Growth & Leadership Insights

The Prime Directive for Service

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Customer relationships are valuable, fragile, and the foundation of your business. Your customer-service personnel are your front-line representatives, the face of your business. When something does not go as planned, how they respond to your customer-in-need makes all the difference in how that customer appraises the value of your relationship. How are your service people trained to respond? Do they deliver a scripted reply, based on what they can see on their computer screen, and …

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Finding the Space to React

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Urgent issues and changing priorities – these are the daily experiences of leadership. That’s why this insight from Viktor Frankl, offered by David Noble and Carol Kauffman in their book “Real Time Leadership,” is valuable: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” This space between a stimulus and a response provides the time for leaders …

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Culture Drives Performance

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Increasingly, the discussions I’m having with leaders focus on how to better leverage their culture to improve performance. We’ve experienced more change in the past few years than we’ve ever seen before. The work to be done is evolving, it’s different; so, the way we get it done must be different. Culture is how a business gets things done. It defines who you are as a company and what you believe. While your purpose or …

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To Solve or To Sell

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Inflation and incremental supply chain issues continue to breed uncertainty for your customers, increasing their risk and their focus on price. If your strategy is to sell value creation rather than low price, then you’re likely finding that it’s more challenging to execute your strategy. Because increased volatility tends to shorten a customer’s planning horizon, each transaction is often assessed in isolation, for its short-term advantage. A price-first priority is helpful to customers since it …

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Ensuring Your Message Is Heard

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When there’s a serious message to deliver, we often ponder the words we want to use, redrafting them, and practicing how we’ll deliver them, until we think we have it right. But despite all our best efforts, many messages are not understood as intended. One reason this occurs is because we tend to communicate messages the way we like to hear them, without considering how our listeners might hear them. Combine this tendency with the …

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Self Interest to Shared Accountability

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Before there can be accountability, there must be responsibility. The responsibility of committing to a decision, of taking ownership of a challenge, of striving to make a difference. It’s the opposite of compliance – of just doing the job, of not taking a risk, of doing what everyone else is doing. What matters is a person’s willingness to see what’s wrong or what could be better, and then striving to do something about it. It’s …

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Shaping Leaders

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“Leaders learn best by leading in the face of obstacles. As weather shapes mountains, problems shape leaders.”~Warren Bennis Leaders perpetually face problems and challenges – it’s a responsibility that’s part of the job. Some are planned like change initiatives, and some arrive unforeseen. Some are familiar, and some are new; but every one of them involves barriers to be overcome and priorities to be sorted. Each challenge presents an opportunity for leaders to learn and …

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Better Discovery Boosts Business

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When a customer encounters a problem, they tend to tightly control the information shared with external suppliers in their quotation requests. There is urgency to resolve the problem, so these If your solution is more complex, offering to produce more benefits for the customer with a related higher purchase investment, then responding as the customer expects, with simplicity, speed, and minimal dialogue, reduces your chance to earn their business. Proposing your solution, without first discovering why resolving their …

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The Cost for Autonomy

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Daniel Pink cites 3 motivators that drive performance for those doing cognitive work: 1. Their purpose: yearning to do meaningful work that makes a difference, to do what they do in the service of something larger than themselves; 2. Their pursuit of mastery: striving to continuously improve “something that matters;” 3. Their desire for autonomy: wanting to direct their own lives. Daniel’s theory ranks autonomy as the primary motivator, and purpose as the 3rd . …

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Feedback Drives Performance

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The most effective and proven tool for improving performance is feedback. Positive feedback validates our strengths, and our sense of value in the workplace, increasing confidence and satisfaction. But it’s constructive feedback that teaches us and helps us grow; it reveals what others see, what they value about our contributions, and what they expect or need from us. Seeking feedback from others shows that we value their input, and are secure enough to hear how …

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