Year: 2010

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What are You Tolerating?

Work colleagues tolerating each other at work

Years ago, I met Thomas J Leonard, the Founder of Coach University.

He introduced the concept of “Tolerations” – those things that annoy you, drain your energy, and hold you back yet can be eliminated from your life.

Tolerations show up in most areas – work, home, school, relationships, equipment, cars and your habits.

Here are some Common Tolerations:

  • Office – Piles of papers on your desk, sticky notes all over, computer repairs
  • Home – loose door knob, leaky faucet, slow drain, squeaky door, needing paint
  • People – those who drain our energy, relationships that aren’t working
  • Your habits – not dealing with overwhelm, not exercising, not eating healthy
  • Work – not knowing what is expected, not knowing how to deal with change, poor communication

Dealing with Tolerations:

Tolerations are all about energy. Eliminating tolerations will give you more energy for what is important to you. You’ll be happier, more confident and won’t waste time stepping around things.

A great way to deal with tolerations is to write a list. Look around and record what things are draining you. Once you have your list, rank the items – which ones can you change or eliminate right away? This will give you momentum to tackle the ones that are more complex. Intentionally decide which ones you will put on hold. It is OK to “procrastinate with a purpose” but give yourself a timeline.

What tolerations will you eliminate?

For more resources, see the Library topic Personal and Professional Coaching.

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Tools for your Training/HPT toolbox

A-group-of-colleagues-working-with-a-laptop-in-an-office

Sorry this is a day late, life happens – Well I promised to give some useful tools to put in your training toolbox – I had a comment on a past post and the writer suggested that “companies are choosing to use additional methods such as corporate videos for training and development opportunities (benefits enrollments in particular)”. The gentleman sent a link to his site and I thought it might be a good tool so the link is:

http://www.icorporatevideo.com – you might want to check it out. – other tools are:

Books – I recommend the following:

Brain teasers, There are a myriad of these out there amazon.com is a good place to look – Brain teasers are a great place to start a training session gets em up and thinking!

Any book by Robert Mager

Donald Kirkpatrick’s 4 levels of evaluation

Make Training Work – Phillips

e-Learning – Rosen

Training aint telling (ASTD publication)

Running Training Like a Business – David Van Adelsberg, Edward A Trolley

And my personal favorite “Who Moved the Cheese”

I also have laminated Harless’ 13 questions for HPT here’s a link for that

http://boisemicrocinema.com/virmedian/hpttoolkit/chapter2.html

I also can’t say enough about ASTD’s info lines they have been invaluable to me when I was a grad student and I am sure I will use them when I eventually find a job.

One thing I also recommend is a membership to ASTD they are a wealth of information and the site is really user friendly.

I also recommend looking at www.langevin.com they are a train the trainer site and also have great classes and certifications too.

I am sure your toolbox is pretty complete, but I thought I’d add my two-cents too and once again happy training and suggestions comments and concerns are welcome as well as guest writers.

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For more resources about training, see the Training library.

– Looking for an expert in training and development or human performance technology?
– Contact me: Leigh Dudley – Linkedin – 248-349-2881
– Read my blog: Training and Development

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What Makes a Business Plan a Business Plan?

Business team working on a business plan

Recently someone asked for a simple definition. As it turns out, business plans mean different things to different people. I tend to think of them as presenting the vision or goals for a business, along with a road map for achieving those goals. It can be sketched on a napkin, written on a few pages, or compiled into a huge stack of paper.

Here’s Wikipedia’s definition:

A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals.

The business goals may be defined for for-profit or for non-profit organizations. For-profit business plans typically focus on financial goals, such as profit or creation of wealth. Non-profit and government agency business plans tend to focus on organizational mission which is the basis for their governmental status or their non-profit, tax-exempt status, respectively—although non-profits may also focus on optimizing revenue. In non-profit organizations, creative tensions may develop in the effort to balance mission with “margin” (or revenue).

Here’s what I would add. First, business plans need to demonstrate a solid understanding of customers and markets, which are all too often under-emphasized. Second, a plan is not complete until it indicates who will be responsible for running the business (its leadership), and why they are suited to achieve success. Third, it should have credible financial projections that can be tested independently. Finally, a business plan needs to indicate its most likely risks, and present well thought-out strategies for overcoming them.

OK, it’s hard to do all that on the back of a napkin. But however you define a business plan, be sure your plan indicates clearly where you are going and how you’ll get there.

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For more resources, see our Library topic Business Planning.

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Thought Leaders Then and Now – Ogilvy on Advertising

I’ve been asked to write about Thought Leaders in Marketing and Advertising. What are the cornerstone philosophies of the industry’s top executives?

This idea intrigued me, as we have much to learn from successful men and women with long careers, packed with hard-earned wisdom.

While discussing it with my partner and trusted advisor, Steven Gladstone, Esq., he suggested a twist that cinched it for me. He asked, “Why don’t you explore their core philosophies in the context of the new media paradigm? Are the concepts and practices that made them successful then, still dynamic in this explosive world of social media?”

I loved his idea, and I hope that you will enjoy exploring it with me.

David Ogilvy on Advertising

At the top of the list is David Ogilvy, Founder of the New York-based ad agency Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather, which eventually became Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide.

Into his late 30’s, Ogilvy had never written an advertisement in his life. In fact:

  • He had dropped out of college.
  • He was unemployed.
  • He had been a cook, a salesman, and a farmer.
  • He knew nothing about marketing … and had never written any copy!

He professed to be interested in advertising as a career (at the age of 38!) and was ready to go to work for $5,000 a year. A London agency hired him.

A mere three years later, he became the most famous copywriter in the world; and in due course built the tenth biggest agency in the world.

Ogilvy considered Direct Response his “first love” and “secret weapon”.

“I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information.” – David Ogilvy

This is ABSOLUTELY spot-on in the new world of social media! In my next post, I’ll explore Ogilvy’s first love, Direct Response, and its creative use in social media. For more insider tips, see this list of “Marketing” quotes by David Ogilvy.

For more social media “Marketing” tips and tactics, search these phrases:

  • Direct Response Marketing
  • David Ogilvy
  • Direct Response Copywriting

Happy “Marketing” hunting!

Which Marketing Thought Leaders do you want to read about?

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For more resources, see our Library topics Marketing and Social Networking.

. . ________ . .With offices in Nashville Tennessee, but working virtually with international clients, Lisa M. Chapman serves her clients as a business coach, business planning consultant and social media consultant. As a Founder of iBrand Masters, a social media consulting firm, Lisa Chapman assists clients in establishing and enhancing their online brand, attracting their target market, engaging in meaningful social media conversations, and converting online traffic into revenues. Email Lisa @ LisaChapman.com

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RipOff Report – The Inside Story (coming soon to an ezine near you)

A young businesswoman holding a paper file

The consumer complaint site, RipOff Report, has been the bane of many companies’ existence and a challenge for crisis managers everywhere. ED Magedson (yes, he capitalizes his first name), Founder of the site, agreed to a lengthy exclusive interview for my ezine, Crisis Manager, that I plan to publish on Thursday, April 29, along with my own editorial comments and teaching points. If you visit the Crisis Manager Archives, you’ll find a place where you can subscribe – it’s free.

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For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
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Mapping your Customer Experience Strategy

Customer-experience-creative-collage

Who Owns the Customer Experience in your Organization?

Answer: Everyone Should.

Who drives the Customer Experience strategy?

Answer: The Leader who is responsible for providing customer service.

The executive team should be 100% supportive and enabling of the necessary collaboration to establish an effective Customer Experience strategy that is the best in Delivering Service Value.

The foundation for delivering outstanding service requires your touch teams to:

  1. Know your Customer.
  2. Understand how they use your products or services.
  3. Ensure this information is shared with all of your customer touch teams.

Don’t have a CRM tool? No worries, the Sales team or customer service teams gather this information during the sales process from customer experience management. Good ol’ fashioned text documents or customer profile forms will work just fine. Don’t let the lack of fancy tools prevent you from this most critical step of understanding your customer feedback to get your customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

Create a Customer Experience Map.

Build your strategy by understanding what is happening today. Start by mapping out all customer journey touch-points, customer feedback data, and by whom. Be sure to delineate the type of outreach: email, phone, and face-to-face. Depending on the size of your organization, this is likely to be a collaborative effort with your sales, marketing, service, and fulfillment customer support team to customer journeys. Don’t think you can effect real change without the participation of these other customer success team.

After you have your map of touch points by whom and by type, fill in the expected timeline. For example, if you send a Welcome letter then be sure you have designated the timeline of when this letter is sent. Is it with the first order? Is it as soon as the opportunity has been converted to a successful customer experience strategy with a signed contract?

Example: Welcome Letter -Email – Marketing- Upon Signing of Contract

If implementation and/or training are a part of your customer expectations rollout to get a customer satisfaction score, then be sure to include general touchpoints and timelines.

This map is the start of your Customer Experience strategy. Once you map what you have, then add what should be included. From there, drill down into each touch-point to specify what, whom, how, and when. Final Step: communicate, communicate, and communicate.

Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages. …Henry Ford

The ultimate goal for your business is to figure out how to create an exceptional experience and establish it as the standard.

Coming next…Customer Onboarding. What is your current process? What makes it exceptional?

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Is a “Working Board” an Immature Board?

A board meeting of working board members

(The following post applies as much to for-profit Boards as nonprofit Boards — many for-profit Boards, especially in family-owned corporations, operate as working Boards.)

A “working Board” is a personality of a governing Board. There is no clear delineation as to what’s a definitely a working Board or not. However, it’s commonly viewed as a Board where members are doing a lot of staff-related (or employee-related) activities. New organizations often have a working Board.

I sometimes get calls from consultants wanting advice about certain situations when they’re working with Boards. It’s not uncommon that they’ll comment that a Board is a working Board and therefore needs to mature to a “policy Board” where members attend exclusively to strategic priorities and decisions. I often disagree with that assumption.

It’s fine to have a working Board — as long as Board members are also attending to more strategic decisions. So it’s OK that they might be fixing the fax machine one day. However, later on, they should also be discussing the purpose of the organization and its most important priorities.

The personality of a Board depends more on what the organization wants to accomplish than on any natural order that the Board must evolve to a policy Board. The more the organization wants to accomplish in its markets or its communities, the higher the likelihood that more resources will be needed (including more paid staff) to do that, and the higher the likelihood that the Board will need more attention to governing the increasing range and complexity of resources. Thus, the more the organization wants to accomplish, the higher the likelihood that a Board will evolve from a working Board to a policy Board.

Some very smart people have decided that they’d rather their organization was “a rifle than a shotgun” — that it do a few things very well, rather than a lot of things not so well. Those people will have carefully scoped what they want their organization to accomplish using a limited amount of resources. So those very smart people might have a working Board — a Board that does not need to “mature” into a policy Board.

What do you think?

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Carter McNamara, MBA, PhD – Authenticity Consulting, LLC – 800-971-2250
Read my weekly blogs: Boards, Consulting and OD, Nonprofits and Strategic Planning.

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Awards R Us

Golden Statuette and Stars on Yellow Background

There are awards for everything and you don’t have too look far to find them. Why just this week there were four award-related pieces of business on Media Savant’s radar. The first was a Media Alert drafted for the news about Token Media (http://www.token.com/shortfilms) and its film-making crew (that extends into the greater Twin Cities community) winning the national 48-Hour short film festival and having another film place first runner-up in the world (out of 3,000 entries). The second was a request from some ad agency pals at Morsekode (www.Moresekode.com) wanting their peeps to vote for them in the annual Webby Awards (come, on, help ‘em out by clicking on Healthcare Lane at: http://webby.aol.com/services/insurance !)

The third was drafting an award announcement for Creative Water Solutions, the coolest natural, greenest water conditioning/treatment company in the world (www.cwsnaturally.com). It recently won two awards for its game-changing use of sphagnum moss to dramatically reduce chemicals loads, maintenance times, and damage to pool and spa equipments and the irritating side effects to pool and spa users like burning eyes, dry scalp and hair, etc.

The fourth was by way of subscribed information from the brilliant and practical minds at Iconoculture (www.iconoculture.com), which sent this notice out along with other newsy, cultural trends and insights:

The AmeriStar competition is billed as the Oscars of the packaging industry by the Institute of Packaging Professionals, the nonprofit org that sponsors the contest. The clothes, hairstyles and gossip aren’t quite as over the top as a Hollywood affair, but the emotions displayed are authentic and the camaraderie among the guests can be inspiring.

The winners — people with titles like packaging engineer, graphic designer and R&D director — finally get recognized for all their hard work.

Should clients seek awards as a way of raising their visibility? It depends on how you leverage them. The entry process can be time-consuming for your PR person and you. Unless you have won a prestigious-plus award like The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, or a similar one, you probably won’t get a feature news story out of it but rather a few sentences in local media publications. So why do it?

A true client experience says it all. A few years ago, the founder and CEO of a leading remodeling company/client that had won literally 30 or 40 awards for its work, warily asked in a meeting if we should enter the XYZ awards again.

“Gee, we’ve won it so often I wonder if it even matters any more,” he sighed.

“How do you customers feel about awards? I asked.

“They like them, they like to see us win them even more.” And there was his answer.

Awards are often critical for building your credibility within your industry and in the public at large, and occasionally you also will get media exposure for it. Now… here are the forms for the next one, due in about three days. Better get crackin’ .

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What’s a “Mature” Organization?

Male employee gesticulating in an office space

I conducted a workshop two weeks ago in which a participant mentioned that some of the other participants in the room were not from “mature organizations.” He went on to explain that their organizations were still somewhat small.

I countered that it’s often an illusion to assess the maturity of an organization based on it size. I suggested that maturity depends more on the nature of activities in the organization — that a small or large organization can be immature if, for example, its internal practices are more reactive and crisis-driven than proactive and plan-driven.

I added, even that depends on the culture of the people in the organization. Some cultures don’t do planning in the typical “linear” approach that we so often talk about. Rather than establishing goals, objectives, responsibilities and deadlines, those cultures might do planning in more of an “organic,” unfolding and dynamic approach.

One of the most useful, recent perspectives on organizations is that of life cycles. The view is that, just like people, organizations must evolve through life cycles, for example, birth, growth and maturity. Life cycles apply to many systems, including products and teams. If a system does not successfully evolve to the next stage, it can stagnate or even decline.

I’ve sometimes wondered about the life-cycle theory — if an organization reaches “maturity,” then does it remain there forever, or does it regress to earlier stages whenever there’s a sudden crisis, for example, a major recession? Or, does that organization, by the fact that it’s mature, evolve through the recession in a mature way?

What do you think is a “mature” organization?

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For more resources, see the Library topics Consulting and Organizational Development.

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Carter McNamara, MBA, PhD – Authenticity Consulting, LLC – 800-971-2250
Read my weekly blogs: Boards, Consulting and OD, Nonprofits and Strategic Planning.

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The Hope Theory of Leadership

Th text "hope" written with paper cards

I came to the overlapping fields of Leadership Development and Coaching through the stage door. I studied Theatre in college, have a graduate degree in Acting and started my adult life performing in Chicago’s Off-Loop theaters. Like my father in the newspaper business, I’ve grown up right alongside both the coaching profession and the field of “Leadership Studies,” just a few years to old to have discovered them as more viable alternatives for my higher education.

That’s okay.

Sitting beside me at my kitchen table tonight are two books that (in concert with 15 years in the nonprofit trenches and another 6+ as a coach) stand out as pinnacles of my self-styled higher education in leadership. They each connect profoundly, from different perspectives, with my own vision of a meaningful life.

They are:

  1. The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World by Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky, and
  2. Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future, by Margaret J. Wheatley.

The first is about purpose, perspective, connection, working outside your comfort zone, listening, risk, experimentation, failure, and trying again.

The second is about listening, connection, purpose, the common good, and hope.

Havel on Hope

Vaclav Havel wrote in Disturbing the Peace, “Hope … is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is definitely not same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from “elsewhere.” It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.”

The Hope Theory of Leadership suggests that each of the other theories of leadership is useful in certain situations. And not a single one is useful without the kind of hope, which Havel describes, that lives, and works, and continually tries new things.

Leadership is not leadership without hope. What are your hopes? What will you try? What else?