Psychological safety

Yesterday I wrote about research from Carnegie Mellon, M.I.T. and Union College that showed the number one factor that influenced team effectiveness was psychological safety. In other words, for teams to work well together, team members must feel comfortable enough to be themselves, then, and only then, will they contribute to their full potential.

Here are some tips on how to build a psychologically safe culture in your workplace:
·      Listen more, talk less.
·      Praise generously.
·      Reframe negative feedback.
·      Pay attention.
And if you cannot do these things, I know someone with the skill set you require, contact me via e-mail for details.

Please don't silence your team

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon, M.I.T. and Union College discovered that good teams generally did two things:

1. When working on tasks, teammates all got the chance to speak, and no single person dominated the conversation.

2. Teams had high "average social sensitivity." In other words, individual team members were able to correctly interpret fellow teammates' expressions, tone of voice, and nonverbal cues. This led them to be more sensitive to teammates feelings during communication.

Contact me via e-mail if you would like to know how you can apply these findings to your workplace.

Team culture

Leaders need to connect, challenge, build a culture, clearly communicate, and commit to where they are going. It’s teamwork that makes the dreams work, and you are not a team because you work together, you are a team because you trust, respect and care for each other. I think it’s the peer to peer connection in a low trust world that leads culture to change. Are you part of a really engaging culture? 

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
— Peter Drucker

This quote means that the culture of your company always determines success regardless of how effective your strategy may be. Our tribe need to get so engaged in what we do that they tell their friends and that’s what changes culture. It’s important to understand that culture beats everything! Culture beats strategy, culture beats pricing, culture beats technology, culture always wins. So, our job is to change the culture and we do that 10 people at a time who then tell 10 people and so on. 

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Trust the process

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Have you ever been in the situation where you are presenting to potential client and you can see that they just don’t seem to “get it”?

Would you like to know how to share your story in a way that builds trust and interest with your ideal clients without sounding like you’re just bragging about yourself?

Would you like to know how to teach in a way that opens up your listeners to new perspectives and helps them visualise what it’s like to be successful with you?

Would you like to how to talk about your products and services in a way that gets your audience taking notes and leaning in, instead of feeling like you’re being pushy and selling them?

Would you like to know exactly how to structure a great talk and stories within that talk so you can create sales with confidence every time you speak?

Contact me via e-mail to schedule a meeting about the right framework for driving growth for your business.

Hard work pays off

Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with things that you would rather not deal with, for example, fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, drive through the other barrier and overcome whatever obstacle is placed in front of you. And after you’ve done that, to do it again the next day. I think the biggest influence in life is habit.


To get better results, adopt better habits. I ask myself everyday: 
1. How will I create value for my customers?
2. And how will I make money doing so?

What fuels you?

Introducing new ideas is hard and most of us think the best way to win people over is to push harder. Organisations and individuals tend to focus on understanding behaviours in terms of internal forces, things like motivation and intent. Therefore, when attempting to launch a new product, and maybe people aren’t buying, the way the mind understands that is to assume that it is because the appeal or should I say the allure is insufficient. When you want to grow and sell to more customers, you usually say: “I need to improve my product, I’ll give the customers a better deal by way of discounts or market yourself better.” And if that’s the problem you imagine, the way you solve it is by elevating appeal. Organisational psychologist, Loran Nordgren says a more effective approach is to focus on the invisible obstacles to new ideas. 

“People don’t engage with us for our reasons, they engage with us for their reasons.
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— Burrellism

Understand the source

In my experience, most projects that start don’t succeed. Why is that? I think it’s a combination of two things: Empathy, meaning you are building it for yourself and not your audience, and secondly, the persistence and resources to get through the dip - meaning when you hit the hard part when everyone stumbles. The questions you will ask yourself are: Do you have a committed team? Do you have the money in the bank? Do you have the time? This is the moment of truth and what separates the things that get finished and work from the things that get abandoned.

“In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.
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— Seth Godin

Always add value

What you want is to be so specific in what you stand for, that people will search for you by name. We should aim to become the type of person, or should I say make the type of contribution that people search for by name. Remember the more specific you are, the more the likelihood that this will happen. In my experience, it’s far easier to love what you do than to do what you love.

 

I’m a business consultant, sales trainer, and keynote speaker and I’m not there to look good, I’m there to make my clients look good, simply put it’s never about me, it’s always about them. This is a new challenge for me to look at myself and ask, where am I being generous so that an organisation or person, I care about has changed for the better. I aim to do this over and over again and I never position price, I always position the value.

Seeing things from another perspective

Buyers think about desired outcomes, for example, “I have a problem that needs to be solved.” Now, if all products are solutions or platforms, how do you present that to a buyer? Ask questions that will enable the buyer to quantify the impact of change on their organisation, team/dept., and also on them personally. Take time to personalise this for the buyer as one size does not fit all. Here’s a great discovery question:

Dear buyer,
By doing business with my company, what will this do for you both professionally and personally?

With each day that passes

A proof of concept is an exercise in which work is focused on determining whether an idea can be turned into a reality. A proof of concept is meant to determine the feasibility of the idea or to verify that the idea will function as envisioned. As soon as the proof of concept is in place, all the motivation to close the sale is already there. All the energy you need to have that sale cross the line in the right way at the right time is also in your hands.

“To know others is knowledge.
To know oneself is wisdom.
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— Lao Tzu

Anxieties darken the skies

Look at what the world believes about selling, the world believes selling is about pitching and persuading. The way targets are set up are for example, how much did you sell this month? The problem is salespersons dive into pitching before creating an urgency for the product or service they are selling and this causes pipelines to clog, and sales cycles to slow down. Just imagine if the sales managers better understood the psychology of selling and trained their sales teams to listen to the buyers and understand the problem they are trying to solve. The better the salespersons understand what it costs them by not solving the buyers’ problems, the more likely they will change the way they approach sales meetings and presentations. 

A need is a necessity arising from a certain problem, a real problem; and a want is what people think or say they need. I think salesperson’s really need to learn how to listen to their buyers and not to pitch or persuade them before clearly understanding their needs. Contact me via e-mail for sales training and workshops.

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Self reflection

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According to Indeed business leadership refers to how individuals make decisions, set goals, and provide direction in a professional environment. Business leadership can take many different forms, but usually involves a CEO or higher-level employees guiding and inspiring the rest of the team. I have an in-depth knowledge and understanding of the core elements of business leadership and I think the essential business management skills should include:

  • Critical and strategic thinking

  • Communication

  • Problem-solving

  • Organisation

  • Presenting

  • Reporting

  • Leadership

  • Project management

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A simple buying process

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I love to simplify complex things and I think that buyers go through 3 stages before purchase:

⁃  Awareness: What’s the problem and what’s the desired outcome?
⁃  Consideration: How can we achieve these things?
⁃  Decision: Who are we going to do this with?

The first two platforms are a battle over ideas and as a salesperson you must come into buying meetings with good questions and ideas. Buyers usually do their research and will get the facts and figures online, so salespersons have to step their game. We have start getting salespersons to start having conversations instead of giving presentations - true storytelling with references and testimonials. Contact me via e-mail when you are ready for a sales training and storytelling workshops.

Speakers' corner

Storytelling is an undervalued and underused art in the world of business. I think it’s unfortunate that it’s only in our roles as businesspeople that we avoid using stories. We share the latest organisational gossip with our colleagues, and we tell our friends stories about our personal lives. Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park has been a traditional site for public speeches and debates since the mid 1800's when protests and demonstrations took place there. As a child my parents would take us to Speakers' Corner. 

When was the last time you heard a story used to introduce and discuss a business issue? Do you have high anxiety around public speaking? Contact me via e-mail if you are interested in learning how to share a short story that other people in the room can relate to.

How clear are your questions?

After you ask a question, be silent and listen for their answer. 

⁃ Active listening means you’re concentrating on their response, making direct eye contact, and taking notes.

⁃ Are you paying attention to nonverbal cues?

⁃ What’s not being said is usually more important than what is said.

⁃ Keep it positive and focus on what can be done, not what can’t be done.

It’s the cornerstone

Critical thinking is the ability and eagerness to identify gaps in logic or shortfalls in evidence-based argumentation. Sympathetic listening is that commitment to understanding the argument from the other person’s perspective. For example: “Am I really understanding this or that from the other person’s point of view?”

Now what sympathy means in these cases is I am willing to set aside, even if it’s just temporarily, that hunt for the slightest mistake in logic or reasoning. Setting that aside for a moment, so that you can listen really carefully to what your conversation partner is saying, so you can understand from their perspective what their intellectual project is or why it is that they are looking at the same world you are looking at but coming to a very, very different conclusion. I think critical thinking and sympathetic listening are both facets of a great conversation.

The 4 C's

Why are these skills important?

1. Communication
I think communication is all about sharing thoughts, ideas, and questions. Communication can come in many it’s not just speaking verbally as non-verbal cues such as hand gestures and facial expressions are just as important. And nowadays, as we live in a digital world, it is also important to learn how to responsibly navigate digital spaces.

2. Collaboration
I think the ability to collaborate and work together to reach a common goal is a skill worth practicing. Problem solving and tackling issues in which are bigger is essential if you want a career in any field. 

3. Critical Thinking
I think by looking at problems in a new way and simply asking “Why?” in today’s world where we can get information at the click of a button, a large part of critical thinking is being able to look at information and decide if it is credible or not.

4. Creativity
I think being creative is trying new approaches to solve problems by simply thinking outside the box in any area. Creativity can be taught and fostered by encouraging your team to try new things and by creating a safe space for them to express themselves.

Setting goals

I wrote it down, put a date on it, listed the obstacles I had to overcome, identified the people, the groups, the organisations I needed to work with, spelled out a plan of action, set that time limit in there, and identified all the benefits to me. It was only when I did that, that the goal became a reality.

“If you want to achieve your goals, help others achieve their goals.”
— Zig Ziglar