The single biggest mistake Young Leaders in organizations make.

The single biggest mistake Young Leaders in organizations make.

At a recent conference for a pharma company, we heard the following conversations happening at the review meetings:

“We need to stop degrowing”
“Why did this degrowth happen?”
“Why did you make this mistake?”
“Don’t make the same mistake in this launch that you made in the last product launch”
“Why is everyone so demotivated?”
“Don’t worry”
“Don’t take tension”
“Don’t be late”
“Don’t come unprepared for the presentation”
“I don’t want daily calls to be less than 45 a day”
“I don’t want complaints from customers”

Sounds familiar to you.
This is the language we use when we discuss strategies and tactics at our review meetings and conversations.

So what's wrong, you might ask?

Well - here is what is wrong.

ALL THESE STATEMENTS ARE THINGS WE DO NOT WANT!!!!

Do you want your people to come late? make mistakes? make less sales calls? come unprepared? Do you want your customers to complain?

Obviously not.

Then why are you talking about it?
"What else should I do", you might ask? I have to discuss the mistake, send a strong message, etc etc.

"Think and talk only about those things that you want"

You might say - that's exactly what I want - I want less complaints, I want less mistakes, etc

Is that what you really want?

Let me show you with an example.

Don't think of a zebra.
That's right. DO NOT think of a zebra at all.

What are you thinking?
I know what you are thinking.

Now - think of a zebra.

What are you thinking now?

You get the point? Whether I tell you to think or not think of a zebra, you do the same thing. i.e. think of a zebra.

So when you say "Don't come late", what happens? yes boss, they all come late. And you know why they do that? Because you told them to "come late".

Because telling them "don't come late" and "come late" is the same thing.

A better way would be "come on time tomorrow"

The human mind does not process "don't" or "NO". It only processes the main message which was "come late", "make mistakes", "take tension" etc. And that is the message we plant in the subconscious most of the time - to others and to ourselves.

So how do we converse:

"Come on time" not "Don't come late"
"Relax" not "Don't take tension"
"Come prepared for the presentation"
"Make more than 45 calls a day"
"Grow 40% this year definitely"

Watch the conversations you make at work and at home.
"I want to be slim" not "I want to reduce weight"
"I want to breathe clean" not "I want to quit smoking"
"I want to get promoted" not "I don't want to be stuck in this role"
"I want to be prosperous" not "I want to get out of debt"
"I want to be healthy" or "I am healthy" not "I don't want to fall sick"


What do you really want? Think and talk only about what you want

Looking for more such solutions to your everyday leadership challenges? Follow us onYoung Leaders at Every Level now. 

Maneesh Konkar is a Mumbai based sales and leadership trainer. Contact him on maneesh@directiononeonline.com or follow him on twitter @youngldrs.

My boss gives me tonnes of work just when I am leaving for home!

Last week, I had covered this topic "Greed is not Good" through some examples.

Lets look at more such ideas in this post.

How do we traditionally approach a conversation or an interaction with a colleague or business associate?

a. What do I want from this conversation?
b. What do I want this person to do for me?
c. How will I benefit?
d. How much will I make?
e. If I do this, what's in it for me?

And you know what, the other guy is also asking the same question. Which is why so many interactions are not productive.

Lets say we use a different approach:

we ask the following for each interaction:
a. What do both of us want from this interaction?
b. What is this person worried about?
c. What is his challenge at work now?
d. Can I help him do his role better?

Lets apply this to a few situations:

a. You are a Assistant Manager trying to convince the boss to give you work at beginning of day, not at end of day (why do they all do that?):

Traditional approach: Sir - pl don't do this, I am tired, I need to go home, I need to ........, etc etc.
The Young Leader Approach: When you give me work at end of day, we end up not being able to do a great job of it, we end up making mistakes, instead sharing your workload at beginning of day would enable us to do it faster and better, this way we could assist you to complete tasks better...................

b. You are a salesperson, selling recruitment solutions. Today is 10th of the month. Client wants to wait till end of month to extract maximum discounts, knowing you would be under pressure. How do you get the client to buy now, not later?
Standard approach - begging begging............
The Young Leader Approach: Calculate financial benefits to the customer by the early purchase. eg you could hire ten people this month itself. Each person would contribute 15 days to the sales turnover faster. calculate ebitda and you would arrive at a figure of $250,000. Instead by waiting 20 days, you might save $2400 maximum. Why delay?

...............................for detailed ideas of the Young Leader Approach, click on the links above to buy the ebook "Young Leaders at Every Level" 

Maneesh Konkar is a Mumbai based sales & leadership trainer & author of the book "Young Leaders at Every Level". Contact him at maneesh@directiononeonline.com

Why less is actually better

The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

by Greg McKeown  |  10:00 AM August 8, 2012

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Why don't successful people and organizations automatically become very successful? One important explanation is due to what I call "the clarity paradox," which can be summed up in four predictable phases:

Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it leads to success.
Phase 2: When we have success, it leads to more options and opportunities.
Phase 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts.
Phase 4: Diffused efforts undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place.

Curiously, and overstating the point in order to make it, success is a catalyst for failure.

We can see this in companies that were once darlings of Wall Street, but later collapsed. In his book How the Mighty Fall, Jim Collins explored this phenomenon and found that one of the key reasons for these failures was that companies fell into "the undisciplined pursuit of more." It is true for companies and it is true for careers.

Here's a more personal example: For years, Enric Sala was a professor at the prestigious Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. But he couldn't kick the feeling that the career path he was on was just a close counterfeit for the path he should really be on. So, he left academia and went to work for National Geographic. With that success came new and intriguing opportunities in Washington D.C. that again left him feeling he was close to the right career path, but not quite there yet. His success had distracted him. After a couple of years, he changed gears again in order to be what he really wanted: an explorer-in-residence with National Geographic, spending a significant portion of his time diving in the most remote locations, using his strengths in science and communications to influence policy on a global scale. (Watch Enric Sala speak about his important work at TED). The price of his dream job was saying no to the many good, parallel paths he encountered.

What can we do to avoid the clarity paradox and continue our upward momentum? Here are three suggestions:

First, use more extreme criteria. Think of what happens to our closets when we use the broad criteria: "Is there a chance that I will wear this someday in the future?" The closet becomes cluttered with clothes we rarely wear. If we ask, "Do I absolutely love this?" then we will be able to eliminate the clutter and have space for something better. We can do the same with our career choices.

By applying tougher criteria we can tap into our brain's sophisticated search engine. If we search for "a good opportunity," then we will find scores of pages for us to think about and work through. Instead, we can conduct an advanced search and ask three questions: "What am I deeply passionate about?" and "What taps my talent?" and "What meets a significant need in the world?" Naturally there won't be as many pages to view, but that is the point of the exercise. We aren't looking for a plethora of good things to do. We are looking for our absolute highest point of contribution.

Enric is one of those relatively rare examples of someone who is doing work that he loves, that taps his talent, and that serves an important need in the world. His main objective is to help create the equivalent of National Parks to protect the last pristine places in the ocean — a significant contribution.

Second, ask "What is essential?" and eliminate the rest. Everything changes when we give ourselves permission to eliminate the nonessentials. At once, we have the key to unlock the next level of our lives. Get started by:

• Conducting a life audit. All human systems tilt towards messiness. In the same way that our desks get cluttered without us ever trying to make them cluttered, so our lives get cluttered as well-intended ideas from the past pile up. Most of these efforts didn't come with an expiration date. Once adopted, they live on in perpetuity. Figure out which ideas from the past are important and pursue those. Throw out the rest.
• Eliminating an old activity before you add a new one. This simple rule ensures that you don't add an activity that is less valuable than something you are already doing.

Third, beware of the endowment effect. Also known as the divestiture aversion, the endowment effect refers to our tendency to value an item more once we own it. One particularly interesting study was conducted by Kahneman, Knetsch and Thaler (published here) where consumption objects (e.g. coffee mugs) were randomly given to half the subjects in an experiment, while the other half were given pens of equal value. According to traditional economic theory (the Coase Theorem), about half of the people with mugs and half of the people with pens will trade. But they found that significantly fewer than this actually traded. The mere fact of ownership made them less willing to part with their own objects. As a simple illustration in your own life, think of how a book on your shelf that you haven't used in years seems to increase in value the moment you think about giving it away.

Tom Stafford describes a cure for this that we can apply to career clarity: Instead of asking, "How much do I value this item?" we should ask "If I did not own this item, how much would I pay to obtain it?" And the same goes for career opportunities. We shouldn't ask, "How much do I value this opportunity?" but "If I did not have this opportunity, how much would I be willing to sacrifice in order to obtain it?"

If success is a catalyst for failure because it leads to the "undisciplined pursuit of more," then one simple antidote is the disciplined pursuit of less. Not just haphazardly saying no, but purposefully, deliberately, and strategically eliminating the nonessentials. Not just once a year as part of a planning meeting, but constantly reducing, focusing and simplifying. Not just getting rid of the obvious time wasters, but being willing to cut out really terrific opportunities as well. Few appear to have the courage to live this principle, which may be why it differentiates successful people and organizations from the very successful ones.

More blog posts by Greg McKeown

More on: Managing yourself, Personal effectiveness

GREG MCKEOWN

Greg McKeown is the CEO of THIS Inc., a leadership and strategy design agency headquartered in Silicon Valley. He was recently named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Greg did his graduate work at Stanford. Connect with him on Twitter @GregoryMcKeown.

Outstanding Leadership Quotes

Check out these outstanding quotes from a just concluded Leadership Summit


Quotes and concepts from speakers at The Global Leadership Summit:

Craig Groeschel:

1. If you’re not dead you’re not done.
2. Don’t fear the new generation, believe in them because they need you.
3. Delegating tasks creates followers. Delegating authority creates leaders.
4. Authenticity trumps cool.
5. Young leaders grossly overestimate what they can do in the short-run and underestimate what can be done in the long-run.
6. Honor publicly results in influence privately.
7. Giving people honor helps them become honorable.
8. Respect is earned. Honor is given.
9. Create ongoing feedback loops from those who are older andyounger.
10. Don’t copy what others do. Copy how they think.
11. How many 16 year olds can write a book? Those who’ve been told they can.

Greed is not Good - especially when the market is down

Gordon Gekko had made this line famous in Wall Street. Greed is good - greed for knowledge, for life, for love, Greed has marked the upward surge of mankind.................................

Has it?

Have today's greedy sales people really marked the upward surge of their industries? Lets ask our friends in the insurance industry, where their greed has got them. The last time I checked, the largest company had shed 40% of its staff in eighteen months.

When market is down, when sales are not happening, when bosses send you ten messages a day, when everything is urgent and required yesterday, what does one do? How does one handle all this killing pressure from the "system?"

Get back to the basics, we would say.

What is selling? 
Certainly not dumping your products on an unsuspecting buyer.
Not spray and pray, not making the same pitch to every buyer.
Not the buffet counter method of selling, where the entire product range is shown to the customer, who gets so confused that he does not place a single order.

Instead, if we just followed the basics of selling, we would not have to struggle so much.

Selling is just about creating demand.

What is creating demand for our products?

It consists of two steps:
a. Researching our customer's business to identify areas for improvement - "pain areas".
b. Positioning our products as a means of reducing that pain.

A salesperson in the building construction industry trying to sell tiles to a builder. Builder wants the lowest price. Seller identifies builder's poor sales as a "pain area". positions the tiles as a sales tool to help the builder justify the high price he is charging

Seller of premium roofing solutions is getting price resistance from warehouse owners. Seller studies high cost of electricity as a "pain area". Presents a scientific calculation of how his products would save money in the long run.

.............................examples and concept mentioned in detail in the book "Young Leaders at Every Level" where Abhijit handles these challenges as a Sales Manager. Click on link to buy eBook now. Immediate download.