Leadership Viewpoint

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” A colleague reminded me of the critical importance of selecting and using an engaging name for one of our community service activities. So often, we are caught up in the development of substance that issues of style evade our consciousness. It is almost always a mistake. Getting BOTH the substance and the style right is almost always the ante for big success.

What if you could add kindness to your repertoire? Would that enhance your effectiveness? What about humor? Might that support your communication? Many of us work very hard on ‘substance’ thinking that this is sufficient to establish our credibility. We couldn’t be more wrong. Content merely puts us in the game. Whenever other people are involved, coupling that substance with appropriate style makes all the difference in our effectiveness.

Recall conversations where tone made the difference in interpretation, or when someone’s facial expression alerted you to their concerns – matters of style matter. So what is your style when communicating? Are you inviting others in, or pushing them away? Are you engaging them to open up and share, or shutting down discussion? Recall more than what was said; recall too the tone, the faces, the body language, the nervous ‘tells’, the colors and even the smells. They all add up the totality of the message, and that’s the real deal.

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Perhaps you’ve heard of learned helplessness. It’s a term that came out of psychology (Martin Seligman, Learned Optimism). Scientists conditioned a dog with electric shocks every time a bell rang. Once the dog was conditioned to expect a shock every time the bell rang, they put the dog into an open box, where it could easily escape. Then they rang the bell, and the dog just laid there, awaiting what it thought was the inevitable shock. Dogs that hadn’t been conditioned with the electric shocks simply jumped out of the box and ran off.

Sometimes it feels as if people around us have received similar conditioning. Often they just sit there, when the very things they want are easily within their reach. Something has squelched their natural drive for success. Great leaders seem to have the opposite conditioning effect on their people. First, they identify and hire ‘go getters’. Then they systematically pump them up, build their confidence and provide them with opportunities for small wins. Later, when a situation puts them in a ‘box’, they instinctively exhibit winning behaviors.

The beauty of being a person, rather than a dog, is that we have intelligence, self awareness and free will. We can actually go out and condition ourselves. Many of us do it in little ways, such as positive self talk, and asking good questions. It doesn’t have to stop there. We can do the same thing for ourselves that great leaders do. We can set ourselves up for small successes and build up to the bigger challenges. It takes a change in focus – from the things we cannot do, to focusing on the things we can do.

Imagine you are learning a new hobby. Would you start out with an advanced project? Of course not, you’d look for ‘Beginner’ on every project you considered. Then you would move up as your experience and confidence improved. Personal power is very similar. Find some ‘beginner’ projects and build yourself up to the ‘advanced’ level. I often recommend volunteer work for newbies. It’s a great way to build yourself up and poise yourself for greater challenges down the road.

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As you are working with your clients, it’s critically important to ensure that they always feel that working with you is of value. By definition, value is what they get for the money. To increase it, either cost must go down, or what they receive must go up. If you’re a discounter, you probably choose to take price down, and you may try to cut the costs of your goods and services accordingly.

If you are a premium seller, then you try to add to what the client receives. The ideal addition is something that is very valuable to the client, but a negligible cost to you. To identify such items, stand back and look at everything you have at your disposal, not just your typical product/service offerings. Value-added items are often from resources that you don’t typically sell. They may be adjunct goods and services, or they may be exposure or ‘connections’ related. In many service industries, sellers add extra services – a package deal for instance.

We sometimes see sellers set up client networking opportunities. One of my colleagues arranges a large meeting with outside speakers quarterly for his clientele. His clients all meet one another and receive a morning of informative talks from area experts in non-competing fields. These experts receive exposure to a group of potential clients, and are generally grateful for the opportunity. It’s a clear win-win and everybody feels indebted to him.

Think about your own business. What can you do to add value to your clientele? What can you afford to give away, simply as a privilege of doing business with you? What can you do that nobody else in your field does for their clients? How can you make the experience of working with you better than working with anyone else?

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