Executive Coaching: Articles

Leadership by Persuasion

“Effective persuasion becomes a negotiating and learning process through which a persuader leads colleagues to a problem’s shared solution.” —Jay A. Conger, PhD  Professor of Organizational behavior, London Business School Author, Winning ’Em Over: A New Model for Management in the Age of Persuasion

As a leader, your success depends upon your ability to get things done: up, down and across all lines. To survive and succeed, you must learn to persuade people: to convince them to take action on your behalf and under your direction, often without formal authority.

Persuasion is widely perceived as a skill reserved for sales and negotiation. Now, it’s an essential proficiency for all leaders, requiring you to move people toward a position they don’t currently hold. You must not only make a rational argument, but also frame your ideas, approaches and/or solutions in ways that appeal to basic human emotions.

Discovery, Preparation, Dialogue

Any attempt to persuade may provoke colleagues to oppose and polarize. Because persuasion is a learning and negotiating process, it must include three phases: discovery, preparation and dialogue.

Before you even begin to speak, consider your position from every angle. Presenting your ideas may take weeks or months of planning to learn about your audience and prepare your arguments.

Dialogue occurs both before and during the persuasion process. You must invite people to discuss solutions, debate the merits of your position, offer honest feedback and suggest alternatives. You must test and revise ideas to reflect colleagues’ concerns and needs. Success depends on being open-minded and willing to incorporate compromises.

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Decision-Making - Emotion or Reason?

Have you ever made a foolish decision that had unpleasant consequences? Needless to say, we all have. Consider the following:

• We go grocery shopping with the resolve to eat healthfully and buy a gallon of ice cream… just in case friends stop by.
• We need to replace our used car… and end up buying a brand-new one.
• We bet on a sports team we don’t really  think can win because the risk offers great financial reward.
• We take a job with long hours because the benefits seem too good to pass up.

Later, we cannot seem to find rational explanations for our decisions—but  we still manage to come up with “logical” excuses for our illogical behavior.

Neuroscientists learn more about the brain each day, including how it processes information and how we make decisions. While much remains to be discovered, we may not be as rational and “in control” as we think.

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Office Politics: Survival of the Savvy

There’s one skill everybody at work wishes they were better at, but you won’t find it taught in MBA courses: office politics.

Tales of political sabotage, power plays and turf wars are part of any organization’s history. Nonetheless, political competence is the one skill everyone wishes to have more of — but no one admits to it.

Political competence is the “ability to understand what you can and cannot control, when to take action, who is going to resist your agenda, and whom you need on your side. It’s about knowing how to map the political terrain and get others on your side, as well as lead coalitions,” according to Prof. Samuel B. Bacharach who wrote Getting Them On Your Side, 2005.

Defining Political Savvy

It’s naive to suggest that all office politics are destructive and unethical. If you define politics in such a narrow and negative way, you overlook the value of political awareness and skill. When political astuteness is combined with ethics and integrity, it can produce positive results for you, your team and your organization.

By avoiding or denying its existence, you underestimate how political behavior can destroy careers, a company’s reputation and overall performance. If you define politics in only negative terms, you are naively under-political, which leaves you vulnerable to overly political, self-serving individuals.

Three Phases of Political Competence

Political competence can be developed in an ethically sound way with a three-phase process.

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Bargaining to Win - and Still Be Friends

Without signing up for the Harvard Negotiating Project, how can you learn to bargain to get what you want?

Let’s face it: Each of us negotiates every day. At work, we discuss additional compensation when we’re promoted to a new position. We plan a vacation or a move. We negotiate with our spouse over what’s for dinner and which TV shows to watch. We negotiate all sorts of things, big and small, on a daily basis.

Negotiation is a means of getting what you want from others. It consists of back-and-forth discussions designed to reach an agreement with another party anytime you face common and opposing interests. But sometimes differing interests can cause the discussion to careen off track into an argument. Even when you reach a compromised agreement, the relationship may be harmed.

Positional Bargaining

Most often, when people bargain, they become entrenched in their positions. They try to reach a compromise that’s as close as possible to their original goal. This means bargaining in a give-and-take fashion.

The problem with this process, known as “positional bargaining,” is simple: Once you take a position, you lock yourself into it. The more you defend it, the more committed you become to it. Some people try to use soft bargaining, with an emphasis on preserving the relationship. This works—unless the other party is a hard bargainer.

An Alternative Process

There’s an alternative to hard or soft bargaining: Change the game entirely. Based on the Harvard Negotiation Project, this method—described in the book Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher, William Ury and Bruce Patton—is called principled negotiation, or negotiation on the merits.

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The Quest for Great Customers

Customer relationship marketing is powerful in theory, but troubled in practice. We need to take time to figure out how and why we are undermining our own best efforts.

Perhaps we’re overlooking the fundamental elements of a good customer relationship program. With the means to connect with customers easily, maybe we’re rushing to cash in on the potential rewards, while forgetting the essentials of all relationships: intimacy and trust.

Close examination reveals that relationships between companies and consumers are suffering. U.S. satisfaction rates are at an all-time low. Complaints, boycotts and growing unhappiness with big corporations are strong indicators that most CRM isn’t working.

Ironically, the very steps marketers are taking to build relationships with customers are often responsible for destroying these connections. Companies may delight in learning more about their customers and providing services to please them, but customers are fed up. They’re tired of irrelevant survey questions, overwhelming product choices, features they’ll never use in phone plans and cars, and rebate-driven buyer reward programs.

The New Frontier: Mining the Internet

With the proliferation of online stores that complement traditional outlets, companies now have a tremendous source of information about consumers’ preferences. Because a traditional store may not always have a product on its shelves, purchase results are not always a good measurement of desires. Online stores can track consumer demand patterns more precisely, as they offer extensive ranges of products to national and global customers.

The web is more than a sales channel; it is a powerful means of collecting data in real time. The Internet is truly the new frontier in connecting with the customer, offering a huge opportunity for companies to improve customer relationships.

The full 2000-word article discusses the following concepts:

What’s Missing
What’s Wrong
Regaining Customer Trust
The Quest for Customer Focus
Standardization Versus Localization
The New Frontier: Mining the Internet
Overpromise, Overdeliver
The New Social Marketing: Buzz and Word of Mouth

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Information Overload: Taming the Electronic Beasts

This article is based on a great book out about our busy, electronic lives, CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! by Edward M. Hallowell, M.D. It covers the following concepts:

ADD Nation?
Adrenaline Rush
Organizational Deficit Disorder
Human Deficit Disorder
What Leaders Can Do

Many smart leaders are being swept up by today’s frenetic, globalized, technology-driven lifestyle.

We have plunged into a mad rush of activity, aided by high-speed Internet, cell phones, instant messaging, BlackBerries and email 24/7. We work longer hours, with escalating demands.

We expect our brains to keep track of more than they can handle, and then find ourselves losing and forgetting things—impatient, anxious, worried and plagued by short attention spans.

Modern work life, for all of its timesaving conveniences, is sapping our creativity, humanity, joy and, occasionally, our sense of humor. It’s time to stop and look at what’s happening.

The speed of our lives threatens to destroy our most important connections. Unless we deliberately set aside time for what matters most, the quality of our personal and professional lives will erode. When this happens, we find ourselves less energetic, optimistic and enthusiastic than before—and we don’t even know why. We may think we are just too busy or disorganized, or ascribe it to growing older—or simply to life itself.

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Presentation Skills that Persuade and Motivate

Almost everyone feels a bit nervous about delivering a presentation before a group. Some people claim they’d rather undergo a root canal than manage the anxiety associated with  giving a speech.

Follow some basic guidelines for preparation and delivery, and you can transform your nervousness into positive energy that achieves the results you desire.

Giving effective presentations is not something you want to delegate or avoid. Sooner or later, you’ll be called upon to make a presentation to an audience—perhaps your direct reports, other managers, your superiors, customers and/or industry colleagues. Managers who can deliver successful speeches have greater opportunities for career advancement.

Don’t rely on your innate intelligence or charm! Intuition can carry you through many phases of your career, but leaving presentations to chance—or simply winging them—is risky. Your career’s trajectory could be on the line.

The secrets to successful presentations are simple, based on common sense. Many people, however, fail to employ them.

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Once Again, How Do You Motivate People?

You know you have a talented group of people working for you. You may have personally hired some of them or seen their excellent work in other teams. But all of this talent is meaningless if you cannot raise the bar and motivate people to produce their best work ever, for you and your team, right now.

When people feel inspired to live up to their full potential, companies thrive. There’s a positive shift in the work environment, and the resulting culture boosts morale and productivity.

When you inspire motivation, you’ll see the following advances at work:

• People come up with new ideas about how to solve your company’s most pressing problems.

• People get along well and collaborate in teams to create new ways of doing things that can revolutionize the marketplace for your products and services.

• People work with boundless energy, giving their time, enthusiasm and drive to forward the company mission.

• Even during challenging times, your people remain steadfast and loyal.

• People take pride in their work and feel responsible for the company’s future.

If you’re a manager or team leader whose employees exhibit such behaviors, you work under ideal conditions. When such energy is evident, truly great things can happen.

But what if, like the results of the Gallup Organization’s study of engagement at work, some of your people are not fully dedicated to their jobs? What if one-third of your team members are simply going through the motions, showing up but withholding energy?

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The full 2000 word article is based on the book Motivating People for Improved Performance, a collection of timely articles from Harvard Management Update and Harvard Management Communication Letter, part of the Results-Driven Manager Series (2005, Harvard Business School Publishing).

Here are the concepts discussed in the full article:

A Paycheck Isn’t Enough
Is Motivation an Inside or Outside Job?
Helping People Find Meaning at Work
8 Career Anchors: What Matters Most
Strengthening Personal Qualities
Fostering Commitment Beyond the Job
Open-Book Management Style
9 Steps to Creating a Great Workplace

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The Four Agreements at Work

The Four Agreements at Work:
An Inside Job

In his book The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz distills the essence of Toltec wisdom into four principles for living a life of value:

1. Be impeccable with your word.
2. Don’t take anything personally.
3. Don’t make assumptions.
4. Always do your best.

How elegantly simple and, as some might say, a “no brainer!” But simple wisdom isn’t common practice. While most of us believe we are impeccable with our word, we know others who are not. And most likely, others, from time to time, consider us far less than impeccable.

The Four Agreements are deceptively simple, yet difficult to apply. With practice, they’re extremely effective, providing a way to experience inner peace and happiness, while creating stronger relationships.

Each agreement is self-directed. It’s not about what you can do to change someone’s behavior. Rather, the guides teach us how to respond appropriately to others’ difficult behaviors and maintain smoother work relationships.

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The full 1000 word article examines how to apply each of these principles at work.

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Difficult People: They're Everywhere

Dealing with Difficult People

They’re everywhere. Walk into any workplace and you’ll find them. Regardless of your company’s success or employee-friendly culture, difficult people pose challenges for managers and team leaders each day.

Some are angry; some are anxious. Others are fearful, negative and obstinate. Some spark frequent disputes with their peers. Still others quietly stonewall and fail to follow through on commitments.

You cannot afford to avoid dealing with difficult people. Whether they’re direct reports or peer managers, their frustrating behaviors will take a toll on your ability to manage others and produce stellar results.

The more serious forms of difficult behavior are, in some ways, easier to deal with because they are blatant and often illegal. In cases of harassment, sabotage or physical threats, swiftly follow your clearly outlined company policies and implement the appropriate consequences.

But long before overt infringements arise, there are subtle forms of damaging behaviors that should not be tolerated or allowed to escalate. Confronting and dealing with these sticky situations will prevent more serious problems in the future.

Unfortunately, many managers avoid dealing with difficult people and strong emotions in the workplace. “People problems” are often cited as the most challenging — and time-consuming — part of a manager’s job. One study found that 42 percent of managers’ time is spent on defusing office conflict.

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The full article contains the following concepts:

The High Costs of Conflict
Three Important Questions
Identify the Problem Behaviors
The Force of Strong Emotions
Handling Difficult Behaviors –
  Step One: Develop a Plan
  Step 2: Invest in Training
  Step 3: Invest in Coaching
What Is Your Part?
A Checklist for the Disciplinary Conversation