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Four Questions (and Tips) That Will Transform Your Culture

People grow into the conversations you create around them. The best tool great leaders have to strengthen and empower others is powerful questions. Questions evoke curiosity. They force others to think. And, when answered well, allow others to take ownership of the process and responsibility for the outcomes.

Remarkable!It has been said that powerful questions can steer any conversation away from problems and personalities and move them toward meaningful solutions. Powerful questions evoke insight, stir creativity, inspire collaboration and help craft a culture of accountability.

So, to that end, let me offer four questions that, when asked often and answered well, can help you intentionally craft a Remarkable! culture.

1. Are you creating more value than you are taking?


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About the Author

Randy RossDr. Randy Ross is founder and CEO (Chief Enthusiasm Officer) of Remarkable! Randy is a “craftsman of culture and a catalytic coach,” who inspires elevated performance. A master of cultural transformation, Dr. Ross has a unique understanding of employee engagement and offers practical solutions for increasing both the morale and performance of teams. He is an author of the book, Remarkable!: Maximizing Results through Value Creation.

Strategically Network for Business Support and Success

Leaving the corporate world behind and becoming an entrepreneur is an exciting venture, but it can also put a lot of pressure on you – especially in the first six months. You’ll spend a lot of time learning new things, making adjustments and reacting to situations as they arise. The “bumps” in the road you are likely to encounter are a common occurrence on the entrepreneurial journey, so don’t get bogged down by thinking you’re doing something wrong. You’re not.

Be Your Best BossThe good news is that this phase won’t last long and the lessons you learn from the experience will prove to be extremely beneficial for the rest of your business ownership journey. It’s important to keep in mind that just because you’re in business for yourself, doesn’t mean you have to be by yourself. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. In order to have a positive experience and get optimal results, you need to choose wisely whom you will surround yourself with.


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About the Author

Bill SeagravesWilliam (Bill) R. Seagraves, president and founder of CatchFire Funding, is the author of Be Your Best Boss: Reinvent Yourself from Employee to Entrepreneur (TarcherPerigee, on sale February 2016). A serial entrepreneur, Bill coaches mid-career Americans on the best route to successful entrepreneurship. Learn more at yourbestboss.com.

The 5 Cultures That Determine Your Company’s Success

How healthy is your company’s culture? Your company has a culture whether you make the effort to shape it or not, and as you might expect, it’s better to make the effort to create the culture that will lead you to success than to simply hope a great corporate culture will organically generate itself.

Cultural TransformationsBut culture can’t be static, and CEOs and other executives can’t be static either. Knowing what you and your company stand for and being completely unyielding and inflexible are different things. The world of business is in constant transformation mode, so an adaptable company culture isn’t just nice to have, it’s necessary.

Be aware, however, that constant re-engineering, reorganization, and restructuring in pursuit of efficiency (or the latest management fad) has a questionable effect at best. Adjusting in order to thrive, however, requires competent leadership and commitment to creating the best possible corporate culture. Your company’s overall culture is made up of five building block cultures, each of which must be tended in order to yield the best results.


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About the Author

John MattoneJohn Mattone is an authority on leadership, talent, and culture. An acclaimed speaker and executive coach, he advises Fortune 1000 senior leaders on how to create cultures that drive superior operating results. He is the author of seven books including Cultural Transformations: Lessons of Leadership and Corporate Reinvention, Talent Leadership, and Intelligent Leadership. John is the creator of numerous business assessments, including the Mattone Leadership Enneagram Inventory. For more information, please visit www.johnmattone.com.

Take the Fear Out of Accountability

The word accountability elicits a threat response from most employees, who interpret the word ‘accountability’ to be synonymous with punishment. Let’s face it, any time there’s a disaster, mistake, or misfortune on the news, the first thing out of the mouth of the officials is, “Who is to be held accountable?” The tone is always one of shame and blame and fingers always start to point before facts are given. Employees at any level of the hierarchy will avoid the pain of blame and punishment if the culture is one which people fear accountability instead of seek accountability to get the intended results.

You can’t blame them, really, for having this kind of visceral recoil from the word, if that’s all it means to them.

But, I believe that that it’s possible to take the fear out of accountability so that your people actually crave accountability rather than cringe when they hear the word.

Here are three ways to go about doing that:


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About the Author

Marlene ChismMarlene Chism is a consultant, international speaker, and the author of two books: No-Drama Leadership: How Enlightened Leaders Transform Culture in the Workplace (Bibliomotion 2015) and Stop Workplace Drama (Wiley 2011). Marlene’s passion is developing wise leaders and helping people discover, develop, and deliver their gifts to the world.

Why Pitching, Persuading, Guiding, and Influencing are Largely Unsuccessful – a thought paper for sellers, coaches, leaders, parents, and managers

You recognize what someone needs and offer just the right guidance, product data, or experience to help. Yet, except for occasionally, they don’t act on your brilliance. Why? Why would they prefer to keep doing what they’re doing when it‘s obvious, even to them, they’re less-than-effective? Because making the switch to behave differently is not as simple as desiring to do something different: your information, brilliant and well-intentioned as it is, is not heard accurately, nor do people know how to translate what you’ve offered into action. They’re not ignoring you: they just don’t know what to do with the information.

This article is about systems, Beliefs, change, and our status quo – a thought paper on why giving information (pitches, suggestions, rationale, directives, counselling) doesn’t necessarily produce changed behaviors. It’s a bit wonky; more conventional articles are on my blog www.sharondrewmorgen.com.

Our Status Quo Acts Habitually

Our information, our new ideas or implementation requests, our product descriptions and presentations are relevant of course. But they can only be heard accurately and acted upon when our audience has bought in to, and learned how to manage, any proposed change, and all relevant ‘systems’ are GO.

Adopting new behaviors challenges our ingrained, personal, habitual systems. Our status quo (that mysterious mix of unconscious elements developed over a lifetime that define us) does not shift easily: doing anything – anything – different means replacing a familiar choice with something unfamiliar, with no guaranteed results or precise outcomes.

How can we know up front whether any change is worth the risk? How can we keep our system – our habitual, historic, comfortable, and interconnected configuration of rules, relationships, beliefs, goals, etc. – congruent if we behave outside our proscribed standards?
Without answers to these questions, the risk is too high to change. The change itself isn’t the problem, it’s the disruption. So how can we promote change that a person is willing/able to consider? One way is to stop sharing information until the system has prepared itself to change. Or we can actually facilitate the change before offering information. Let me explain what’s going on.

Behaviors vs Beliefs: Why a System Changes

Whether it’s personal or work, our lives are defined by a set of Beliefs we’ve each developed over the course of our lifetime. We live in neighborhoods, work at jobs, and choose friends in accordance with our Beliefs. We even listen (see What?) according to our Beliefs. Everything we do (our Behaviors) emerges from our Beliefs.

Except when we’re incongruent, our Behaviors carry out our Beliefs. As a life-long liberal, I Believe I must contribute, care for the environment, treat others respectfully. My Beliefs inform my politics, my choice of city, my choice of friends; they are hard-wired, and make me me. And I happily bias my actions and decisions against them. This all happens unconsciously, of course. And therein lies the problem.

New input, and suggestions that require change, challenges the status quo which has been ‘good-enough’ until now. We’re asking people to change their Behaviors before they’ve managed buy-in or figured out how to maintain systems congruence: without knowing how to convert our Beliefs into new Behaviors we face incongruence and feel threatened, causing us to reject, sabotage, forget, misconstrue, or ignore what we’ve heard.

Buy-in is the problem because it means altering rules, changing expectations, or reconsidering outcomes like job descriptions, or timing, or relationships. Everything that will ultimately touch the proposed change must buy-in or the system will continue to reject the information.

Therefore, our information – our brilliant recommendations, thoughts, solutions, or leadership, even when directed by bosses or family – cannot even be heard even if the data is valid or important until the system itself knows how to prepare a new pathway to expected results, comfort, and congruence. We protect our system at all costs. (See Dirty Little Secrets for a thorough explanation of this topic.)

When Information is Applicable

Sales and marketing folks, managers, trainers, coaches, leaders – any profession that focuses on offering advice or promoting action – must stop trying to ‘pitch’ even if someone needs to hear it. Stop trying to lead according to your own vision of what needs to happen. Your job is to facilitate buy-in to promote Excellence. And it might not look like a set of actions you’re familiar with. Once you get agreement and the system creates a way to shift congruently so its Beliefs are upheld (in accordance with the foundational rules, expectations, relationships, etc.), then you’ve got a shot that you’ll be heard or followed.

I’ve developed a change facilitation model (Buying Facilitation®) to manage this buy-in/conversion that I’ve been teaching to sellers, leaders and coaches for decades. But you can design your own model. Here is the relevant question you need to address: How can you design a way to help others find a route to their own excellence by helping them be willing to modify their status quo in a way that shifts congruently?

Once they have a route through to changing the status quo and know they’ll come out butter-side-up, they’ll know what they need to buy, and how and when they want to change. And THEN you can pitch, offer, suggest, or influence.


About the Author

Sharon Drew Morgen is a visionary, original thinker, and thought leader in change management and decision facilitation. She works as a coach, trainer, speaker, and consultant, and has authored 9 books including the NYTimes Business BestsellerSelling with Integrity. Morgen developed the Buying Facilitation® method (www.sharondrewmorgen.com) in 1985 to facilitate change decisions, notably to help buyers buy and help leaders and coaches affect permanent change. Her newest book What? www.didihearyou.com explains how to close the gap between what’s said and what’s heard. She can be reached at [email protected]