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Human Feedback is the Greatest Path to Efficiency

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Feedback, at its core, is simply information about the results of past action that can improve the results of future actions. An airplane’s navigation system, the thermostat in your home’s heating unit, and a flashing electronic sign that displays your car’s speed are all examples of feedback that drives improvement. The plane adjusts its course, the heat turns off in the warm afternoon, and you slow down to the speed limit. Each time an adjustment is made, a ‘feedback loop’ is completed.

It’s not happening in the workplace
This is so not the way information flows between human beings in the workplace. Although employees receive massive amounts of information via electronic sources, feedback from their boss – information that could help them improve performance – dribbles in at a very slow pace or not at all.

Why is this?

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About the Author

Anna Carroll, MSSW, is an organization development consultant, facilitator, coach, and speaker. She designs and leads training and group planning experiences and creates learning tools and assessments to speed up group success. Most recently, Anna has focused on how leaders and team members can overcome their barriers to exchanging valuable feedback in the workplace. Her book, The Feedback Imperative: How to Give Everyday Feedback to Speed Up Your Team’s Success, was published in July 2014 by River Grove Press.

Want to learn more? Visit Anna’s website: www.EverydayFeedback.com or contact her by email at [email protected].

Lead Like it Matters… Because it Does, part 3 of 4

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Lead Like it Matters… Because it DoesWe asked Roxi Hewertson about the 8 overarching leadership insights that kick off her new book Lead Like it Matters…Because it Does hitting the stores in just a few weeks. She agreed to share them with us as a four-part series. This is Part 3 of 4.

Insight #5: Leading is All About Relationships

Let’s get to the heart of the matter. If no one is following you, you aren’t leading. Period. You can manage all kinds of tasks that might involve schedules, money, projects, budgets, and so on, and yet everything you do with your staff and other stakeholders involves relationships. How well those relationships work has a lot to do with how much TRUST is at the center of them. Susan Scott, author of Fierce Conversations, sums it up well. “When the conversation stops, the relationship stops.”

The question is not IF we will have relationships at work; the question is what will the quality of those relationships be? Each leader plays a critical role within her and his ecosystem in what I call your ‘responsibility pond.’ This is where your leadership ripples are most strongly felt, no matter how big or small your ‘pond’ may be.

As a leader, informal or formal, you contribute to – often create, model, and nurture the norms, culture, and environment that everyone who lives and works in your ‘pond’ will experience. You can sustain and strengthen the culture or you can weaken and sicken it. Are you part of the solution or part of the problem? Understanding this reality is often a huge wake-up call, and in my opinion, not a moment too soon.

I’m sure you know that it is not enough to be really, really, smart. Emotional intelligence matters a heck of a lot – more even than IQ, particularly if you want to have healthy and productive relationships. Bad and ineffective leaders can create a lot of damage. Good and effective leaders can accomplish incredible feats with their followers.

I believe most of us would choose the latter as our legacy.

Here are 4 suggestions about what you can do to pay attention to those important relationships:

  • Create a healthy culture
  • Build trust on purpose and often
  • Walk around a LOT
  • Model how you would like others to behave

Insight #6: Learning the ‘Soft Skills’ is Hard!

I’ve noticed that adults tend to resist learning or re-learning good interpersonal and social management skills. These involve thinking about relationships, behaviors, and even emotions. This is very different than an impersonal or technical task – and still it is a task – just a human one.

This IS hard work. Most of us know that we need to engage and energize employees, build trust, and communicate so that people understand us and know where the organization is going. They want and need to know what part they can play in getting there. We will not get all that good stuff from our people without doing all the hard soft stuff. It’s really that simple.

Mastering leadership skills is not rocket science. It is a lot harder, precisely because it is far more qualitative than quantitative, and because we are leading people, not machines.

Building trust is one of the key outcomes of mastering interpersonal skills. Try to resist the urge to say, ‘Oh, no, not the touchy-feely stuff!‘ Because, really, you can’t get far in life without knowing how to communicate so people understand, how to have tough conversations, or how to transform conflicts into solutions.

While it does take determination, practice, and feedback, nothing is beyond you when you are committed to learning or honing your interpersonal skills. And I know I’m not telling you anything new; I’m just reminding you to pay attention and grow your emotional intelligence competencies to improve your effectiveness. When you do this… your teams will thrive and of course all of this flows directly to your bottom line.

Here are 4 suggestions about where to focus some of your attention:

  • Listen more than you talk
  • Increase staff engagement at every opportunity
  • Make improving your dialogue skills a priority
  • Take or revisit what you learned in a good leadership course

About the Author

Roxi HewertsonLeadership 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.

How can you make the leadership leap gracefully? Well, learning and practicing effective leadership skills is a good place to begin. When you read Roxi’s book you’ll be well on your way! Click here to learn more.

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].

Lead Like it Matters… Because it Does, part 2 of 4

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Lead Like it Matters… Because it DoesWe asked Roxi Hewertson about the 8 overarching leadership insights that kick off her new book Lead Like it Matters…Because it Does hitting the stores in just a few weeks. She agreed to share them with us as a four-part series. This is Part 2 of 4.

Insight #3: Leadership Is a Discipline, Not an Accident

We know for sure that highly effective leaders get much better results. There is no debate about this, and you know it’s plain old common sense. Don’t we all want better results? Don’t we want to get more bang for the buck?

Those of you who already lead people (as opposed to technology, science or thought leaders, for example) may think you got to your position because you are a good leader and were recognized as such. “They hired me, didn’t they?” The sad truth is that you, along with the rest of us, probably got your first and even subsequent leadership roles by luck, not by design, and sometimes even by default.

Leaders find themselves responsible for the work lives of other people because their knowledge, performance, and technical skills as an individual contributor were exemplary, or at least pretty good. Learning to become an Olympic athlete, an engineer, a teacher, a scientist, or an opera singer requires one to learn increasingly difficult skills; to practice, practice, practice; and to receive regular feedback on one’s performance again and again.

This is also true for becoming, practicing, and remaining a skilled, effective leader.

Insight #4: Leaders and Individual Contributors Require Opposite Skill Sets and Motivations

From the day we were born, all the applause has been about “what I have done well,” not “what we have done well.” Look at your life and your experiences and then fast-forward to where you are today. I think you’ll agree that for most of your life, your personal performance generated the lion’s share of your positive rewards or negative consequences. It wasn’t a group of people; it was you, you, and more you.

The exception is teamwork within or outside your family. Whether you were on a great team or a lousy team, you probably learned something about leading and teams. Unfortunately, few people integrate those lessons when they become leaders at work. The fallback position for most of us is what we know best and think we can count on the most – and that would be… ‘me.’

The skills, attributes and even motivations required to lead people successfully are entirely opposite from those required to be a successful individual contributor. Consider this: if the roles and skills weren’t so opposite, it would be a walk in the park for someone to move seamlessly from being a great violin player to being a great conductor.

In the first case, the violin player is responsible for his performance. While the conductor is responsible for her skills, her real job is knowing how to get the most out of each person so that everyone’s work will blend well and produce magnificent music. She succeeds only when the entire orchestra succeeds.

Leading others is an emotional and intellectual seismic shift that will quickly separate effective leaders from ineffective ones. Making the transition from being an individual contributor to being a leader can seem as difficult as swimming from New York to London alone, without a life jacket.

About the Author

Roxi HewertsonLeadership 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.

How can you make the leadership leap gracefully? Well, learning and practicing effective leadership skills is a good place to begin. When you read Roxi’s book you’ll be well on your way! Click here to learn more.

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].

The Big Picture of Business – Visioning Scope: Applying Vision Toward Your Organization’s Progress

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Visioning is the process where good ideas become something more. It is a catalyst toward long-term evaluation, planning and implementation. It is a vantage point by which forward-thinking organizations ask: What will we look like in the future? What do we want to become? How will we evolve? Vision is a realistic picture of what is possible.

7 Steps Toward Strategic Vision

  1. Analyze the company’s environment, resources and capabilities. Determine where the Big Picture existed before, if it did at all. Crystallize the core business in terms of viabilities to move successfully forward to some discernible point.
  2. Clarify management values. Usually, management has not yet articulated their own individual values, let alone those of the organization. This process helps to define and develop value systems to create success.
  3. Develop a mission statement. It is the last thing that you write, not an end in itself. In reality, the Mission Statement is rewritten several times, as the planning process ensues. The last draft of the statement will be an executive summary of collective ideas and works of the Visioning team.
  4. Identify strategic objectives and goals. I ask clients to do so without using the words: ‘technology,’ ‘sales,’ and ‘solutions.’ Businesses fail to grow because they get stuck in buzz words and trite phrases that they hear from others. Technology is a tool, which feeds into tactics. Sales is a tactic, one of dozens of tactics which an organization must pursue. Tactics feed into objectives, which feed into goals, which feed into strategy, which feeds into Vision.
  5. Generate select strategic options. There are many ways to succeed, and your game plan should have at least five viable options. When the Visioning program matures and gets to its second generation, you’ll find that winning formulas stem from a hybrid of the original strategic options. Creative thinking moves the company into the future, not rehashes of the earliest ideas.
  6. Develop the vision statement. It will be action-oriented and speaks from the facts, as well as from the passion of company leaders. It will include a series of convictions why your organization will work smarter, be its best, stand for important things and be accountable.
  7. Measure and review the progress. By benchmarking activities and accomplishments against planned objectives, then the company has a barometer of its previous phase and an indicator of its next phase.

7 Biggest Visioning Challenges

  1. Settle the organization’s short-term problems. Otherwise, they will fester and grow. Many organizations fail because they deny the existence of problems, proceed to place blame elsewhere or hope against hope that things will miraculously get better. Unsolved problems turn into larger roadblocks to growth.
  2. Never let the vision lapse. Keep the vision grounded in reality through benchmarked measurements. Keep the communication open, and the people will keep the enthusiasm alive. Renew the vision every five years with a formal process, thus including newer employees, the latest in business strategies and, thus, the advantage over emerging competitors.
  3. Effective visions are lived in details, not in broad strokes. If the mission evolves from the process, then so do the goals and objectives reformulate by changing tactics. The smallest tactics and creative new ways of performing them tend to blossom into grand new visions.
  4. Be sure that all sectors of the organization participate. The Big Picture cannot be top-down, nor can the embracing of corporate culture be only from the bottom-up. The Visioning committee should represent all strata of the firm.
  5. Periodically, test and review the process. Understanding why the organization ticks, rather than just what it produces, makes the really big gains possible. Success is a track record of periodic reflections.
  6. Never stop planning for the next phase. The review and benchmarking phases of one process constitute the pre-work and research for the next. From careful study (not whims or gut instincts) stem true strategic planning.
  7. Change is inevitable and 90 percent positive. Individuals and organizations change at the rate of 71 percent per year. The secret is in benefiting from change, rather than becoming a victim of it.

Your company’s future relies on your people sharing this vision. Determine if your team understands your vision, if they can see the possibilities, if they know how they fit into the picture and if they are motivated toward action.

About the Author

Hank MoorePower Stars to Light the Business Flame, by Hank Moore, encompasses a full-scope business perspective, invaluable for the corporate and small business markets. It is a compendium book, containing quotes and extrapolations into business culture, arranged in 76 business categories.

Hank’s latest book functions as a ‘PDR of business,’ a view of Big Picture strategies, methodologies and recommendations. This is a creative way of re-treading old knowledge to enable executives to master change rather than feel as they’re victims of it.

Power Stars to Light the Business Flame is now out in all three e-book formats: iTunes, Kindle, and Nook.

Present for Success

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StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals ArticleDoes this sound familiar? You have a big presentation and you practice reading your notes for several days. You work on the perfect PowerPoint slides and polish your content, but on the big day it feels like your presentation falls flat. What happened?

If public speaking makes you uncomfortable or gives you anxiety, you’re not alone: public speaking is one of the most common fears in the United States. Unfortunately, that anxiety can interfere with your delivery. It doesn’t matter how strong the content of your presentation is, if you’re unable to speak in a clear, confident manner, your message will suffer. In fact, recent research has shown that how you say something actually matters twice as much as what you say!

Learning to speak with confidence and master the art of public speaking is crucial to professional success. Whether it’s giving a sales presentation, pitching an idea to a committee, or presenting your ideas to a prospect or client, the ability to speak in a clear, engaging and confident manner is a crucial part of advancing your career. In today’s business world it is imperative that we polish our tone, engage the audience and deliver a dynamic presentation; even if it is just to one person.

Ready to take your public speaking skills to the next level? Take a look at these five tips to improve your speaking and presentation skills:

  1. Always keep water on hand when you speak. I am always surprised to see people stand at a podium or deliver a speech of greater than fifteen minutes and not have an accompanying glass or bottle of water. Speaking for a prolonged period can dehydrate your vocal cords, and dry mouth caused by nerves can make the situation worse. Staying well hydrated will help keep your voice strong and clear. In addition, taking a sip of water can be a great way to take a moment to compose yourself and collect your thoughts during your presentation.
  2. Don’t forget to breathe! Closing your eyes and taking a few deep breaths before you present is remarkably effective for helping you to calm down and focus on the task at hand. Take a moment and breathe in through your nose and out from your mouth several times before taking the stage or podium. Taking deep breaths from your abdomen as you speak helps you retain this calm, and also gives power to your voice.
  3. Before you begin, take two minutes to do some vocal warm-up exercises. They’ll help to relax you and make your speech more fluid. This is even more important if you are giving a morning presentation and have not yet conversed with colleagues; you literally need to “warm-up” your voice! Lip flutters and humming are two simple and effective ways to warm up, and sliding your voice from its highest to lowest speaking pitch can prepare your vocal cords to use the range you need for a dynamic, engaging speaking voice.
  4. Improve your clarity. When people get nervous they tend to rush the delivery of their message, which subsequently causes mumbling. When people swallow their words or mumble, the importance of the message can be lost. Focus on saying each sound, especially at the ends of words.
  5. Practice! If you’re completely confident in the content of your presentation beforehand, you’ll be much more relaxed, and free to focus on the quality of your speech and your presentation style. Once you’re confident in what you are going to say, put in some additional practice time focusing on your performance style. If you incorporate clear speech and a dynamic voice into your practice, it will come much more naturally on the big day.

Polishing your public speaking skills will help you to gain confidence and increase your professional credibility. Take the time to focus on your speaking style, and make sure your presentation is doing your message justice. Remember: It’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it!

About the Author

Jayne LatzJayne Latz is an expert in communication and CEO of Corporate Speech Solutions, LLC. She has worked as a speech trainer, coach, professional speaker, and has co-authored two books titled, Talking Business: A Guide to Professional Communication and Talking Business: When English is Your Second Language. She was recently featured in The Wall Street Journal and on The TODAY Show.

If you are interested in learning more ways to improve your business communication skills, contact Jayne at [email protected] or visit www.corporatespeechsolutions.com.