Where Have All the Leaders Gone?, part 5 of 6

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Leadership Role #4: Building Followership

Leaders require followers who are committed to achieving the mission – ideally people who believe in both the vision and the leader and who want to be there. To create such a devoted followership, leaders must remember that they are also followers – not only in the sense of supporting others’ missions but also through subordinating their own interests for the sake of serving their teams and organizations.

We live in an era when downsizing, increased work hours, ceaseless pressure for higher profits, internal competitiveness, and similarly unpleasant factors have produced a toxic brew of resentment, resistance to change, and self-serving political maneuvering on the part of workers at all levels, and the cost is significant. Projects are abandoned or fail to achieve their objectives; employees are unwilling to embrace changes in business culture; self-interest takes precedence over the best interests of the organization as a whole; and so forth. This trend can only be reversed when leaders take their responsibility to serve those who support them seriously.

One area of particular importance is career. Organizations provide a framework of stability for their employees. Thus, great leaders create environments in which ambition naturally arises and flourishes. There are several ways to do this:

1. Declare vision that constitutes a game worth playing – one that inspires people to rally around it and makes them feel as though their contributions to the overall mission somehow make the world better.

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About the Author

Chris Majer, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of The Human Potential ProjectChris Majer, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of The Human Potential Project, is the author of The Power to Transform: Passion, Power, and Purpose in Daily Life (Rodale), which teaches the strategies corporate, military, and sports leaders have used to positively transform themselves and their organizations in a way readers can adept to their own lives and professions. He may be reached at www.humanpotentialproject.com.

The Advisor’s Corner – How Do I Deal with a Calendar Full of Meetings?

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How Do I Deal with a Calendar Full of Meetings?Question:

How do I deal with a calendar full of meetings that are wasting my time?

StrategyDriven Response: (by Roxi Hewertson, StrategyDriven Principal Contributor)

I love meetings… when and only when they produce something useful. When they don’t, I stop going. Seriously, I gave up useless meetings just like I gave up greasy food, cold turkey, so to speak!

Dave Barry once said, “If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings’.” Well, lousy meetings anyway.

Indeed, there are great meetings and important ones I’d never want to miss. People need to congregate and exchanges things. We need to network, learn, collaborate, decide, discuss, chew on ideas, mind-meld, team-build, brainstorm and have fun together. There are plenty of fabulous reasons why people should have meetings, gatherings, and get togethers.

Yet, we have a serious meeting epidemic in this country. This is not my opinion; it’s a fact. Smart people study this stuff, and the reality is, we have been meeting for more hours each and every year since they started keeping track back in the 1950’s. It’s a bit like global warming – it creeps up on you and before you know it, your life is one big meeting desert or tsunami or both, at the same time, in the same meeting!

Email didn’t fix it. Whiz-bang meeting software didn’t fix it. Today, you can just throw on a t-shirt, sit at your computer, and be in a meeting with virtually anyone, anywhere, anytime. Yes, it’s a short commute, and convenient, but now instead of commuting, you are simply in another meeting. How’s that working for you?

There is a whole planet full of people suffering from bad meetings. You’d think it was contagious. Well, you’d be right. The way meetings are run in your organization IS a result of your internal culture, meeting protocols, and the meeting skills of the person running them. Every new person coming into the system generally conforms to those norms. So… ask yourself, “How healthy and productive is the meeting virus I am passing around?”

For those meetings you attend but don’t run, remember, it’s YOUR calendar. So take control of it. The next time you are about to agree to a meeting, try asking yourself these 5 questions:

  1. WHY are we having this meeting; what is the goal; what are the deliverables?
  2. WHOSE meeting is it?
  3. WHAT kind of a meeting do we need to have? In person, on the phone, virtual, standing up, off-site, formal, informal, etcetera.
  4. WHO should be there? Why?
  5. WHAT are our meeting ‘norms,’ and do I like them? If not, why am I going to this meeting and/or what am I going to do about it?

Once you decide, yes, you need a meeting, you need a purpose and an agenda. Every item on your agenda should have one of three purposes or a combination of them or it shouldn’t be there at all.

Information – Discussion -­ Decision

Information: no more than 20% of any meeting should be spent on information sharing – there are plenty of other and cheaper ways to share information other than meeting time.

Discussion: means getting input and ideas, hearing from the people in the group. Make sure you have a method to do that well.

Decision-making: use best practices and ask all the important questions when a decision needs to be made

Take control of your life and work by taking control of the time you spend in meetings that don’t matter, and making the time you do spend in meetings an investment that DOES matter.

About the Author

Leadership authority Roxana (Roxi) Hewertson is a no-nonsense business veteran revered for her nuts-and-bolts, tell-it-like-it-is approach and practical, out-of-the-box insights that help both emerging and expert managers, executives and owners boost quantifiable job performance in various mission critical facets of business. Through AskRoxi.com, Roxi — “the Dear Abby of Leadership” — imparts invaluable free advice to managers and leaders at all levels, from the bullpen to the boardroom, to help them solve problems, become more effective and realize a higher measure of business and career success.

The StrategyDriven website was created to provide members of our community with insights to the actions that help create the shared vision, focus, and commitment needed to improve organizational alignment and accountability for the achievement of superior results. We look forward to answering your strategic planning and tactical business execution questions. Please email your questions to [email protected].

Balancing Performance Measures

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StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures Best Practice ArticleBecause resources are always limited and there is no free lunch, too much of any one thing can be bad.

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About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

Salespeople have questions. Jeffrey has answers.

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I get a ton of emails from people seeking insight or asking me to solve their sales dilemmas. Here are a few that may relate to your job, your life, and (most important) your sales thought process right now.

Dear Jeffrey, This is my first week in car sales. Can you tell me what sections of any of your books I could go to for help with deflecting that first, “What’s your best price?” question. I want to build rapport and provide the value of my services in addition to the vehicle. I was thinking of using your “Can you close a sale in five questions?” as my porcupine close, ignoring the price question, and asking my own question, “Jeffrey, how do you select a car or truck?” Any suggestions? Rich

Rich, Yes, I have a bunch of suggestions. First of all, you’re battling 100 years worth of doing it the wrong way. Yes, there have been a lot of cars sold, but oftentimes in spite of themselves. And the reason people come in and want the best price is because they’ve already shopped online. They already know what the car costs. The customer is now more educated in the car business than the car salesperson is because the customer has probably shopped ten different brands and the car salesman pretty much only knows his own.

So the challenge for you as a salesperson is if you get a question of “What is your best price?” get it down to the model and say, “Look, I’ll give you my best price, but don’t you want to know if this is the right car for you? Why don’t we take it for a drive and then we’ll talk about how much it is if you really want it. If you don’t want it, there’s no sense in negotiating for it and I’m assuming if I give you may best price, you’ll say ‘Thanks’ and buy it. Otherwise, you’re going to go shop around and thank me and then go talk to my competition and that’s not what we want to do. We want to put you in a car. We want to make you feel great, and we want you to get the best car for your money today and when you sell it, and we want to make sure along the way that it’s maintained. Is that fair enough?” Jeffrey

Dear Jeffrey, I’m in sales and the manager of the office is also an agent. She distributes the internet leads for the other agents and regularly keeps the highest dollar leads for herself. We have a transparent database that percentage-wise shows she’s been doing this for over a year, yet she denies it. How do I deal with a manager like this? Bill

Bill, You quit! You don’t want to work for a liar. You certainly don’t want to work for someone who garners all the leads for herself. Why don’t you give her all the leads and go get your own leads? Or, why don’t you go someplace where it’s more fair? My recommendation is first talk to her boss and ask if there is any way the leads can be distributed more fairly. Obviously, if you were getting all the leads you might do the same thing yourself. It’s called cherry picking. She knows not only what the best lead is, but also what the easiest lead to close is. Maybe it should just be random, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, and split up the leads like that. If she fights it, she’s doing it the wrong way. You gotta be ethical, you gotta be honest, or you gotta find another job. Best regards, Jeffrey

Dear Jeffrey, I have a large insurance agency and we interview for salespeople quite often. “Looking for a professional with an aggressive sales demeanor.” Somebody told me of an interview question that they ask and I’d like to get your opinion. During an interview, this person will ask the interviewee to bark like a dog. That’s a pretty rough question isn’t it? If they don’t do it, the person will end the interview. If they do it, the interview continues. The rationale is that if they don’t do it, they’re not inclined to get out of their comfort zone. If they bark, and they’re comfortable in doing it, they’ll be comfortable in doing things out of their normal task. What do you think of this? Jay

Jay, What do you think of it? Do you think it’s professional or do you think it’s third grade? Well, I’m sorry candidate, you didn’t bark like a dog, so even though you’re a great salesperson, you’re a smart guy, and you’ve got a great attitude, you’re disqualified. Dude, that is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life! Why don’t they just cluck like a chicken? The challenge is this: If I’m interviewing someone, I want to know if they’re smart, I want to know if they’re self-starting, I want to know if they have a great attitude, and I want to know if they have some kind of past history of success. All the rest is irrelevant. Best regards, Jeffrey

Reprinted with permission from Jeffrey H. Gitomer and Buy Gitomer.

About the Author

Jeffrey Gitomer is the author of The Sales Bible, Customer Satisfaction is Worthless Customer Loyalty is Priceless, The Little Red Book of Selling, The Little Red Book of Sales Answers, The Little Black Book of Connections, The Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude, The Little Green Book of Getting Your Way, The Little Platinum Book of Cha-Ching, The Little Teal Book of Trust, The Little Book of Leadership, and Social BOOM! His website, www.gitomer.com, will lead you to more information about training and seminars, or email him personally at [email protected].

It’s Your ‘Reputation’ Stupid: the Real ‘R’ in CRM

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As the co-inventor of ACT! contact management software, the product credited as the catalyst for the Customer Relationship Management industry, I’m surprisingly not a champion of the concept of ‘managing relationships’ at all. I don’t think entering data, scheduling activities, or even communicating with someone amounts to ‘management’ in any meaningful way.

Even if the concept of managing customer relationships was the premise for the industry, the actual result is little more than a tool for Management to oversee an employee’s activity, communication, and progress with their customers and prospects. CRM systems are often positioned as an employee’s tool for building or maintaining meaningful relationships is little more than a method of ‘keeping tabs’ on salespeople.

Networking Alone Isn’t the Answer
It’s never just what you know, but whom you know that matters. But anyone can purchase a list of names. No matter what industry you’re in, the quality of your connections trumps the sheer quantity of names in your database. Attending events, shaking hands, collecting business cards – nothing wrong with that, per se, but the person with the most business cards doesn’t necessarily win. The same can be said of social networking: sending dozens of connection requests doesn’t equate to building relationships.

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About the Author

Mike MuhneyCRM pioneer Mike Muhney, the co-creator of ACT! software, is CEO of mobile relationship management purveyor vipOrbit – the first relationship-centric contact manager solution enabling mobile business professionals to manage their contacts, calendar and client/customer interactions across Mac, iPhone and iPad platforms. He may be reached at www.VIPOrbit.com.