” to shaking things up. Also have the courage to recruit people who are genuinely better than you at doing certain things, and let them. Their efforts will free you and your results will soar.
  • Ask for help and offer help. Both activities are signs of strength, not weakness.

A Case Study of Ingaged Leadership

In case you think that all this is theoretical, it is not, as this story proves. Last year I had a call from one of my clients, a franchise brand. I cannot give the company’s name in this article, but you know them. They have branded walk-in locations in hundreds of cities and towns across America – probably near where you live.

The caller explained that the company had a very specific problem they wanted me to solve, which my contact summarized as, “Our annual conference is coming up in a few months, attendance has been in the low 20% for the last few years, and we would like you to get more of our store owners to attend. We will be rolling out a new store design and showing it to our people and that’s why we want to get most of our store-owners there.”

Our team called a number of franchisees to ask, “How do you feel about going to your annual conference?” Most of them responded by saying something like, “Oh, the conferences are fun and I get to socialize, but I never learn anything that the company isn’t going to tell me later on anyway. So why go?”  Further we found the franchisees didn’t feel like they were involved at the meeting, they felt like they were being talk at and being sold things. Those comments made it clear that the rollout of the new design was going to be a disaster.

I called my contact back in headquarters and suggested that instead of “selling” a completed new design, the company should structure the convention as an opportunity to let franchise owners come out to see the three different concepts, critique them, and give feedback.

All of a sudden, there was real value for people to go. They weren’t going to be talked at, they were going to be listened to. In other words, they were being Ingaged. The event sold out, to the point where no hotel rooms were available in the original hotel or two hotels nearby. In the end, there was more than 85% attendance. The meeting was a huge success.  Currently the new design is in testing in the field, but assuming customer reaction is strong and positive, there’s an anxious group of franchisees who are ready and willing to convert their locations. Involvement and listening where the keys to this success story.  A traditional hierarchical approach would have met with failure.

Putting the Power of Ingagement to Work

I could report more times when Ingagement has achieved great things. But in the end, all the stories I could tell you are not as important as the new chapters you can write in your own leadership journey. I invite you to add Ingagement to your leader’s toolbox as you watch your story unfold.

Categories
Growth Leadership Personal Development

Why Failing to Train Your Employees Costs a lot More Than You Think

Let me start this article by quoting a conversation between a CEO and a head of training.

The CEO says, “What if we spend all this money training our staff and they leave us?” And the head of training replies, “What if we don’t train them and they stay?”

The point of this adage is that if you spend a lot of money and they leave that is not great. But if you don’t train them and they stay, it costs you a lot of money.

***

Early in my career when I worked for CCA Global Partners, I supervised operations at a number of flooring stores that practiced a philosophy hiring philosophy that seemed logical. The company routinely hired salespeople who had worked at other flooring retailers, and then didn’t train them. The assumption was that experienced salespeople were “pretrained.” Training them would be costly and superfluous.

That assumption might have made sense, but it was flawed. The fact that those salespeople had experience didn’t mean that they came armed with the best selling skills. So, my team and I developed a blended program of live and eLearning that taught the comprehensive selling skills that our company needed. We trained salespeople on the products they were selling, on how to increase the size of the average order, on how to explain to customers what to expect when their new flooring was installed, and more.

The performance of the experienced people we trained was dramatically better than the performance of experienced people who were allowed to “learn on their own.” For every $750,00 in sales made by salespeople we trained, the “learn on their own” salespeople generated only $400,00 in sales, or only about 60% of what trained employees did. Another way of looking at it? Untrained employees contributed about 60% of what the trained employees did against margin (the amount of money they generated after subtracting the cost of commissions, the cost of goods sold, the cost of processing credit cards and other expenses).

And the advantage becomes even greater when you consider the additional cost of employment that include benefits, social security taxes, the cost of a desk and a phone, and other expenses.

In my years of analyzing training results, I have seen time and time again that the ROI on training is dramatically greater than most company executives believe it will be. In simple terms, if a trained worker becomes 100% productive and an untrained worker is only 60% productive, you are losing $40,000 in value on every $100,000 of business you conduct.

And here’s another statistic that should catch your attention. When you look at the amount of money that each employee contributes after commissions (the “contribution margin”), properly trained salespeople generate something on the order of $122,000 more for of $1 million in sales that your company makes. And when you tally those gains across a salesforce of five, 10, or more employees, you easily see that the gains are significant.

Why Trained Employees Generate More Income

There are many reasons. Trained salespeople . . .

  • Close more sales
  • Generate larger average sales
  • Sell fewer products at discounted prices, and more products at list price
  • Make fewer mistakes
  • Sell the right products, reducing the cost of returns and product replacements
  • Build customer relationships that result in more repeat business
  • Generate more positive reviews online
  • Increase your net promoter scores
  • Help keep morale and productivity high among all your employees, because people don’t like to work with untrained people who don’t know what they are doing

There are many more reasons why trained employees contribute more to the bottom line. Even if you have a company that attracts a small volume of walk-in traffic and only a small number of customers come through your door, for example, trained salespeople will increase profits for you, even if you do not increase the number of customers you attract, your business will still be up if you train them to sell each customer just a little bit more, to make higher margins.

Training Is Not Just for Salespeople

To cite another example from my years in the flooring industry, I was once responsible for creating a program that trained flooring installers the basics of customer service, such as explaining to customers exactly what to expect during the installation process. Thanks to that program, we took the percentage of customers who said they would not buy from us again from 13% down to less than half a percent.  We dramatically increased the likelihood of doing referral business by word of mouth advertising.

In Closing . . .

Not training is hugely expensive . . . far more expensive than training. In your company, I urge you to look for all the opportunities where proper training can dramatically increase profits, reduce waste and provide an outsized ROI for every training dollar you spend. If you start to look, I am willing to wager you will find many more opportunities than you expect.

Categories
Growth Human Resources Personal Development

Training: Learning to Measure Both Hard and Soft Metrics

Because the first aim of training is to improve the way people do things, all training programs should be evaluated by measuring “hard” metrics – which are almost always measurements that can be translated into numbers and evaluated. They could include data on:

  • Are our salespeople making more sales calls, closing more sales, or increasing the size of the average order?
  • Have our product assemblers increased their output and reduced the number of quality defects?
  • Are our phone reps now resolving more customer issues on the first call?
  • How many more positive reviews are we getting online?
  • Six months after training ends, are more customers placing repeat orders?

Without hard metrics like those, how will you know whether your training has achieved its goals or repaid your investment?

But it is important to measure soft metrics too. Often misunderstood, they have to do less with observable performance, and more to do with attitudes. They too can be measured before and after training as a way to evaluate results. Some examples:

  • Do members of your hotel’s front desk staff feel calmer and more confident about resolving customer complaints?
  • Do your new hires now feel more enthusiastic about working for your company than they did before training began?
  • Do employees now expect to remain at your company for longer periods of time?
  • Has training improved employees’ attitudes?

The Art of Measuring Soft Metrics

There is an incorrect assumption that it is difficult to collect data on soft metrics. In fact, soft metrics can be measured by having trainees complete surveys or by having interview with members of your training or HR team.

Another way to gauge soft metrics is to measure behaviors. After training your call center staffers, for example, do they arrive more punctually and call in sick less often? That could indicate improved motivation and morale. Or after training your retail salespeople, has the rate of their retention improved after six months or a year? That could indicate that your training made their jobs less stressful and more satisfying.

Another reason to measure soft metrics is that they help you identify any “extra” benefits your training achieved. If the primary purpose of your training was to teach your restaurant workers to deliver better customer service, for example, but they also became bigger believers in your brand.

Categories
Growth Leadership Personal Development

Attitude Is a Multiplier

If you say the word “attitude” to people in the training community, most of us will think about presenters who burst into a room and try to knock trainees over with high bursts of energy. That’s not a bad image. Energy is absolutely part of attitude. Yet attitude is a lot more too.  It is a force that multiplies the results of training, improves performance, and leads to greater success.

Attitude has been the motive force behind many kinds of people. Rosa Parks was a quiet woman, but she had the attitude to take on bigotry and hasten the end of segregation. Winston Churchill was not a showman who sought the spotlight, but he rose to the challenge of World War II and his “never, never, never give up” attitude led his country to victory. Stephen Hawking, with his physical limitations, is not equipped to bowl people over with high energy, but his great attitude has enabled him to lead a very full life and expand the horizons of physics and science.

And you and I can use attitude to multiply our effectiveness too, no matter our field of endeavor.

What Is Attitude?

Here’s an analogy that helps explain what attitude is.

Attitude is like STP, the popular oil additive. People who love STP say that when they add it to the oil in their cars, their engines run more smoothly, produce more horsepower, and deliver better gas mileage. Attitude is like that. You pour it into whatever you do, and performance improves.

Attitude is like an electric light bulb too. As soon as Edison began to sell electric light bulbs, people were able to read and learn into the evening hours, work longer days, and achieve logarithmically bigger things in their lives. Attitude also lights up the world and empowers people to achieve more than they ever thought possible.

How Can You Put the Power of Attitude to Work?

I am still working this out – it is a very big issue. But here are some observations from my own life in business that I know to be right:

A great attitude starts with great listening, because attitude flows from other people to you – and not the other way around. When you become immersed in other people’s ideas, needs, concerns and inspirations, your attitude soars, and people sense that.

Being open to new ideas is the cornerstone of a great attitude. I have noticed confusion in this area, because some people seem to think that attitude means having emphatic opinions and trying to convince other people that they are right. A great attitude, in contrast, means trying to discover where other people are right and honoring them for that.

People who inspire you can help you build a powerfully positive attitude. If you apply life lessons from people who had great attitudes, you will take on some aspects of their greatness. When you study exceptional people, they will always be at your side in a sense. They might be your parents or other family members, business leaders you admire, historical figures, your minister or imam or rabbi – or anyone else whose life inspires you.

A great attitude is something that gets things done in the real world, not just in theory. If you go into a room and charm people and then nothing changes after you are done talking, you are not really tapping the power of attitude. Attitude does not stop as soon as the words are said. If you want to tap its power, follow through and follow up and bring change to other people’s lives and to the world.

I Would Welcome Your Input

Attitude is a topic that runs through my new book, Ingaging Leadership. As I noted above, it is a topic that I continue to explore. I invite your comments and feedback so we can engage and ingage in this process together.

Categories
Growth Management Personal Development

Massively Big Ideas for Creating Massively Better Franchise Agreements

You’re a franchising industry veteran. You understand franchise agreements like you do the back of your hand. But is it possible that you still have a lot to learn? That there are revolutionary new ideas out there?  I suspect yes, and I would like to tell you about them in this article.  So please read with an open mind.

What’s Wrong with Franchise Agreements?

Chances are you will agree with me when I say that there are plenty of things wrong with the binding documents that you sign with your franchisees, AKA franchise agreements. The biggest of the problems are tied to the fact that franchise agreements typically are binding for five years, or often 10.

There’s security in that, you might say. But what if some great new idea comes along during that time? Let’s say, for example, that you realize that there is a huge opportunity if you begin to sell products online, if you introduce a new line of products, or introduce some other big new idea?

You can’t just announce it and expect the change to automatically happen across all your franchise locations. Your feet are stuck in clay. How can you get all your franchisees to agree?

How can you retroactively change the franchise agreement? You have to change your franchise agreement, but it’s binding for those five or 10 years, and your franchisees are under no obligation to change. You need to write a new agreement and get everyone to sign it. What if they don’t want to? Do you really want to wait five or 10 years before you can issue a new agreement – before you can make the changes you want? Of course you don’t.

Massively Big Idea #1

This isn’t a theoretical problem, I have had many franchises ask me about it over the years. My solution? When you write new franchise agreements, include a procedure for implementing change. Here is what I recommend.

Write a provision in your franchise agreements that states that if management proposes new changes, all franchisees will get to vote on them. If 60 percent of all franchisees vote in favor of the change, it is binding on everyone. One vote per franchisee.

Of course, this new clause will not be included in the franchise agreements that are already in force. But here’s a suggestion – start including it in all the new agreements you create.  Isn’t it better to start including this provision in all the new agreements you write, starting today? In time, your old agreements will cycle out and you can replace them with new ones that include this clause . . . along with your big new business idea. This is a massively big idea

Massively Big Idea #2

Franchise agreements explain activities that franchisees are required to engage in. Your agreements might say that franchisees are expected to attend your annual convention, to take part in the training you provide, to use your signage and display systems – to refrain from selling certain products, or products made by your competitors.

Okay, your franchisees have agreed to adhere to your requirements. But what if they don’t? What if they don’t play by your rules? Are you really going to terminate franchisees who decide not to attend your convention , even though they are required to? Are you going to terminate them if they start to create their own substandard advertisements instead of those that come from you? In most cases no, you are not.

But here’s my solution. Instead of writing franchise agreements that threaten franchisees with termination, your franchise agreement should specify penalties, with specific dollar amounts that franchisees will pay for violations. With a termination option still available, if needed.

For example, the fee could be $1,000 for brand standard violations, for the first month that a franchise is in violation. If the franchise is still in violation after that, the fee increases by $1,000 a month. And it continues to increase by $1000 every month, until the franchisee complies. Plus, you back up those requirements with a clause that says you still have the option to terminate franchisees that don’t comply. Because these requirements are spelled out in the agreement that franchisees sign, you are building in a big incentive for them to adhere to the standards that build your success and your brand.

The penalties you put forth should not be punitive, but they should be rational and motivational. Let’s say, for example, that the typical airfare and hotel costs that franchisees will pay to attend your annual convention will be about $1,500. The penalty for not attending should exceed that amount. If you only penalize them $500, some of them are going to say, “I’ll skip the convention, because the penalty is less than what it will cost me to attend.”  So a $2,500 penalty would be rational.

All penalty dollars should go to the national advertising fund. That way, franchisees will not see your fines as a way enrich the company.  You will gain more support from your franchisees if the funds go to the national advertising fund – a source of funding that benefits them all.

Your franchise agreement should also include a process that franchisees can use to request a variance.  Let’s say, for example, that one of them gets into a major car accident on the way to the airport, went to the hospital, and was unable to attend your convention. Variance requests should be heard by a group of franchisees, not by  management. Franchisees are tougher than management about the behavior of their fellow franchisees.

You should look at every violation you have in your franchise agreement and attach a dollar amount to it. Of course review this process and the fine amounts with your franchise council and get their buy-in, and vet the concept with the entire system so you have the support of the franchisees before implementing this change.

Don’t wait for all your agreements to rollover.  If you have gotten support from your franchisees, implement changes now. By  offering your current franchisees a fine in lieu of termination, you can’t require the fine, but most franchisee would choose it over termination.

This will massively change for the positive how you handle violations.

Hopefully these were two ideas you never have heard of and that you can implement in your franchise system.  These ideas are game changers.

Categories
Growth Human Resources Personal Development

How to Tell the Difference Between Training that Is Frivolous and Training that Gets Results

Let’s take a look at two professional trainers. In today’s post, we’ll call them Joan and Jack.

How Joan and Jack Are Similar

Both Jack and Joan are energetic trainers who get their audiences laughing quickly. They will both do whatever it takes – using props or quacking or asking trainees to do silly things – to illustrate a concept or get them engaged. And when trainees leave at the end of the day, they feel energized and happy.

How Joan and Jack Are Different

A few weeks after training is over, the performance of the people who trained with Joan has really improved. The performance of the people who trained with Jack hasn’t. They quickly went back to “business as usual.”

In other words, Jack’s training is frivolous. Joan’s isn’t, because it gets results.

How to Avoid Wasting Money on Frivolous Training 

Define outcomes and make sure your trainer can reach them. Do you want your salespeople to contact 25% more new prospects? Do you want the people who deliver and install appliances for your store to give true “white glove” treatment to customers? Or do you want your hotel front-desk staff to delight guests with exceptional service?  Your trainer should explain his or her plans to break those processes down into individual steps and address them directly through training.

Help your trainer know who your trainees are. A good trainer will want to know about their ages, prior experience, educational level, current jobs, and all other factors that can be leveraged to engage them more fully in training.  A concerned trainer will also want to be aware of any factors that might cause them not to engage.

Work with your trainer to develop meaning metrics. If you work together to define what you will measure after training is completed, chances are good that your training will accomplish much more, because its goals are well defined.

Monitor sessions and make sure that training stays on track. If you are a company training director or a member of senior management, you might not want to attend sessions, because your presence could put a damper on trainees’ ability to relax and learn. If that is the case, ask a few trainees to check in with you at lunchtime or other breakpoints to tell you whether the trainer is hitting the benchmarks you created. If not, a quick check-in with the trainer can often get things back on track and avoid wasting time and money.

It’s All About Getting Your Money’s Worth and Getting Results 

If you are a training director who wants to record serious results from serious training, it’s important to work closely with professional trainers who don’t only entertain, but educate.  That’s the difference between training that’s frivolous and training that offers a good ROI on your investment.

About Evan Hackel

Evan Hackel is CEO of Tortal Training, a leading training development company, and principal and founder of Ingage Consulting. He is the host of Training Unleashed podcast, and author of the book Ingaging Leadership. Evan speaks on Seeking Excellence, Better Together, Ingaging Leadership, and Attitude is Everything. To hire Evan as a speaker, visit evanhackelspeaks.com and follow Evan on Twitter @ehackel.

Categories
Growth Human Resources Personal Development

How to Identify the Best Candidates for Leadership Training

Leadership training programs offer your organization many important benefits, including:

  • A cost-effective and efficient way to fill your top jobs by promoting excellent performers from within your organization.
  • A powerful motivator that encourages your most talented managers to stay in your company for the long term.
  • An opportunity to create a strong cross-functional leadership team of individuals who bring extensive experience from different sectors of your organization.

Those are all important reasons to invest in leadership training. But before you start to design a leadership training program, let’s take a step back and ask an important preliminary question . . .

How can you select the best candidates to take part in your leadership training?

In a Breakthrough Ideas in Training webinar for Tortal Training Dr. Keith Halperin, Senior Partner at Korn Ferry, outlined these four “leadership dimensions” that should influence your choice of trainees and your training goals.

Experience – For the Korn Ferry leadership consulting team, experience is part of a process. Dr. Halperin and his team identify the most critical experiences that a company’s leaders have had in the past. They then create training that exposes leadership trainees to those same experiences.

Traits – These are specific competencies that leaders need in order to be successful in your organization. Identifying them requires study of your current leaders. Do they have experience doing business internationally, for example? Are they keen marketers, communicators, financial analysts, or something else? Once you have a fuller picture of key traits, you can select the strongest candidates and design training that cultivates the traits that they will need as they move into leadership positions.

Drivers – “Leading is hard work that takes energy and passion,” Dr. Halperin told the webinar. Before selecting candidates for leadership training, it is important to evaluate whether they really have the drive to want to handle the challenges of top leadership positions, or whether they’ll take your training just because it’s the next step up the ladder.

Competencies – Competencies are abilities that leaders are capable of developing. In his webinar, Dr. Halperin cited “Learning Agility” as one of the most important; it means a person’s ability to move into unknown situations, adjust to uncertainty, and understand what needs to be done. Learning agility also means the ability to learn lessons from past experiences that apply to new situations. Other competencies can include the abilities to earn trust, lead change and create a culture of innovation.

About Evan Hackel

Evan Hackel is CEO of Tortal Training, a leading training development company, and principal and founder of Ingage Consulting. He is the host of Training Unleashed podcast, and author of the book Ingaging Leadership. Evan speaks on Seeking Excellence, Better Together, Ingaging Leadership, and Attitude is Everything. To hire Evan as a speaker, visit evanhackelspeaks.com and follow Evan on Twitter @ehackel.

Categories
Growth Management Personal Development

Take Pains to Differentiate Fact from Opinion

A lesson in communication and leadership from my new book Ingaging Leadership

We are living in a time when many people express their opinions as if they were facts. Many do it unknowingly, others intentionally. We hear politicians do it. It has also become commonplace on talk radio and television news.

When people speak with any level of passion or conviction, they often speak as if what they are saying is a fact. In reality, much of what people try to pass off as facts are simply opinions. And when people state an opinion as a fact, their audience is prone to believe it to be a fact and react to it in a certain way. Most often, the conversation either ends or never gets to the point of addressing real issues.

You might hear someone in your organization say, for example, “You cannot bring that product to market by early next year because of A, B, and C.” That person is stating opinions as though they were facts and if you disagree, you look like you are calling him or her a liar.

If you cultivate the habit of delineating between fact and opinion during conversations, you become more empowered to move toward real solutions. If you fail to do so, miscommunications usually result. Imagine, for example, that you’re asking for advice about a particular issue, but that you express your opinion of that situation as though it were undisputable truth. In such a case, the advice that you receive will probably not have great merit, because the other person will not base his or her advice on a wider and more comprehensive understanding of what the situation really is.

From the other side of the equation, it is wise to cast a similarly critical eye on the information you receive, by consistently challenging the assumption that what is being said or presented to you is actually fact. To make the most informed decisions, you need to investigate and become as certain as you can that you are considering not opinions, but the reality of what is taking place.

Now, it’s not realistic to think you can do this with absolutely everything that comes across your desk or in every conversation. Time limitations and pressures often will keep you from probing on a deep level into what you are hearing. And you do not need to do so all the time – not when you are dealing with low-priority issues or activities, for example. But you certainly should do it when you are dealing with serious or deep issues. That’s where you’ll want to dig deeper – to look at every angle to get to the real facts.

When you get there, you’ll realize a significant improvement in business. Fact or opinion? You decide.

Communications skills that help differentiate opinions from facts . . .

When you are offering an opinion, precede it with the phrase, “In my opinion.” This differentiates opinions from facts. Perhaps more importantly, it raises the quality of the conversation by inviting people to contribute to your opinion, refute it, or offer productive alternatives of their own.

Ask other people, “Is what you are saying a fact or an opinion?” This strategy, like the one just above, encourages others to be more alert to situations in which they are tempted to offer their opinions as facts.

Point out when other people are presenting opinions as facts. This can be difficult to do because in a way, you are pointing out that those other people might be lying. Plus, it can be unpleasant to challenge other people’s opinions. If someone says, for example, “Your price increases are killing sales,” you should consider exposing that statement by stating that it is an opinion, not a fact. You can then explore that opinion to see if it has validity or is simply an attempt to box you into a corner or limit a productive search for information and solutions. In some cases, you will discover the other person is simply trying to advance his or her own agenda or goals. One good choice of words is to say, “I believe . . .” (“I believe that other factors could be at work too . . . let’s explore some more.”) In a non-confrontational way, those words help you address the reality that another person is expressing an opinion as though it were a fact.

Get into the habit of looking for facts. If someone says, “Your price increases are killing sales,” you can work with that person to arrive at statistics, data, feedback, and facts that either support or refute the opinion. This elevates the quality of your conversation to a level of higher ingagement.

An Experiment for You to Try

Over the next two days, pay attention to times when people state opinions as facts. Watch some commentary shows on television and notice when it’s taking place. Pay attention to your own communication too, and try to make sure that others know when you are stating an opinion. What do these steps tell you about how effectively you and other people in your organization make this important distinction?

About Evan Hackel

Evan Hackel is CEO of Tortal Training, a leading training development company, and principal and founder of Ingage Consulting. He is the host of Training Unleashed podcast, and author of the book Ingaging Leadership. Evan speaks on Seeking Excellence, Better Together, Ingaging Leadership, and Attitude is Everything. To hire Evan as a speaker, visit evanhackelspeaks.com and follow Evan on Twitter @ehackel.

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Growth Leadership Personal Development Technology

Is Training Putting Your Company Data at Risk?

Data security has come a long way since December 2005, right? That was the month when somebody popped open a car trunk and stole a laptop that contained the records of 230,000 Ameriprise Financial customers.  Suddenly, data security became a big concern, executives heard the word “firewall” for the first time, and companies scrambled to protect themselves.

But how much has computer security really improved? You have to wonder. Only a few years ago, the records of 74,000 current and former Coca-Cola employees were compromised when laptops were stolen from company headquarters in Atlanta.

That’s really bad. But the most pressing question is, how secure is your company data? And because we are a training company, we need to ask . . .

Are your training platforms exposing your company to attacks from hackers?

It’s a troubling question, especially if you deliver training to employees in multiple locations:

Your trainees are logging onto Wi-Fi in Starbucks and other public places across the country. Does that expose you to risk?

You’ve got a powerful new distributed system that lets employees do their training on their smartphones. But is that safe? What if one of your trainees loses a phone? Does that put your company data at risk?

You maintain stringent security in company headquarters, but what’s going on in your regional offices? Can you be sure that laptops and workstations are secure? Remember the hard lesson that Coke learned when company laptops were lifted in Atlanta.

Proactive Steps to Take

It’s reassuring to know there are ways to make sure remote laptops, tablets and phones do not give hackers access to your company data. Here are some defenses to keep in mind:

Remember, the cloud can be a great defense. When your training materials reside in the cloud – in effect, on servers that are maintained by your training company, not by you in house – it is virtually impossible for hackers to use them as entry-points to get into your company’s servers or company records. And if your training modules are organized in separate “silos” so that trainees can access only one training area at a time, you have even more security.

Be sure that trainees are using two-step encrypted passwords to log into your system. “Two-step” means that each trainee must enter two individual credentials to start training – such as a username and a strong password that passes muster. “Encrypted” means that the username and password are “scrambled” so they cannot easily be copied over Wi-Fi or by remote hackers. Also, let trainees know that they are required to log off as soon as they complete different training units. That prevents phone thieves from stealing phones and having easy access to your training materials.

Make sure robust security protocols are being followed in all company locations. You know your company and its structure better than we do, so you know the obstacles you might be facing in this area.  To make sure that protocols are followed, you might have to deliver regular security training to divisional or regional supervisors. You might also need to have your training director take on the role of security officer by making sure that company security directives are being followed.

Prevention Is Better than Fixing a Breach

One certain thing is that it is much better to take preemptive steps to protect your security than it is to repair the damage after a breach has taken place. When selecting a training development company for distributed training, the best course is to choose one with the expertise to build security defense into your plans from day one.

About Evan Hackel

Evan Hackel is CEO of Tortal Training, a leading training development company, and principal and founder of Ingage Consulting. He is the host of Training Unleashed podcast, and author of the book Ingaging Leadership. Evan speaks on Seeking Excellence, Better Together, Ingaging Leadership, and Attitude is Everything. To hire Evan as a speaker, visit evanhackelspeaks.com and follow Evan on Twitter @ehackel.