May 29, 8:58 am

Four actions and attitudes for effective managers

Every employee has thoughts and feelings about his or her workplace—including what’s needed for that employee to be successful. Not trying to understand those needs is a management mistake. As you may or may not know, most people who quit their jobs don’t quit their jobs, they quit their boss.  In other words, the most common reason people quit is they’re tired of dealing someone who’s not doing what’s needed in the management role.

As an example of this, at a training session I recently conducted for a small management team, one of the participants (let’s call him Bill) talked about how a worker on his shift claimed not to know how to perform a specific procedure.  Bill’s attitude was almost mocking as he told of the incident, and how he’d said to the worker, “If you don’t know how to do that, go up to the office and read about it in the manual.”   The worker quietly finished his shift, and the next day he quit.

Having known—and worked for—managers like Bill, I feel sorry for people who have to work under them.  Hopefully, those unfortunate employees will strive to be successful, but managers like Bill are obstacles on the road to their success. Mocking employees and expecting them to learn skills without management guidance and support is a fast lane to the employee exit door.

As detailed in my book Creating Passion-Driven Teams, a core responsibility of managers is training employees to be more efficient in what they do. Here are a few “DO’s” for your management practice:

1) Seek to understand the perspectives of each person on your team.

2) Listen with a genuine effort to understand.  Even the slightest mock or insult will leave a long-term scar.

3) Mutually identify action steps for each employee to help them succeed.  Mutual means that you both have input.

4) Check in / inquire on a regular basis for follow-up and to provide any friendly advice or additional help.

Let me say that the points just listed are not suggestions – they are core responsibilities for being an effective manager.  Wouldn’t it be nice if all managers like Bill did these things? If they did, it’s guaranteed that not only would more people stay with their job, but they—and their companies—would be more successful along the way.

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May 15, 7:07 am

Rudeness WILL lose you business

Politeness and professionalism go a LONG way. Rudeness will lose you business. You would think that in today’s day and age, people would realize this piece of common sense, but alas, it seems the lessons still need to be taught.

My wife and I are involved in our local Home Owners Association (HOA) Board. In this capacity, various mortgage companies send email asking for info about fees on houses that recently sold in the neighborhood. Every time someone sends an email to the HOA, the system sends back an instant autoreply that says, in effect, ‘we received your message, someone will get back to you within 48 hours. If you don’t receive a reply within 48 hours, please contact the Webmaster.’

My wife usually handles these messages, and always within the 48 hour window. But this past week, a mere 25 hours after sending in her original request, someone at a local mortgage company sent an ALL CAP and RUDE nastygram demanding her requested information. Then, a few hours later, she had her boss send a nastygram to the Webmaster who in turn sent a hard nudge email to my wife.

Sigh. First the polite stuff. What follows are three age-old axioms that most people know, but apparently some still need to hear:

1. You get more flies with honey than with vinegar.
2. Lack of planning on YOUR part does not justify an emergency on MY part.
3. Your approach determines your response.

Second, although normally I just slide with such ignorance, I’ve had enough of this BS lately. I’m not going to contact this woman and give her the what for, but I am going to have a long memory. I also know where she works. And, I interact with a lot of people around town who are in her line of work. A simple message from her saying “hey, I’m under a deadline, can you please give me this info as soon as possible?” would have generated a pleasant response from my wife. It would have been a very neutral interaction that might have even generated good feelings, leading me to recommend this particular mortgage company employee to people who might need her services.

But alas – her rudeness has now earned her a reputation that I intend to remember. I won’t even have to say anything bad about her … if someone is talking about her company, all it will take is a facial expression. That will be enough to communicate that this company might not be such a good choice when getting a mortgage. And, if someone asks outright, I would be very happy to say “I strongly recommend you look elsewhere.” My ethics will preclude me from explaining why, but I will have no problem telling people to shop somewhere else.

Like I said, politeness and professionalism go a LONG way, and rudeness will lose you business. I imagine that because of this woman’s rudeness, she is going to lose some business – and so will her company — and this will happen no matter what I do. If rudeness is the way that company and its employees operate, it won’t take long for their reputation to drive people away.

Think about it … one rude email to a simple little HOA is all it took to create a bad reputation.

It’s sad that some people haven’t learned the meaning of “ripple effects.”

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April 22, 1:27 pm

The only person holding you back is you

When it comes to achieving success, you may fall short if you merely focus your thoughts on being successful. You greatly increase the likelihood of success when you “see” yourself succeeding.

I’m not talking about “The Law of Attraction,” although some overlapping principles probably exist. What I’m talking about is the power of visual focus. Over the past year I’ve done quite a bit of reading on neuroscience, and while I’m certainly no expert, I’ve become an even firmer believer that, to succeed, people should be aware of the power of where they place their focus.

In fact, one of the twelve “Dan-isms” I’ve taught my clients for years is “you go where you’re focused.” That’s because I believe that for most of us, our focus –– that is to say, both our actual visual focus and the focus of our mental images –– is often more powerful than our thoughts. You could think of it as saying the pictures in our head are more powerful than the words in our head.

One illustration of this, as mentioned in my book, Creating Passion-Driven Teams, occurred many times while riding my bicycle growing up. While riding up long inclines I would be pedaling hard and watching the ground several yards in front of me as I went. When I saw a small rock I would think to myself, “I’m going to miss that rock,” but if I was looking directly at the rock, even though my brain was saying “I’m going to miss that rock,” I invariably ran over the rock anyway.

Over time, I learned to shift my visual focus a few inches to the left or right of the rock. When I did that, my bike tire consistently went to where my eyes were directed. Interestingly, if I shifted my visual focus but mentally told myself “I’m going to run over that rock,” I still missed the rock, despite my mental self-talk. My bicycle tire followed my line of sight, not the words in my head.

Putting neuroscience to work

So how will our mental images help us achieve (or not achieve) success? The answer lies in how our brains operate. Our brains grow “hardwired” neurons in response to routine activities we undertake so those activities can occur without much electro-chemical effort, which is very energy intensive. This feature of the brain leaves more electro-chemical energy available for processing new situations and new information we encounter.

By repetitively seeing mental images of ourselves succeeding, our brains will literally start to reform themselves into being more efficient for achieving success.

If my rock story is not enough to convince you that our mental image choices matter, allow me to quote from a 1977 study on the power of mental imaging involving college basketball players. Seventy-two players were divided into four groups, and over six weeks each group experienced 15 minute practice sessions for free throws, preceded by 10 minutes of “prep time.” The experimental and control activities occurred during the prep time. The four groups experienced different prep times as follows:

Group 1: Five minutes of relaxation and five minutes of guided visualization.

The guided visualization involved the players listening to a recording that instructed them to feel the same sensations they would feel the moment they approached the free-throw line. As the players sat with their eyes closed, the physical sensations they were likely to feel and the sounds they were likely to hear were narrated. Then the players were instructed to visualize themselves making perfect shots.

Group 2: Five minutes of relaxation followed by five minutes of inert concentration activities, (provided simply to control for 10 minutes of time).

Group 3: Same as group 2.

Group 4: No special preparation. Just 10 minutes of repetitive drills followed by 15 minutes of free-throw practice.

Again, all four groups had only 15 minutes of actual physical free-throw practice each session during the six-week experiment. After the study, all four groups were tested for their ability to make free throws. Their results were:

Group 4: No improvement at all.

Groups 2 & 3: Slight improvement.

Group 1: Significant improvement.

Over the years, similar studies have occurred in karate, tennis, and marksmanship, always with similar findings.

So how can you apply this to your management and leadership ability? The best answer, according to neuroscience research, is routinely invest time to see yourself succeeding. This is not saying positive affirmation statements, such as “I am a successful person.” You must clearly identify and articulate the specific behaviors you want to have as well as the physical and audio sensations you are likely to experience when you need to be displaying the behavior. Then imagine yourself actually doing the successful activity, and doing it flawlessly.

Anyone can do this. The research is there, and the results are always the same. Therefore, to give yourself the winning edge, you must regularly “see” yourself doing it. And the only person holding you back … is you.

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February 19, 5:30 pm

In memory of Dr. Dennis R. Rader

Dennis Rader was not your typical professor. If he had been, I probably wouldn’t be writing this. Dennis was the best I’ve ever known at using the Socratic method to get students to think. The assignments he gave were far outside the norm, but in assigning them he got students to think way outside the box. I would like to think that Dennis’s students learned more from him than from other instructors, and that the lessons they learned through him enabled them to live a much more fulfilling life.

This was certainly true for me.

I first met Dennis when he was an adjunct professor for Southern Illinois University’s extension program in San Diego, where he taught educational psychology in my undergraduate program. He asked great open-ended questions and encouraged students to debate and defend their perspectives about the human condition and how we learn.

My life was forever changed the day Dennis gave us an assignment almost as an afterthought as we were getting ready to leave class. “Oh by the way,” he said, “in my book Hogs on Ice you’ll find a chapter titled ‘Teachers as Toad Killers.’ Read that chapter and write a one-page paper entitled ‘Myself as a Toad Killer.’”  I’m sure we all looked at him with expressions that communicated “what the hell are you talking about” because he just smiled and said “Read the chapter and you’ll know what I’m talking about.”

I had already been running my own company as a management coach for several years, working one-on-one with managers at multiple levels within organizations to identify obstacles that were holding them back and finding ways around them. With that background the concept in “Teachers as Toad Killers” immediately resonated with me. In that chapter, Dennis told a story about Coach Hatfield, a basketball coach who used the metaphor of a toad to represent obstacles that dwell within our minds and keep us from achieving our true potential. I couldn’t believe the power of Dennis’s story. It was an amazingly simple metaphor to help people wrap their minds around the idea of “old tapes” or fears that hold us back. I couldn’t stop telling people “the Toad story.”

At our very next class, I waited until an opportune sidebar moment and said “Dr. Rader, you know that toad story? It is extremely powerful. It needs to be more than just a chapter in your book – it needs to be a book all by itself.” Dennis’s next words changed my life. He said “would you like to write it with me?”

We worked on the project sporadically, and when Dennis moved to Mississippi and then Kentucky we lost track of each other because he didn’t believe in email. Thankfully, we reconnected and Dennis eventually warmed up to technology.  I finally flew to Kentucky in 2003 where we sequestered ourselves in a hotel for several days and finished writing Living Toad Free.

Dennis was not only a phenomenal teacher, the synergistic ideas that filled the room when the two of us got together were unbelievable. I can’t tell you how many times we’d sit down to talk and then kick ourselves an hour later for not having a tape recorder on.

After Living Toad Free was published Dennis would occasionally accompany me to conduct training for my clients. Whenever possible, we would also visit bookstores and do book signings together.

We kept in touch throughout the years, getting together from time to time and always talking about doing a second edition of Toads. Unfortunately, other projects are always seemed to take the front burner, and now I’ll have to work on that second edition by myself.  Dennis passed away last week (on 2/14/2013) from a heart attack.

Dennis once told me that “writing is the highest form of teaching, because your writing impacts people you will never meet, and it also stays around long after you’re gone.”

True words. Dennis and I regularly called each other to share how the Toad story impacted people’s lives. There was the 40-year-old woman we heard from who, after reading Living Toad Free, decided to go back to college and finish her degree. Another was a middle-aged man who, after participating in a discussion group about getting rid of Toads, decided not to leave his wife. We heard dozens of such stories. We even heard from a woman in Pennsylvania whose life was so changed by the Toad story that she asked for (and received) permission to conduct Living Toad Free workshops in her company.

Dennis, wherever you are now, I hope you are even more aware that your Coach Hatfield story not only changed my life, but it also changed the lives of thousands of people you never had the opportunity to meet—and that it will continue to do so now that you’re gone. You will be missed. Rest in peace.

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February 13, 3:03 pm

Webinars do NOT have to be boring

Today I was quite disappointed.  I sat through an hour-long Webinar put on by a high-profile training organization (I shall save them the embarrassment of naming them), and it was B*O*R*I*N*G.  Really boring?  Yes, really boring.  People who purport to work in the training industry ought to be on the cutting edge of producing quality Webinars.  Alas.

Oh, don’t get me wrong– they talked fast.  They also passed the controls back and forth among the two of them and told some interesting stories. But visually I couldn’t have been more bored, and content-wise, I had to DIG DEEP to acquire the few golden nuggets I took away (I believe there are ALWAYS golden nuggets one can find if one looks hard enough).

What could they have done different?  One thing could have made all the difference:  Make it more visually stimulating.  Putting up a slide that is text heavy with bullet points and letting it sit stagnant for three minutes while you cover all the points is NOT what I call visually engaging.  Sure, they had a small picture off to the side (that sometimes related to the majority of their points and sometimes not), but for the most part it was what I would call an amateur presentation.

Call me picky. Call me someone with high standards.  Just don’t identify me as someone who would put up such lame visuals during a Webinar.

Here’s an exercise you might try:  The next time you watch a movie or turn on the TV, turn down the sound for the first two minutes and count how many times there’s a cut to a different camera.  I’m not going to tell you the average number of cuts — I want you to say “WOW” to yourself when you discover this number for yourself.

Then I want to encourage you to think about the Webinars you’ve attended.  How many different screen shots or changes did they make in the entire hour?  (Hint: My guess is that there are more different camera angles in the first to minutes of any TV show than what’s in an average one-hour Webinar.

The truth?  Webinars do NOT have to be boring.  First, I encourage anyone who does Webinars to attend one of my Certified Trainer Workshops (either seat classes [April, July, or October, 2013] or self-paced).  Second, I encourage you to watch my latest Webinar on Training Do’s and Don’ts: Best Practices from 25 Years in the Training Room (free) to see how Webinars can be more visually engaging.

REPEAT: Webinars do NOT have to be boring.  And you can learn how to make your audiences go “WOW” in a GOOD way. 

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January 30, 12:43 am

The seven deadly sins of not listening

Do you ever “sin” when you listen?  If you’re aware of biblical definitions, to “sin” means “to miss the mark.” To be “off.”   Most of us commit at at least one sin while listening, and usually more!

What I’m talking about is letting other processes get in the way of solid listening skills, which inhibit our ability to truly listen.  In my book Creating Passion-Driven Teams, I outline the seven deadly sins of (not) listening.  Knowing where you “sin” in your listening endeavors is important because millions of dollars are wasted and many relationships are damaged every day because of poor listening.

Most of us think we’re good listeners, but when given the opportunity to prove ourselves, we often fall short.  The seven deadly sins of (not) listening are famous for getting in the way of—or damaging—good relationships.

You can listen to me discuss these seven sins in a 15-minute blog talk radio podcast, linked below.

(click here or on the link below)

Listen to internet radio with DanBobinski on Blog Talk Radio

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January 9, 2:01 pm

Listening Skills - a 15-minute lesson

Millions of dollars are wasted and many relationships are damaged every day because of poor listening. Most of us think we’re good listeners, but when given the opportunity to prove ourselves, we often fall short. Why? Because few of us have ever been taught how to truly listen.

Listen to author Dan Bobinski as he discusses the chapter on listening skills from his best-selling book, Creating Passion-Driven Teams.

Find out what gets in the way of good listening, and then learn the two skills necessary for good listening to occur. Implement these two things and you’ll see your listening skills improve immediately!!

(click here or on the link below)

Listen to internet radio with DanBobinski on Blog Talk Radio

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