Lifestyle

February 22, 2015

Persistence, When You Don’t Feel Up to It.

Looking at today’s job market, we may feel that it is the worst time ever yet there has never been a more opportune time to follow your heart and realize your dreams. However, getting to the right outcome is not easy. It takes persistence, commitment, and the willingness to do whatever it takes.

So how can you be persistent when you don’t feel like it? How can you go on when the going gets tough? When you have called, knocked on doors, and toiled, day after day, week after week, and you experience all kinds of rejection, disappointments and frustrations.

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December 14, 2014

Keys to Being a Transformative Leader

Courtesy of Stuart Miles at freedigitalphotos.net

To be a Transformative Leader one must exhibit strength in two very important character areas, trust, and transparency. One’s ability to grow and allow others to grow depends wholly on the results of both of these characteristics.

Trust is one cornerstone:

The first characteristic is Trust. As a noun, it is defined as a firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something. For example, “relations have to be built on trust”

Synonyms for trust can be confidence, belief, faith, certainty, assurance, conviction, credence

Legally, it is defined as, confidence placed in a person by making that person the nominal owner of property to be held or used for the benefit of one or more others.

As a verb, trust is defined: to believe in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of. For example, “I should have trusted that data from the beginning.”

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November 2, 2014

Dueling Checklists Killing Engagement?

Today, we have a dilemma that is facing many companies when it comes to hiring. Checklists are getting in the way. Having dealt with the application process for a while, I find it interesting what the automated process has done to the human interaction process.

We have dehumanized the interaction so much that defensive processes have started to appear that further jeopardize employee engagement, in my opinion.

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October 5, 2014

Leadership Crisis? – How About Coaching?

According to a recent government report the business world is currently in a leadership crisis. Up and coming managers, those who will be our business leaders of the future don’t see positive examples of “inspirational leadership” in their work places. Employees long to see a genuine shared vision, real confidence and trust in teams and respect for colleagues, customers and employees. Less than 40% of managers actually see these traits on display in the workplace.

Courtesy of pinkblue & FreeDigitalPhotos

They are looking for fresh and exciting opportunities so they can grow, expand and become the best leaders they possible can be however management is does not fully understand how to implement coaching. The state of corporate coaching today is really nothing but a re-labeling of 50-year-old management techniques. I did a review recently of the state of corporate coaching that is being encouraged each day in many organizations and I was astounded.

One, of many, defined corporate coaching as “providing guidance, feedback and direction to ensure successful performance”. This is a typical old school management process because everything is defined for the employee or new manager. The focus is on short-term results and very structured framework so that it can be micro managed for success. There is no mention of empowering, growing or allowing employees to make mistakes.

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September 28, 2014

Real-ationships, a Must in the Hyper-Connected World

Puzzle - Real-ationships — Putting Real-ationships together.

I find it interesting how changing a letter or two can open up a whole new arena for a person’s mind. In listening to the sermon recently, the word Real-ationships was coined and discussed in a spiritual sense but I found this opened a whole different view for me in terms of leadership.

The idea was very liberating because much of what we discuss today has a virtual feel to it and many times leaves us feeling disconnected and alone, even though we are buried in data and virtual relationships.

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September 7, 2014

Do you have a Trusted Mastermind Team?

Courtesy of Sheela Mohan at Freedigitalphotos.net

One of the keys to life is to be around the people who will empower you to reach the next level! In order to exceed your present reach, you need to be around people who will help you stretch a little farther each time. Building a trusted mastermind team may be exactly what you need. The secret to a productive mastermind team is to surround you with people who you can trust and always learn from. One sign of a very intelligent person is to be smart enough to realize that you need to learn from others who can contribute to your WHY in life.

My ultimate dream is to develop the #1 personal leadership-development network in the world. Each and every day I strive to immerse myself in material and people who will enable me to achieve our corporate mission.

When you look at your own mission in life, you need to ask yourself a very honest/straightforward question ….”Is my personal development engine (mastermind team) in Forward, Neutral or Reverse?” The answer is very simple but the impact is immense.

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February 16, 2014

Leadership Includes Customer Experience

Today, all companies deliver a Customer Experience. However, many times it isn’t always what the company intended. At the call center, it is often a poor customer experience with unmet expectations.

Does your company deliver the promised customer experience?
Do you have a document outlining what the Customer Experience is supposed to be?, No, that’s not surprising, few companies do. It is not a good excuse but all of us who don’t have a Customer Experience model in place are in good company.

According to a recent Forresters’’ report; while 90% of executives said that the customer experience was very important or critical, only 11% consider themselves to be very disciplined in their approach to customer experience. How many times does your customer go away with a bad experience?

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November 13, 2013

Business Tip #8: Telemarketing is NOT the Anti-Christ

Today, you’ll learn how to use direct mail marketing and, yes, telemarketing to your full advantage. I know, the word “telemarketing” might as well be four letters, but there is a way to help customers feel like they are getting personal attention and keep them from blocking your number!

With the success direct mail marketing has had and the availability of computers, these can be used as a powerful marketing tool for your success. Telemarketing is best for high priced, high margin products/services.

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November 3, 2013

Thinking Out of the Box is NOT a Dead Idea

“Thinking out of the box” is a term that is over-used, often misunderstood and woefully buzzified. There are experts in the leadership circles that want this term removed from our vocabulary forever; fortunately, I am not one of those. This term needs to become more utilized and it needs to be combined with a dose of disruptive thinking so we can make effective proactive changes that allow us to deal with the plethora of difficult issues we are dealing with in business and government today.

When people talk about thinking outside the box, we mean coming up with creative ways to solve problems – new ways to look at things. We are looking for new ways, processes for how we can do it? We are looking for new products or services that can advance our businesses to a new level. In our eagerness to think outside the box we often, forget to understand what the box is and what constraints there are within the boundaries of that box.

First, Let’s Examine the Box

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September 29, 2013

Another View of Pink

“The future belongs to a different kind of person,” says Daniel Pink, in his book, A Whole New Mind.

It belongs to “…creative and empathetic right-brain thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn’t.”

Pink claims we are living in a different age. A different time that demands different thinking.

According to Pink, right-brain creative thinking coupled with left-brain logistical reasoning is the great differentiation that separates the wheat from the chaff. I concur and expand it to incorporate a move to the next level:

From The Information Age to the Conceptual Age to the Collaborative Age

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