Posts Tagged ‘High-Performance Culture’

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Chat with the Experts: Jack Canfield

Saturday, September 4th, 2010

Mark your calendar!  Next week on Wednesday, September 8, at 12:00 PM CT, we will be interviewing Jack Canfield, America’s #1 Success Coach and co-creator of the bestselling series Chicken Soup for the Soul®. During the interview we will be discussing his book The Success Principles: How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. The Success Principles, co-authored with Janet Switzer, will teach you how to increase your confidence, tackle daily challenges, live with passion and purpose, and realize all your ambitions. Not merely a collection of good ideas, this book spells out the 64 timeless principles used by successful men and women throughout history. And the fundamentals are the same no matter what your profession or circumstances—even if you’re a student, stay-at-home mom or currently unemployed.

This is usually a private teleseminar for The Emmerich Group member clients — we offer these sessions and allow them to invite their prospects and their clients to help them develop business.

Based on the enormous response to our last teleseminars, I knew you would really value another chance to hear from a best-selling author.  So, I’m inviting a handful of non-member organizations again.

This is a great opportunity to bring your whole team together for a Lunch ‘n’ Learn or team learning opportunity.

Join us for the call on September 8, 2010 at 12:00 noon CT for one hour to discover:

  • How to get from where you are to where you want to be.
  • The biggest difference between people who are successful and those who aren’t.
  • How to change the outcome of any event, simply by changing your response to it.
  • Why you should drop out of the “Ain’t It Awful” Club and instead surround yourself with success, positive and nurturing people.
  • How to complete past projects, heal past relationships and process old hurts, so you can embrace the future.
  • How to ask for and get everything you want…from people who can give it to you.
  • How to deal with fear and uncertainty.

A teleseminar like this usually costs $500-1000 dollars or far more, depending on the size of your company. We are inviting you and your team for FREE as a special gift to prepare you for a better 2010—regardless of the economy.

Registration is easy! To sign up, go to www.ThankGoditsMonday.com/jack-canfield.

Space is filling up quickly so be sure to sign up right away!

Clear your schedule and register TODAY!

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Posted in Culture Transformation, Personal Transformation, Training and Development | 2 Comments »

Goodbye to “Sir or Madam” Marketing

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010
© Brunoil | Dreamstime.com

© Brunoil | Dreamstime.com

“Dear Sir or Madam,”

“Have you heard about our new [product/service]?  There has never been anything like it before.  Best of all, it’s designed just for you, [prospective client name here]!  Worry no more about [financial security/maximizing returns/funding college/on-time retirement].  Our [product/service] will fit your needs like a [glove/shoe/favorite T-shirt].”

Most marketing has gotten well beyond this level of obviousness, of course.  But below the smoother surface of our mail-merges, much corporate thinking about marketing is still stuck in the one-size-fits-all mindset that should have gone out with legwarmers.

American Express was successful for years with the all-purpose slogan, “Don’t leave home without it.”  But with the 1990s came the advent of a new consumer mentality, one that encouraged customers to feel that products and services were not generically designed for the masses but tailored “just for them.”  American Express recognized this and retooled its approach, adopting its revised, targeted slogan, “The right card for the right people.”  As Richard Weylman noted in Opening Closed Doors, AmEx had realized that “it is more important and effective to reach the right people than it is to reach many people.”

It’s one of the great insights of modern marketing.  In today’s advertising climate, the wider you cast your net, the lower your marketing ROI.  Instead, spend some time identifying and wooing the very specific fish that are most likely to bite on the bait you have to offer.

How do you identify these fish?  Look around your tank. They’re already swimming in front of your nose.  Your current happy customers are the best predictors of what your future happy customers will look like.

After all, your current happy customers are happy for a reason—they love what you have to offer.  If you think of them as generic “customers” and go out looking for more “customers,” you are missing out on the golden opportunity to discover just what it is that brought them in and kept them with you.  Do you have accounts belonging to young families?  Realtors?  Educators?  Members of the Kiwanis?  Golf-loving retirees?  New homeowners?  Each of these comes with specific needs and desires.  Find out what they love and want, then build tightly targeted marketing around that subset of your local population.

And how do you find out what they love and what they want?  ASK them!  Remember that people love to talk about themselves.  Send out a personal letter to every current client who recently bought a home.  Tell them that you are eager to have more clients just like them.  Who wouldn’t want to hear that?  Ask what would make their lives easier—from actual financial products and services to a pizza delivered on Moving Day—then create it, advertise it, and reel ’em in!

In the end, your marketing should consist not of one big blast of generic information, but six or eight smaller, more carefully crafted campaigns.  Believe me—it’ll be the biggest bang for buck you’ve ever had.

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Posted in Culture Transformation, Marketing Strategy | 1 Comment »

The Limits of Compassion (and yes, there are some)

Thursday, July 15th, 2010
© Beatrice Killam | Dreamstime.com

© Beatrice Killam | Dreamstime.com

I am human.  And I’m willing to bet that four out of five readers of this column are human, too.

As humans, we come equipped with massive contradictions and imperfections.  Our emotions battle with our intellect.  Our community spirit wrestles with our selfishness.  We think thoughts both lofty and low and emit smells both lovely and, uh…not.

But when we come together in the workplace, we’re making a deal with each other to bring our higher, stronger, better selves to the game.  It’s not that our weaknesses cease to exist, but they do cease to ride shotgun on our day.

There are days when I’m running on two cylinders or less—not enough sleep, not enough breakfast, too many pressures, bad news, whatever.  You have to figure at least one out of every four people around you feels about the same on any given day.

Now suppose we all had permission to give full expression to those feelings—you’d have 25 percent of the people in any given workplace whining, sighing, crying, or screaming their way through the day. The drain on productivity would be impossible.  Forget about achieving anything great or being of profound service, even on your own good days.

A little expression of fatigue or frustration once in a while is fine, and we can all be there for each other at those times.  But then there are the people who seem to have woven dramatic emotional displays into their job description, day after day after day.

Not okay.

Approach this carefully by all means, but for the sake of everyone’s sanity, DO approach it.  Start by expressing genuine concern.  Is there something going on in this person’s life that they’d like to talk about?  Is there anything you can do to help?

If he or she waves off your attempts to help and continues to be a vortex of negative energy, ramp it up a bit.  Ask Human Resources or your immediate manager if anything can be done to assist the person—and drop a mention of how long it has gone on and how difficult it is to work well in the presence of such displays.

If you have offered personal concern AND attempted to get help at a higher level and no improvement is made, it’s time to call in that mutual contract, that unspoken but rock-solid agreement to bring our higher, stronger selves to work.  Let the person know gently but firmly that something’s gotta give, that she MUST take advantage of offers of help, that the situation is impacting the work and attitudes of those around her.

If no improvement is forthcoming, it is incumbent on you to return to management with a stronger insistence that something be done.

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Posted in Improving Morale, Personal Transformation, Self-Growth | No Comments »

Getting the marching orders you need to succeed

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010
© Jennifer Pitiquen | Dreamstime.com

© Jennifer Pitiquen | Dreamstime.com

There are a few recurring nightmares that just about everyone has at some point.  You’re trying to run from a monster and you’re stuck in slow-mo.  You’re walking down the hallway of your school in your underwear.  The classics.

Then there’s the one where you have to do SOMETHING but you don’t know what to do or how.  Maybe there’s an odd-shaped racket in your hand and thousands of people in the stands shouting angrily as ten balls of different colors come flying at you.  You’re expected to perform, and you want to do well, but you don’t know the rules of the game, so you have no idea what “doing well” means.

Fortunately we wake up from our nightmares.  But some people live the “no information” nightmare over and over again while the sun is up.  They want nothing more than to do what is expected of them and to do it well, but they are repeatedly handed projects with unclear parameters, fuzzy deadlines, and unstated assumptions.

Worst of all is finding out that, just like in the nightmare, the expectations DID exist, and time after time the employee is lambasted for not meeting them.

This is not okay.  As an employee, you have the right to know what is expected of you.  Holding you to unstated standards and expectations is every bit as crazy as handing someone a bat and putting him at home plate without explaining the rules of baseball—then booing angrily when he strikes out, as he inevitably will.

The good news is that the boss who gives vague instructions is almost always doing it unintentionally.  In most cases she really wants to see the project done right and simply does not realize that she hasn’t given you the information you need to make it happen.  Your job is to help the boss help herself by giving you what you need to do well.  It’s a win-win.

Next time your boss says, “Hey, I need this done,” don’t just dive in.  Take five minutes to see if you have the information you need. What are the exact tasks that need doing?  What are the specifications? When are the deadlines, both soft and hard?

Ask the boss for a five-minute meeting.  Start by saying, “I want to knock this project out of the park, and to do that I want to be sure I understand what’s needed.”  State in your own words what you understand the parameters of the project to be.  Ask if you’ve missed anything.  Ask when the hard deadline is, and whether an earlier deadline would be ideal.  Thank the boss for the clear guidelines and promise to be in touch with any needed clarifications.

Then knock the cover off the ball.  When complete, make sure to go back to the boss and get sign off by asking, “Does this meet your expectations?” If that step is missed, you’re not complete.

If you get praise for a job well done, reply by saying how helpful the clear guidelines and deadlines were. The odds are good that your next assignment will come complete with the details you need.  If not, ask again, reminding the boss how well the previous project went with such clear guidelines.

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Posted in Culture Transformation, Managing Employees, Workplace Performance | 1 Comment »

The Shackleton mindset—a refusal to fail

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010
© Velora | Dreamstime.com

© Velora | Dreamstime.com

For sheer jaw-dropping drama, it’s hard to beat the story of the three-masted sailing ship Endurance, which left England in August 1914 under the command of Ernest Shackleton with twenty-eight men determined to cross Antarctica by sled.

The Endurance ended up trapped and crushed to splinters by ice floes.  The men lived on the Antarctic ice for another two years.

Total survivors out of the original twenty-eight men?  Twenty-eight.

What if you approached every challenge in your life and in your work as if you simply HAD to overcome it?  I’ll tell you what—you would do it.  You would find a way, and you would get it done.

Whenever I hear the expression, “Failure is not an option,” I think of Ernest Shackleton and the men of Endurance.  I picture them confronting these utterly impossible situations and saying, “Well, lads, let’s see what our options are.”

I then picture them reaching into a pocket and pulling out a scrap of paper.  Under the title OPTIONS are two words:  SUCCESS and FAILURE.

Like heck.  Why would failure EVER be an option?  So why not take it off the list entirely?

We’ve all heard the hundred or so reasons such and such a thing simply cannot be done, the many, many reasons failure is the only option.

Tell Shackleton about the insurmountable obstacles you face.  Just let me watch.

Better STILL—why not just take FAILURE off that list of options?

I have a friend who I dearly love but who always used to explain why something couldn’t be done. Excuses came easy to her.  Then one day her boss gave her a priceless saying to remember:  Don’t tell me about the labor pains—show me the baby.

Before a project begins, I don’t want to hear all the reasons it can’t be done.  After the project is done, I don’t care how many hours you worked.  I don’t care how many obstacles you hit.  Save it for your memoirs.  Just show me the baby.

Decide now that whatever project or challenge you currently have before you simply cannot be allowed to fail—that you must use the fortitude of the Endurance crew to make it happen.  It’s a completely different way of thinking.

But be careful—this powerful way of thinking is addicting.  Once you get a taste of achieving the impossible, it’s hard to quit!

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Posted in Culture Transformation, Motivating Employees, Training and Development | No Comments »

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