Are you addicted to being right? Being right always feels nice but it could be holding you back from greater success. My wife Robin is right about many things and she is kind enough to let me think some of those things are actually my idea. We’ll explore the issue in greater depth below.

Addicted to Being Right
 
Chances are you don’t like being told what to do. Whether it’s your mother, father, spouse, child or boss, you will resist doing what they tell you to do, even if they are right. Same thing happens when you tell people what to do. The resistance to being told what to do resides at both a conscious and below-conscious level.
 
Help other people be right
 
While we resist ideas from outside ourselves, we readily accept our own rationale. Therefore, instead of wanting to take credit for a great idea or waiting for the opportunity to say, “I told you so,” why not help other people come to the conclusion for themselves?
 
There are three primary ways to help other people think through situations for themselves and come to the best solution. Using these tools will help you become a more influential person both at work and at home.

1. Ask questions – When you use open ended questions like How, What, Tell me about… it forces the other person to think and respond. That thinking process helps the other person take ownership of the idea.
2. Tell stories – When you hear, see or read a story, you actually immerse yourself in the story. The saying “Selling is Storytelling” is quite accurate because as the other person inserts themselves into your story, they begin to own the idea for themselves.
3. Use powerful words – When you ask someone to do something, always give them a reason. By inserting the word ‘because’ and giving a reason, you increase the compliance by up to 50% over not giving them a reason. Eliminate the word ‘but’ from your vocabulary. When you use the word ‘but’ you are telling the other person that what they just said is wrong and what you’re about to say is right. Instead use the word ‘and’ to join your thought to theirs. That way the thought becomes theirs and they will act on it more readily.

When you become more persuasive and influential you can smile to yourself knowing that you had the great idea to begin with and feel good knowing that the other person is more committed to taking the desired action.
 
Reflection Questions
 
Is it overly important for you to be seen as being right? Do other people do what you want willingly or do they passively or actively resist your ideas, requests and initiatives?
 
Action Items 

• Realize that greater success can be achieved when other people think an idea is theirs even if you helped them discover the idea for themselves.
• Become an expert question asker and story teller, knowing that these techniques help other people grasp your ideas with greater ease.
• Give people a reason to do what you suggest and instead of arguing, join your ideas to theirs to give them a sense of ownership.

If you are curious about how to become more persuasive and influential, check out our Persuasive and Influential Leadership course with Dr. Peter DeShane on Feb 10th, 2010.  A live workshop and a self-study program is available.

Dear Santa,

I have been a good employee all year and wish that you could help my manager bring me the following gifts this season. They would help me become happier and more productive next year.

1. Give me the gift of clear expectations – help my manager become more clear in what he or she expects of me. I am tired of guessing the expectations and getting limited direction.
2. Give me the gift of regular feedback – rather than wait until my performance review, I wish my manager would give me feedback regularly – daily, weekly and monthly. If he or she gave me regular feedback on what I was doing well or needed to improve, I would do my best to improve.
3. Give me the gift of feeling part of the team – like everyone else I have the need to belong and feel part of the team. Help my manager build a stronger team by treating people fairly, not playing favorites and not talking about people behind their backs.
4. Give me the gift of better communication – help my manager keep me better informed about what is going on. If communication is so important, why does my manager do so little of it? Sure they are busy – typically doing things that we the employees could do if only they would delegate and stop trying to make every decision themselves.
5. Give me the gift of praise and recognition – it’s natural to find faults but please help my manager notice all the good things we are doing and tell us about them more often. We will be more likely to repeat the good things if they are mentioned to us more often. On the other hand when our manager focuses on the negative, we tend to give him more of that. Human behavior is funny, eh Santa?
6. Give me the gift of a challenge to grow my talent – My manager finds it easier to keep giving the same assignments to the same people. He thinks it makes his job easier but it really hurts our flexibility and we want something new to do every once in a while. One of the reasons I will stay in my job is because I can learn something new.
7. Give me the gift of training (and train my boss too!) – Show me I am important by investing in me to do my job better. My manager could benefit from some training too – making my wishes come true. I think even my manager’s manager needs some training because my boss behaves the way his boss expects. In fact most of the behaviors my boss wants to change come all the way from the top!

I will remember to leave out the milk and cookies!

Chances are that you have at least two or three significant and aggravating people issues that you know you SHOULD do something about and haven’t.

A few examples:

• An employee or peer who complains constantly and is “high maintenance.
• A manager who is completely lacking in leadership skills and treats his peers and/or employees with disrespect.
• A supplier who consistently disappoints in delivery or service.
• A customer who is so difficult to keep happy that they are costing you all of your profit margin just to keep them.
• A sales person who will not change his habits, go after new business or hit targets consistently.
• Excuses and reasons for why things cannot and are not being done (even simple things).
• Endless meetings that don’t resolve anything and take up valuable time that could be spent doing something of greater value.
• feel free to add in your own examples here.

If you are a supervisor, manager, executive or business owner you have the ability to resolve these issues. And as an added bonus, when you do resolve the issue, chances are a number of other positive benefits will become evident.

Why do we delay doing something about situations that bug us? The number one reason is that we feel that the effort and aggravation to resolve the issue is going to be worse than simply living with the problem.

See Something, Say Something

When a leader notices a behavior or result that is unacceptable and then proceeds to ignore or defer mentioning it to the individual, they are condoning the behavior and supporting its continuation. Untrained managers and supervisors lack the leadership skills to resolve these issues effectively.

A problem is easiest to resolve when you first notice it. The longer it continues, the deeper the roots grow and the more effort and time you will expend to correct it.

Tips to Tackling the Things You Are Putting Up With

1. Imagine what it will be like to NOT have to put up with it any longer. How much happier will you be? How much happier will the people around you be? How much more money could the organization be saving or generating?
2. Plan out what you need to say, how to say it, when you should address it, if you need someone else to help you and even consider practicing or role playing the conversation ahead of time. If you think resolving the situation could result in termination, strategize with HR in advance and get the support of your manager.
3. Think about the likely objections, excuses, deflections or reasons the other person will use to avoid taking responsibility for his actions. Determine what your response will be.
4. Have the conversation. In all cases, discussion in private is warranted. The person will be defensive enough in private, let alone if you attempt to correct them in front of others.
5. For future aggravations, follow the See Something, Say Something rule and address issues earlier.

In many cases you will discover that the discussion is much easier than you expected, the situation will tend to improve almost instantly and you will be wishing you had done it much sooner.

I probably shouldn’t have been thinking about business when I was supposed to be enjoying a meal out with my wife and daughter. We headed down to the closest location of a national italian restaurant chain. Based on previous experiences, it wasn’t my first choice.

I should have trusted my gut. The men’s washroom was littered with paper towel, the service was slow and the staff were frazzled. This wasn’t an isolated incident; previous visits had exposed similar poor performance.

Another location in the same chain had a totally different feel. Staff were happy, service was fast and as customers we were happy. While I didn’t have actual data, one outlet certainly looked busier than the other.

How can it be that two locations of the same chain in different cities could have such a different customer experience? Sites are selected using strict criteria and there are standard operating procedures. So what would explain the difference? Leadership.

In our experience a weak manager or supervisor will cause differences in profitability, sales, costs, cleanliness, morale and turnover. This variation doesn’t just show up in restaurants. It applies to retail stores, factories, production lines and engineering groups.

What leadership behaviors lead to these variations in performance?

1. Expectations: A weak manager doesn’t make his or her expectations known clearly to all staff. Without clear standards, performance tends to drop to the bare minimum.
2. Hiring: A manager will contribute to his or her own demise be being less selective in hiring decisions, poor interviewing skills and deviating from standard procedures and guidelines.
3. Training: Weak managers will either omit training or delegate training to staff members who are not qualified to teach the company system.
4. Monitoring: Managers need to personally observe performance and make sure staff are doing what is expected, correct unacceptable performance and provide encouragement.
5. Communication: Weak managers spend less time speaking with staff one on one and in team meetings.

With business demands and the amount of information increasing, it is tempting for managers to hunker down and spend most of their attention on tasks – dealing with customer/supplier issues, operational issues, answering email, endless meetings and the never ending to-do list.

By spending so much time on tasks, the leader tends to spend less time on the people side of their job. The people side includes explaining expectations, delegating, communicating face to face, providing coaching, training staff, giving performance feedback, and challenging, correcting and recognizing employees.

In the short term, focusing on tasks gets things done. Think of how much you get done on the day before leaving for vacation. In the medium to long term, the task-focused manager creates even more work for themselves because they allow the team to wither and become demotivated. This causes a drop in productivity and results begin to wane. It becomes a death spiral when the manager puts even more emphasis on tasks, hoping to turn things around.

Tips to Get a Better Balance Between Tasks and People

1. Monitor Where You Spend Your Time

For one week, take an inventory of your time usage. As you complete a task, deal with an issue or attend a meeting, ask yourself if someone else on your team could do that task if you were to delegate and coach them. Ask yourself if the task requires your personal attention or could be completed by someone else at a lower cost allowing you to focus on higher value tasks. Ask yourself if your time is being absorbed by activities caused because you did not spend enough time communicating expectations, training staff or addressing a problem sooner.

2. Grow the Capability and Capacity of Your Team

Take the tasks and opportunities you identified in step one and determine how to get your team to take ownership of that task. It may be a simple matter of asking an individual to take on the task, or it may require some clarification of expectations and coaching. View this time as an investment that will pay dividends when you no longer have to take valuable time to do it yourself.

3. Redirect Your Efforts

Without as many tasks competing for your attention, use your new found time to plan, set goals and develop people for the medium and long term. Be known as a developer of people and you will quickly rise to higher levels of leadership responsibility.

Spending more time on the people side of the leadership equation will raise business performance and get more accomplished with less stress and aggravation.

Have you experienced the situation where you think you have been clear in communicating what you want and need, only to be disappointed and frustrated when others do not buy in enthusiastically? Even the most thought-out, logical arguments might create unexpected resistance. 

That’s exactly why Dr. Peter DeShane and I collaborated to create a brand new 8 CD and one DVD self-study program called Persuasive and Influential Leadership. Based on the successful live workshop, this self-paced program covers the advanced communication skills you need to get others to do what you need to get done, willingly. 

The program is based on the science of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) which studies the link between how you think and how you communicate.
 
Key Benefits 

• Achieve greater results in less time with less resistance.- Help others adapt to change more easily.
• Get ready for promotion because you are able to get things done through others.
• Reduce conflict by positioning your information to be acceptable to everyone.

 

What the Program Covers: 

• The influence of existing habits both for you and the people around you.
• How to build instant rapport with almost anyone, including people who you don’t naturally click with.
• The science of resistance – why people resist even when they acknowledge the need to change. How to position information so that people think of it as their idea and are more committed.
• Why logic often fails to persuade and how to position information in a way that others can accept both logically and emotionally.
• Why people are naturally programmed to resist change because it causes a disruption to habits – and how to get them to buy in more readily.
• Three main ways people process information and how to identify and adapt to their dominant processing style.
• How to adapt to people who speak much faster than you do, or who speak much slower than you do.
• The power of stories – how to craft your key messages into powerful stories that help people relate to your message on a personal level.
• Using email more effectively to build rapport electronically.
• Using specific words that are proven to create greater commitment by others to do what you want.
• How to overcome obstacles that keep people from moving ahead.
• and much more.

Edutainment 

The program is delivered in an entertaining and engaging way. You will enjoy the conversational style that Greg and Peter use. It will be as if they are sitting with you one on one. You will want to listen to the content again and again to master the skills of influence. 

What is Included 

1. Four audio CD’s covering the core course concepts.
2. A comprehensive workbook that reinforces the key course concepts.
3. An application CD on How to Deal with Difficult People
4. An application CD on how technical roles can communicate with non-technical people.
5. An application CD on Sales. How to get customer buy in more quickly and easily.
6. An application CD for Human Resource Professionals to keep the organization moving forward with positive employee relations practices.
7. A one-hour DVD that demonstrates the course material visually so you can grasp and use the program more easily.

 

Four Application CD’s 

Recognizing that different professions and situations can require different approaches we have recorded four application CD’s that take the core program concepts and focus them on these areas: 

1. Dealing With Difficult People – Once you learn why people are difficult you can alter your approach to get them to buy in more easily. Imagine taking a person who always is oppositional and turning them into your biggest supporter! Less resistance means less stress on you plus the ability to get more done.
2. Technical Professions – Information technology, engineers and other technical roles can struggle with communicating complex information to other areas of the organization. In this application CD we present a systematic approach to presenting technical solutions in a framework that others can support with enthusiasm. Greater buy-in will move projects along faster and get necessary support to new projects.
3. Sales – Sales professionals and others who deal with customers as part of their role will benefit from this application CD that specifically addresses how to get customers to buy into your proposal and how to really determine the level of interest your customer has in your solution. Get customer buy in more easily in order to grow sales.
4. HR – HR professionals often face two challenges. First they need to convince other managers to treat employees with respect and secondly they often have to mediate employee requests and concerns while reinforcing company policy. This application CD gives HR professionals the skills they need to get buy-in more quickly and help the organization achieve success.

 

A DVD shows you how: 

A one hour DVD provides a visual demonstration of the key concepts which will help you grasp the information more quickly and easily. The DVD was produced into a one-hour cable television special and has earned top reviews. 

The investment: 

The entire program is US$339.95. FREE SHIPPING  

Guarantee: We are acredited with the Better Business Bureau so you can rest easy that we will fully refund your purchase price if you are unhappy with the program for any reason within six months of purchase. Simply return it to us and your refund will be processed immediately. 

Order the Program today: 

One time payment of US$339.95 plus Goods and Services Tax 5%.

Call us toll free at 1-866-700-9043 or email info@uniquedevelopment.com 

Comedian Jerry Sienfeld quipped that people fear public speaking more than they fear death; so at a funeral they would prefer to be in the casket instead of delivering the eulogy.

Toastmasters has been helping people learn how to get comfortable speaking in front of others and get proficient at the art of public speaking. Some people might be curious to know what it would take to jump from “public speaking” to “professional speaking”.

Unique Training & Development Inc. President Greg Schinkel will be delivering a session entitled “How to Make a Living From Your Speaking Talent” to Windsor-Essex-Tecumseh Toastmasters. The public is welcome to attend the session on Wednesday, June 17th 2009 at the Fogolar Furlan Club. Doors open at 5:45 PM and the presentation will begin at 6:45 PM.

Greg is presenting on behalf of the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers Southwestern-Ontario Chapter which is focused on helping speakers and trainers build their businesses. CAPS-SWO Website

In the presentation, Greg will present facts on what speakers can earn, the different business models available and how to build a successful speaking business. He will also present information about the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers.

A voluntary small contribution is requested to support the cost of room rental. To indicate you are planning to attend, please call Sylvia Schultz at 519-979-6574.

If you cannot attend the session but would like to receive a copy of the presentation materials by email, please send an email to info@uniquedevelopment.com

Leaders are expected to remain proactive and positive in challenging situations. When everyone around you is losing hope, your job is to re-ignite the spark of future success.

Hopelessness is one of the worst feelings a human being can feel. At a joint meeting between the Rotary Club of London and the Salvation Army, Major Alf Richardson, Divisional Commander with the Salvation Army gave a stirring speech celebrating the Salvation Army’s mission of Giving Hope Today.

As a leader you might not be charged with providing hope to those coping with addiction and poverty like the Salvation Army; you are however expected to give hope to the people you lead.

In a recession, it is easy for your employees to experience hopelessness. In good times, we think they will go on forever. Similarly in bleak times, we think it will never get better. The leader is responsible for giving people hope.

How to Create Hope

1. Compelling Vision: Look up to the horizon and envision where you want to take your organization given the short term realities and the long term potential.

2. Create a Plan: Define the roadmap that will take you from the current situation to the vision you created. The plan need not be perfect; it just needs to be believable to you and to others.

3. Communicate to Create Hope: Give people hope by revealing your vision and plan. Encourage participation and buy-in. Ask for help in making it a reality. Show your energy and enthusiasm and even the most skeptical people will begin to see the glimmer of hope of future success.

Put your own self-doubt aside and commit to giving hope today.

A client did an experiment. In their food processing plant they measured the time it took for a rumor to spread from the front office to the shipping dock. It took only 20 minutes. In the meantime managers get frustrated when their message takes weeks, months or years to spread throughout their organization.

Why People Gossip

One of the most effective motivators for employees is a feeling of being in on things. They crave this so much that they will take even the smallest bit of information and spread it quickly. The message gets distorted and exaggerated from person to person because each individual wants the recognition that comes with telling the story.

How Leaders Can Communicate at the Speed of Gossip

1. Recognize that employees, in their desire to feel part of a team, want to know what’s going on so be sure to provide regular messaging. If you leave a void, it will be filled with inaccurate and exaggerated gossip. Many front line leaders use a stand-up shift start meeting to provide information and set expectations for the day ahead.
2. Part of gossip is the recognition that people crave by passing along exaggerated stories. Provide regular (constant) recognition so that employees know they don’t need to tell tall tales to get attention.
3. Build stronger relationships with employees. People gossip less about people they care about. If the grapevine is over active, look at whether you are building silos and fostering individualism by playing favorites. Make it a point to connect with team members regularly and personally. They will appreciate the attention and find it harder to talk negatively about the leader or their teammates.

Excessive gossip is an indicator of poor communication and possibly ineffective leadership. Take action to increase the effectiveness of your front line leaders and their managers with training, coaching or mentoring.