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Three Keys to a Good Online Reputation

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Headlines today are filled with cell phone videos of bad behavior, verbal attacks in the twitter-verse, and disturbing incidents of cyberbullying. In our everyday lives, disgruntled customers or employees tarnish reputations of local businesses or past employers and jobs are lost or never offered because of inappropriate social media sharing. Business owners who want to have better control of their reputation online should follow these three key pieces of advice:

How to Protect (Or Destroy) Your Reputation Online1. Build your reputational firewall

Build your online firewall. If your business could be hijacked by negative reviews and online attacks, then you need to ensure that you regularly publish your positive news and build a legacy of positive internet results. It’s tougher for negative information to take center stage in the future if there’s already a lot of positive information anchoring top search results.

Stake your claim to your name. This is really basic stuff but it merits repeating. In a crisis, it is important for your customers and the public to be able to hear your news as directly as possible from the source. Your company should have a Twitter account, a Facebook page, and a LinkedIn page if for no other reason than it verifies your company’s identity and authenticates your news.

Address negative info. If there’s negative information about your company posted online, you have to react in some way. Review sites generally enable companies to respond to comments, both positive and negative. Take advantage of this option. Damaging content can be removed in some cases, but simply allowing negative information to remain unchecked is typically not a good strategy.

2. Get a handle on online review sites

Review sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Angie’s List and Glassdoor are growing in both popularity and authority with search engines. The more companies participate on the sites, the bigger the sites become and authority grows. The impact is building. As one review site executive said to me: “The genie is out of the bottle.” Review sites are here, they are dominating search results, and they can’t be ignored.

Claim or create your company page on the main review sites. Your company may not yet have a listing on a site like Yelp, but any customer or interested party could create one without your knowledge and certainly without your consent. Business owners should look at the main review sites and either claim their page if one has already been created or create their own listing – this will give you a small level of control.

Build out your review site listings. Across the board, executives from review sites recommend completing profiles and adding information to business listings. Up-to-date photos, videos and descriptions increase page views as well as interest from prospective customers or employees. Plain listings without images look stale as customers on review sites are typically interested in getting current information.

Engagement. Likely the biggest trend in online reviews centers on engagement. Interaction between businesses and their customers helps build the overall sense of community, and executives from review sites universally advocate for responding to both positive and negative reviews.

Don’t try to fix “crazy.” When speaking with one executive who has had tremendous success with Yelp, he mentioned that they have some very simple rules. His company will bend over backwards for his customers, but “we don’t do crazy.” Sometimes customers have outrageous expectations, and every business owner has dealt with clients who may not be “all there in the head.”

3. In case of emergency, know your options

When confronted with negative online content that hinders your business or damages your reputation, the best advice is to remain calm and make a sound assessment. While the first reaction may be to blast away at the hate blog, defamatory post, negative news article, or nasty review, we have found that it makes more sense to slow down and develop a strategy before confronting the source.

Negotiate removal. Most websites are run by legitimate businesses that have no interest in publishing false, tasteless or potentially defamatory content. Of course, some sites are run by neurotic bloggers, but the vast majority have sensible human beings at the controls. If you are dealing with negative web postings or negative articles posted on a corporate site or corporate message board, it may be possible to negotiate removal.

Suppress, push-down or bury. When you research online reputation management companies, you quickly learn that they offer a distinct service known in the industry as “suppression.” They will create new, benign web content with the hopes of pushing down or suppressing negative search results. This tactic can be very effective, but it isn’t always the best solution, or the most economical

The idea is that you flood the Internet with positive content about you or your company and work to push down, bury, or “suppress,” the negative content. Information is not removed from search results but rather pushed farther down the search result pages to a point where fewer people will see it.

Remove it using the Covert Ops of reputation management. One of the Internet’s big secrets is that digital is not necessarily forever. The common belief is that once something is posted online, it will stay there forever. Many people endure a feeling of helplessness at this thought, but options exist. Content can actually be removed from search results and sometimes entirely from cyberspace. There are folks who can make things disappear from search results. It’s a fairly exclusive thing and exactly how it works I can’t explain, but we have been able to get stories and posts completely removed from search results These tactics are not the same thing as suppression, which pushes negative information further down the search results. I’m talking about either removing or hiding negative content.

More information about protecting your online reputation is available in How to Protect (Or Destroy) Your Reputation Online (Career Press, October 2016).

About the Author

John P. DavidFor more than 25 years, John P. David has counseled businesses and executives on strategic communications and marketing issues. He has developed a specialty helping clients facing online attacks because, sadly, anyone can publish negative information online, seemingly without consequences. His strategic communications firm, David PR Group, counsels clients in the areas of marketing, reputation management, and public relations. He frequently writes about communications and strategy on The Huffington Post. Follow him at @JohnPDavid.

Questioning Questions

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Decades ago I had an idea that questions could be vehicles to facilitate change in addition to eliciting answers. Convention went against me: the accepted use of questions (framing devices, biased by the Asker, that extract a defined range of answers) is built into our culture. But overlooked is their inability to extract good data or accurate answers due to the bias of the Asker; overlooked is their ability to facilitate congruent change.

What Is A Question?

Questions are biased by the expectations, assumptions, goals, unconscious beliefs and subjective experience of both the Responder and the Asker and limit responses accordingly. In other words, questions can’t extract ‘good’ data. They’re certainly not designed to lead Responders through to real change or accurate revelations. (What? Did you really say what I think I heard? offers a broad discussion of bias.) Here are the most prevalent ways we limit our Communication Partner’s responses:

Need to Know Askers pose questions to pull conscious data from the Responder because of their own ‘need to know’, data collection, or curiosity. An example (Note: all following italicized questions are posed as a mythical hairdresser seeking business) might be: Why do you wear your hair like that?

These questions risk overlooking more relevant answers that are stored beyond the parameters of the question posed – often in the unconscious.

Pull Data Askers pose questions to pull a range of implicating data considered useful to ‘make a case’ in a ploy to obtain their desired results (i.e. sales, leadership, marcom, coaching). Don’t you think it might be time to get a haircut?

These questions run a high risk of missing the full range of, or accurate, responses. Certainly they offer no route to enabling choice, decisions, or collaboration/buy-in. They encourage resistance, partial/missed answers, and lies.

Manipulate Agreement/Response Questions that direct the Responder to find a specific set of responses to fit the needs and expectations of the Asker. Can you think of a time you’ve felt ‘cool’ when you’ve had short hair? Or Have you ever thought of having your hair look like Kanye/Ozzy/Justin? Or What would it feel like to have hair like Kanye/Ozzy/Justin? Wouldn’t you say your hairstyle makes you look X?

These questions restrict possibility, cause resistance, create distrust, and encourage lying.

Doubt Directive These questions, sometimes called ‘leading questions’ are designed to cause Responders to doubt their own effectiveness, in order to create an opening for the Asker. Do you think your hairstyle works for you?

These narrow the range of possible responses, often creating some form of resistance or defensive lies; they certainly cause defensiveness and distrust.

Questions restrict responses to the Asker’s parameters, regardless of their intent or the influencer’s level of professionalism and knowledge. Potentially important, accurate data – not to mention the real possibility of facilitating change – is left on the table and instead promote lost business, failure, distrust, bad data collection, and delayed success. Decision Scientists end up gathering incomplete data that creates implementation issues; leaders and coaches push clients toward the change they perceive is needed and often miss the real change needed and possible. The fields of sales and coaching are particularly egregious.

The cost of bias and restriction is unimaginable. Here’s an especially unfortunate example of a well-respected research company that delayed the discovery of important findings due to the biases informing their research questions. I got a call from one of the founders of Challenger Sales to discuss my Buying Facilitation® model. Their research had ‘recently’ discovered that sales are lost/delayed/hampered due to the buyer’s behind-the-scenes change issues that aren’t purchase-driven and sales doesn’t address – and yay for me for figuring this out 35 years ago.

Interesting. They figured this out now? Even David Sandler called me in 1992 before he died to tell me he appreciated how far out of the box I went to find the resolution to the sales problem (He also offered to buy me out, but that’s a different story.). The data was always there. I uncovered this in 1983. But the CEB missed it because their research surveys posed biased questions that elicited data matching their expectations. Indeed, even during our conversations, my Communication Partner never got rid of his solution-placement (sales) biases and we never were able to find a way to partner.

What Is An Answer?

Used to elicit or push data, the very formulation of conventional questions restricts answers. If I ask ‘What did you have for breakfast?’ you cannot reply ‘I went to the gym yesterday.’ Every answer is restricted by the biases within the question. I’m always disappointed when I hear sellers say “Buyers are liars” or coaches say “They didn’t really want to change.” Or therapists or managers or leaders say “They’re resisting”. Askers cause the answers they get.

  1. Because we enter conversations with an agenda, intuition, directive, etc., the answers we receive are partial at best, inaccurate at worst, and potentially cause resistance, sabotage, and disregard.
  2. There are unknown facts, feelings, historic data, goals, etc. that lie within the Responder’s unconscious that hold real answers and cannot be found using merely the curiosity of the Asker.
  3. By approaching situations with bias, Askers can only successfully connect with those whose conscious biases align with their own, leaving behind many who could change, or connect when their unconscious data is recognized. And conventional questions cannot get to the unconscious.
  4. Because influencers are unaware of how their particular bias restricts an answer, they have no concept if there are different answers possible, and often move forward with bad data.

So why does it matter if we’re biasing our questions? It matters because we are missing accurate results; it matters because our questions instill resistance; it matters because we’re missing opportunities to serve and support change.

When sellers ask leading questions to manipulate prospects, or coaches ask influencing questions to generate action, we’re coaxing our Communication Partner in a direction that, as we now recognize, is often biased. Imagine if we could reconfigure questions to elicit accurate data for researchers or marcom folks; or enable buyers to take quick action from ads, cold calls or large purchases; or help coaching clients change behaviors congruently and quickly; or encourage buy-in during software implementations. I’m suggesting questions can facilitate real change.

What Is Change?

Our brain stores data rather haphazardly in our unconscious, making it difficult to find what we need when we need it, and making resistance prevalent when it seems our Status Quo is being threatened. But over the last decades, I have mapped the sequence of systemic change. Following this route, I’ve designed a way to use questions as directional devices to pull relevant data in the proper sequence so we can lead Responders through their own internal, congruent, change process and avoid resistance. Not only does this broaden the range of successful results, but it enables quicker decisions and buy-in – not to mentiontruly offer a Servant Leader, win/win communication. Let’s look at what’s keeping us wedded to our Status Quo and how questions can enable change.

All of us are a ‘system’ of subjectivity collected during our lifetime: unique rules, values, habits, history, goals, experience, etc. that operates consensually to create and maintain our Status Quo; it resides in our unconscious and defines our Status Quo. Without it, we wouldn’t have criteria for any choices, or actions, or habits whatsoever. Our system is hard wired to keep us who we are (Systems Congruence).

To learn something new, to do something different or learn a new behavior, to buy something, to take vitamins or get a divorce or use new software or be willing to forgive a friend, the Status Quo must buy in to change from within – an inside job. Information pulled or pushed – regardless of the intent, or relationship, or efficacy – will be resisted.

For congruent change to occur – even a small one – appropriate elements within our Status Quo must buy into, and have prepared for, a possibly disruptive addition (idea, product, etc.). But since the process is internal, idiosyncratic, and unconscious, our biased questions cause the system to defend itself and we succeed only with those folks whose unconscious biases and beliefs mirror our own.

  1. People hear each other through their own biases. You ask biased questions, receive biased answers, and hit pay dirt only when your biases match. Everyone else will ignore, resist, misunderstand, mishear, act out, sabotage, forget, ignore, etc.
  2. Due to their biased and restricting nature, your questions will not facilitate those who are not ready, willing, or able to manage internal change congruently regardless of the wisdom of your comments or their efficacy.
  3. Without the Responder being ready, willing, and able to change, ACCORDING TO THEIR OWN CRITERIA AND SYSTEMS RULES, they cannot buy, accept, adopt, or change in any way.

To manage congruent change, align the Status Quo, and enable the steps to achieve buy-in – I’ve developed Facilitative Questions that work comfortably with conventional questions and lead Responders to:

  • find their own answers hidden within their unconscious,
  • retrieve complete, relevant, accurate answers at the right time, in the right order to
  • traverse the sequenced steps to congruent, systemic change/excellence, while
  • avoiding restriction and resistance and
  • include their own values and subjective experience.

It’s possible to help folks make internal changes and find their own brand of excellence.

Facilitative Questions

Facilitative Questions (FQs) employ a new skill set that is built upon systems thinking: listening for systems (i.e. no bias) and Servant Leadership. Even on a cold call or in content marketing, sellers can enable buyers down their route to change and buy-in; coaches can lead clients through their own unique change without resistance; leaders can get buy-in immediately; change implementations won’t get resistance; advertisers and marketers can create action.

Using specific words, in a very specific sequence, it’s possible to pose questions that are free of bias, need or manipulation and guide congruent change.

Facilitative Question Not information gathering, pull, or manipulative, FQs are guiding/directional tools, like a GPS system. Like a GPS they don’t need the details of travel – what you’re wearing, what function you’re attending – to dictate two left turns. They lead Responders congruently, without any bias, from where they’re at to Excellence. How would you know if it were time to reconsider your hairstyle?

This question is a guiding mechanism to efficiently enable a route through the Responder’s largely unconscious path to congruent change.

Here’s the big idea: using questions directed to help Others efficiently recognize their own route to Excellence, and change as appropriate vs. using questions to seek answers that benefit the Asker. This shift in focus alone creates an automatic trust.

An example is a question we designed for Wachovia to increase sales and appointments. Instead of seeking prospects for an appointment to pitch new products (i.e. using appointments as a sales tool), we designed questions to immediately facilitate discovery of need, taking into account most small businesses already have a banking relationship. After trialing a few different FQs, our opening question became: How would you know when it’s time to consider adding new banking partners, for those times your current bank can’t give you what you need? This question shifted the response to 100 prospecting calls from 10 appointments and 2 closes over 11 months, to 37 invites to meet from the prospect, and 29 closes over 3 months. Facilitative Questions helped the right prospects engage immediately.

When used with coaching clients, buyers, negotiation partners, advertisements, or even teenagers, these questions create action within the Responder, causing them to recognize internal incongruences and deficiencies, and be guided through their own options. (Because these questions aren’t natural to us, I’ve designed a tool and program to teach the ‘How’ of formulating them.).

The responses to FQs are quite different from conventional questions. So when answering How would you know if it were time to reconsider your hairstyle?, the Responder is directed by word use, word placement, and an understanding of systems, to think of time, history, people, ego, comparisons, family. Instead of pulling data, you’re directing to, guiding through, and opening the appropriate change ‘boxes’ within the Responder’s unconscious Status Quo. It’s possible Responders will ultimately get to their answers without Facilitative Questions, but using them, it’s possible to help Responders organize their change criteria very quickly accurately. Using Facilitative Questions, we must:

  1. Enter with a blank brain, as a neutral navigator, servant leader, with a goal to facilitate change.
  2. Trust our Communication Partners have their own answers.
  3. Stay away from information gathering or data sharing/gathering until they are needed at the end.
  4. Focus on helping the Other define, recognize, and understand their system so they can discover where it’s broken.
  5. Put aside ego, intuition, assumptions, and ‘need to know.’ We’ll never understand another’s subjective experience; we can later add our knowledge.
  6. Listen for systems, not content.

FQs enable congruent, systemic, change. I recognize this is not the conventional use of questions, but we have a choice: we can either facilitate a Responder’s path down their own unique route and travel with them as Change Facilitators – ready with our ideas, solutions, directions as they discover a need we can support – or use conventional, biased questions that limit possibility. For change to occur, people must go through these change steps anyway; we’re just making it more efficient for them as we connect through our desire to truly Serve. We can assist, or wait to find those who have already completed the journey. They must do it anyway: it might as well be with us.

I welcome opportunities to put Facilitative Questions into the world. Formulating them requires a new skill set that avoids any bias (Listening for Systems, for example). But they add an extra dimension to helping us all serve each other.

About the Author

Sharon Drew MorgenSharon 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 New York Times Business Bestseller Selling 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]

5 Ways to Regain Confidence & Courageousness When the Going Gets Tough

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Achievement Against-the-Odds: How to become bold, confident and courageous enough to break through barriers and overcome obstacles to achieve any professional and personal endeavor and live ‘the best season of your life’

 
As a former plus-size model, I know all too well the pain and disappointment of rejection and judgements based solely on appearance, both professionally and personally. I have lived it time and time again. But, rather than allowing the numerous barrier-inducing critics of my plus-size define who I was, how I would live my life, and what measure of success and happiness I could achieve, I instead chose to face that “cold winter season” head on, turning what others had deemed as challenges into the very assets that would help me realize tremendous success in all aspects of my life.

Not only did I embrace my appearance and excel as a plus-sized model, I was emboldened enough to help others do the same by founding a plus-size modeling agency representing over 100 models who were placed with premier fashion retailers such as Nordstrom, Lane Bryant, Just My Size, Dillard’s, and Liz Claiborne. And I didn’t stop there. Through plus-size beauty pageants ad conventions that I founded, I created an opportunity for hundreds of other women to achieve dreams like those I, myself, had accomplished. As an international speaker, I’ve also had the honor of sharing platforms with A-Listers the likes of OPRAH, Zig Ziglar, Les Brown, and Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. All told, I’ve had the “last laugh” amid the glut of naysayers who would otherwise have cut my extraordinary “larger than life” success story far short based merely on my appearance.

Rather than recoiling, I learned to thrive in every proverbial “season” of my life despite the trials and tribulations that presented. Unfortunately, the sad reality is that untold millions of other women and men, alike, are suffering setbacks based on their own “limitations,” whether real or perceived.

Life is best described metaphorically as continuously transitioning through each of the four seasons: Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall. Truly successful people are not those who try to avoid certain seasons, but rather are those who choose to embrace, overcome, and thrive as they seamlessly flow between seasons, regardless of how long or difficult each one may be. And, successful people don’t just overcome the difficult season of winter, but actually thrive during the harsh cold; they also blossom throughout the spring; reap a lush harvest during the summer; and adequately prepare for the fall and winter that inevitably follow. Such cyclical expectations and preparations are mindsets that are key to sustained and “against the odds” success.

Today I’ve dedicated myself to helping others become bold, confident and courageous—no matter what “season” they themselves are in. With this in mind, here are five tips on how to overcome obstacles and excel through every season of your own life:

  1. Fuel future successes with past achievements. It’s easy to feel like a failure after a particularly harsh setback and even the most empowered of us can, at times, doubt ourselves. However, no matter where you are in your career or life, you have undoubtedly done something that has made an impact. For instance, I had a client who was having suicidal thoughts and I talked her out of being suicidal. This had a tremendous ripple effect as everyone positively impacted by her is a result of the conversation we had to keep her alive. If I’m not proud of anything else, I can be proud of that and realize if I’ve had one success I can have others. You need to take the same mentality. Not every past achievement needs to be as profound as saving a life but find those times you made a difference in the world and know that you can do it again.
  2. Regularly invest in “The Power of You.” Do you ever get to the end of the day, week, month or even year and feel like you haven’t accomplished anything? Chances are you’ve accomplished much more than you realize but without any tangible, physical evidence it can be difficult to bring those accomplishments to mind. A great way to create a visual bank of your accomplishments is to make deposits in what I call, “The Power of You Jar.” Every time you accomplish something or do something good, write it down on a slip of paper and put it in a jar. Watching that jar fill up is empowering. Then any time you’re feeling bad or doubting yourself, just reach into the jar and get that reminder of what you’ve already accomplished.
  3. Channel your inner prize fighter. You can learn a lot from boxers. They spend three minutes fighting each round and 60 to 90 seconds resting. During that time in between rounds they are getting refueled, receiving advice, and getting encouragement. They have a whole training team that is supporting them and speaking life into them. Could you imagine how disastrous it would be if their trainer said, “You’re going to lose” or, “You should quit”? Any doubt during a fight could lead to a knock out. Yet we allow negative people in our corners all the time – people who are not encouraging and people who don’t help us. Is it any wonder we are getting knocked down? When channeling your inner prize fighter, it’s important to not only come out of your corner swinging but when you’re resting and rebuilding in between rounds, make sure the people with you are truly in your corner.
  4. Cease self-doubt with an actual “Stop” sign. If there’s one piece of self-help advice you’ve heard ad nauseam, it’s probably, “Don’t speak or think negatively.” Wonderful advice but for many, it can be next to impossible to follow. Even if you’ve attended the most incredible motivational seminar or are pumped up from a motivational book or video, the principles you’ve learned and the changes you want to make often quickly fade in following weeks or months. An effective way to keep that motivational level up and to make those changes stick is to use visual cues. For instance, if you want to stop thinking negatively, get an actual stop sign – it doesn’t have to be full sized, just big enough to be a reminder. Put it in your office, your bedroom, or wherever it needs to be visible. Then any time you are doubting yourself, you can SEE the stop sign and this will be the reminder to hit the brakes and get back on track.
  5. Don’t outsource your success. In an era where outsourcing is very popular, everything from manufacturing jobs to administrative duties are being outsourced. One thing you must not outsource is your success. If you have achieved something, surmounted an obstacle, or had any sort of triumph, take credit for it. If you find yourself saying, “It was nothing,” or “I didn’t really do much,” people will believe it. This doesn’t mean suddenly become a glory hog but it does mean take credit where credit is due. Allow yourself to be seen as successful and you will feel successful, too.

Some “winter seasons” in your life will be more challenging than others. The best way to get through those inevitable cold, harsh days is to take stock and give yourself credit for what you’ve already accomplished, surround yourself with people who support you, stop negative thinking at its onset, and allow yourself to acknowledge and enjoy present, in-the-moment pleasures. Doing so will give you the motivation and fire you need to be confident and courageous to work through any difficult season.

About the Author

DeLores PressleyInternational Keynote Motivational Speaker, Executive Life Coach and Author DeLores Pressley is dedicated to helping people take action to launch bold, confident and courageous lives. She is the CEO of DeLores Pressley Worldwide and Founder of the Global Up Woman™ Network—a movement to empower and elevate women in business. She may be reached online at www.DeLoresPressley.com. Those interested in her Speaker Success Summits specifically may reach her at www.LaunchpadSpeaker.com.

The attack of the Yabuts!

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Nothing sucks the blood out of a great idea faster than the dreaded “Yabut…” In fact, the “Yabut” may be the No. 1 killer of collaboration, cooperation, great ideas and innovation in organizations.

You know what “Yabuts” are, don’t you? They are those prickly little creatures that make noises like; “Yabut, the banks will never back us on this one… Yabut, the market is totally unpredictable… Yabut, we’ve never done that before…”

Let’s take Stephen, for example. Stephen is a recently promoted Director in the Business Development division of a large financial services company. During a strategic planning meeting, he suggested that they should explore how to be more effective in how they manage certain new initiative assignments. Although several of his colleagues looked at him with faces of interest, the Committee Leader quickly replied, “Yabut, we really don’t have time to be playing around with our management process at this point, even if we all do feel a little pressure” And that was that.

Stephen had made several suggestions about new ideas and opportunities since his appointment to the Strategic Planning Committee, and it seemed that every one of them was answered with some form of the same species of “Yabut…” It was not just Stephen of course; in fact, his colleagues had received that same sort of response with such frequency that the meetings had slowly become a routine of simply answering the questions and listening for your new task. Any meaningful conversation and debate had really just died.

So how do we kill the “Yabuts” before they suck the blood out of our potential growth and prosperity? Replace them forever with a whole new species of “Yesands…”! A much nicer animal in fact, not prickly at all, it makes nurturing noises like: “Yes, and with a more promising corporate strategy, we could negotiate with our banks for better overall conditions… Yes, and we can leverage the market study to include a long needed loyalty review of our most profitable accounts… Yes, and we could learn more about that idea’s potentially positive impact on our current business lines…”

A particularly articulate form of the animal has been heard in creativity dialogues using the phrase structure: “Yes, what I like about what you are saying is [identify anything positive inside the person’s comment that you can, even if you do not agree with the entire thought]… And, [build on top of the point with a positive idea of your own]…” Used consecutively during the dialogue, team members build on top of each other’s thinking, and the results are quite amazing! People feel more confident, become more cooperative, open up and think, put more ideas on the table, nourish those ideas, and as a result, creativity and innovation soar!

I encourage you to do a little self-listening. How frequently do you encounter “Yabuts” in your own yard? Make sure you are not breeding them without even realizing it. Kill them off quickly and replace them with a good healthy herd of “Yesands”. In fact, you can take it a step further and replace nearly every use of the word “but” with “and”, and the results are guaranteed to surprise you, delight your audience, and foster a remarkable outcome.

Every time you hear yourself say, “but,” change it to “and.” In that moment, you’re breaking the habit of closed thinking. The more you do it, the more open you’re thinking will become, and the more open your counterpart’s thinking will become. As with any habit, it takes time to break. And it’s worth it.

About the Author

Scott CochraneScott Cochrane is the author of Your Creative Mind: How to Disrupt Your Thinking, Abandon Your Comfort Zone, and Develop Bold New Strategies (Career Press, 2016). Scott’s The Bold Mind Group helps clients grow to higher levels of success through implementing revolutionary thinking.

Seven Lessons American Manufacturing’s Decline Can Teach Any Company

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The United States destroyed its enemies in World War II because it out-produced them. Its manufacturing capacity was enormous and efficient. Its workforce was inspired and committed. The government, suppliers, and competitors all collaborated to produce the biggest manufacturing juggernaut the world had ever known. It seemed there was no end to America’s manufacturing might.

But there was.

The end to America being a manufacturing powerhouse began during the recession of 2008. Millions of middle-class manufacturing jobs were lost. And they never came back. In fact, since 1979, manufacturing employment has plummeted by over 33%. That is worse than the job losses during the Great Depression.

So what happened? How did the world’s mightiest manufacturing machine end up as the equivalent of room service to China? How did the nation with the workforce that won the war end up with a workforce outsourced to India? How did the most motivated, inspired, and productive workforce on the planet end up caring more about their bowling scores than their production numbers?

There is no shortage of explanations. Some experts claim China is to blame. Others cite United States trade policies. And still others say it is because of the rise of the Millennials.

However, very few people point to the real reason. And that is a failure of American leadership on an epic scale; a failure of government to work with manufacturing instead of against it; a failure of business to adapt to the global marketplace instead of running from it. But most of all, it is a failure of leadership to harness and unleash the remarkable potential of the American worker.

You can’t unleash this massive potential without creating a “culture by design, not default”. A culture by design has a bedrock of carefully selected company-wide values that motivates employees, delights customers, serves their communities and sparks innovation and creativity. But most companies have cultures “by default, not design”. They have what I call “bumper sticker” values. Bumper sticker values are created in boardrooms because they sound cool. But they don’t reflect the real, underlying values of the organization.

One has to look no further than the Wells Fargo bogus accounts debacle to illustrate this. Two of Wells Fargo’s key values are “ethics” and “what’s right for their customers”. And yet what they did was clearly neither. How can a company with those supposed ethics commit such an act? It can only be because while those values look good on a bumper sticker, the real, underlying values at Wells Fargo are “profit above all else”. Now don’t misunderstand me, profit has to be the number one goal. The problem with that as a core value, above all else is people will act that way. And when they do, relationships between employees and customers suffer, quality suffers, the books get cooked, and all other manner of bad outcomes.

That is why it is so important to build a culture by design. Cultures by design contain foundational values that drive organizational behavior toward remarkable outcomes. Cultures by default contain foundational values that drive organizational behavior toward bad outcomes.

The key point here is that you should choose values and not let values choose you. Here are some simple steps to get started:

1. Understand the values your organization currently has. Some, perhaps all, the values may be perfectly appropriate. Some may not be. But remember, the underlying values are probably different than the bumper sticker values. Conduct an anonymous survey of every single employee and ask them. Don’t make this a human resource exercise. It has to come right from the top to be taken seriously.

2. Once you know the underlying values of the organization, decide which ones are worth keeping, nourishing, and promoting and which ones need to be discarded. And then you and your senior leadership team can decide which new values need to be implemented. This is not a slogan exercise. It is a gut-wrenching soul-searching mission. Which values should you choose? It will be different in every company but you should choose values that drive organizational behavior toward remarkable outcomes. Don’t choose values that sound cool in the C-suite but stupid to employees. Choose values that everyone in the organization can get behind and feel good about. Sound like a tough job? It is. The last time I did this it took a year.

3. Declare to the organization the new values that have been chosen and why. If you have chosen well, people will applaud you when you tell them. If you have chosen poorly, you’ll be a water cooler joke. Be very deliberate and comprehensive when you announce the new values. Explain completely what each value means, why it was chosen, and what you expect from employees in terms of behavior to support the values.

4. Now comes the most crucial part. You must be certain your senior executives live these values day by day. You can’t expect “people from below to do what the top does not”. Some of your executives won’t go along with the new values. Ask them to leave the company. Yes, you read that right. One loose cannon on the values ship can scuttle the whole effort.

5. Align all organization policies and practices to support the new values. Make them part of performance appraisals, standards for promotions, and compensation increases. Don’t let this become a “check the box to keep human resources happy” exercise.

6. Once the values are firmly entrenched, don’t let anybody in the front door that doesn’t believe in them. Do a “values check” as part of the interview process.

7. And finally, this has to be a CEO initiative or it will fail. Think of this as a strategic culture plan, requiring years to execute, not months. And give it the same time, importance, attention, and resources as you do the strategic operating plan.

About the Author

CEO Miller IngenuitySteven L. Blue is the President & CEO of Miller Ingenuity, a global supplier of mission-critical solutions in the transportation industry and author of the new book, American Manufacturing 2.0: What Went Wrong and How to Make It Right. For more information, please visit www.StevenLBlue.com, www.milleringenuity.com and connect with Blue on Twitter, @SteveBlueCEO.