Sales Coaching

Sales Managers: Get Your Team Up For The Game!

If you’re a sports fan, or an athlete, as I am, you know when you or your team are “flat” and are just phoning-in their performances, and when they’re juiced, and ready to go.

It makes a crucial difference in sports, as well as in selling.

In both situations, we have to get up for the game, and if you’re a sales manager, it’s your duty to psych up your players before every engagement, whenever possible.

As a former sales manager, and as a sales coach and consultant, I advocate having frequent sales meetings for this purpose. Meet, greet, and motivate your people before every shift, if they sell from inside.

If they’re outside sellers, try to arrange frequent telephone conferences to achieve the same thing,

Remind them of their sales targets, and try to tell inspiring stories, or share recent customer testimonials with them.

Every meeting should give them another reason to feel proud of themselves and what they’re selling.

You can use these get-togethers to review closing techniques, or to introduce better techniques of any kind. And most important, team members can discuss what’s working for them, which their peers don’t get a chance to see and to hear for themselves.

But the key deliverable from a successful meeting is emotion. They should get a boost, feeling higher and more energized than before.

One of my salesmen said to me, after our umpteenth meeting, “Gary, I might be able to make more money somewhere else, but nothing is going to be this much fun!”

Mission accomplished!

Dr. Gary S. Goodman, President of Customersatisfaction.com, is a popular keynote speaker, management consultant, and seminar leader and the best-selling author of 12 books, including Reach Out & Sell Someone® and Monitoring, Measuring & Managing Customer Service. He is a frequent guest on radio and television, worldwide. A Ph.D. from USC’s Annenberg School, Gary offers programs through UCLA Extension and numerous universities, trade associations, and other organizations in the United States and abroad. He is headquartered in Glendale, California, and he can be reached at (818) 243-7338 or at: gary@customersatisfaction.com.

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Dr._Gary_S._Goodman/10449

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Leadership

The Quakers, A Sword, And The Leadership Talk

William Penn (1644-1718),founder of what would become the state of Pennsylvania, was on the receiving end of a succinct Leadership Talk that still reverberates down the centuries and into your everyday leadership challenges.

In his youth, Penn became an ardent Quaker. When he asked George Fox (1624-1691), the founder of the non-violent religious sect, if he should continue to wear a sword, a standard part of the dress of Penn’s aristocratic class, Fox replied, “Wear it as long as thou canst.”

Fox’s reply not only illustrates a principle of Quakerism but also a principle underpinning a leadership process I have been teaching to thousands of leaders worldwide during the past 21 years: the Leadership Talk.

Get the Leadership Talk right, and it can boost your job performance and career in many ways. But you can’t get the Leadership Talk right unless you understand this principle.

What is a Leadership Talk? You can understand it by first understanding “the hierarchy of verbal persuasion.” The lowest levels of the hierarchy are speeches and presentations. They are methods for communicating information. The highest level, the most effective way for a leader to communicate, is through the Leadership Talk. The Leadership Talk not only communicates information; it does something much more: it helps the leader establish deep, human, emotional connections with the people they’re talking to, enabling them to be much more effective.

As to the principle: it goes right to the heart of Fox’s reply to Penn. Fox ardently believed that every human has an “inner light and spirit.” The Quakers were guided by that light which they believed came directly from God. They refused to bow to authority and endorsed pacifism. Implicit in Fox’s reply was that it was Penn’s choice, not any mandate from Fox or anyone else, that governed the situation.

The Leadership Talk recognizes that leaders do nothing more important than get results; and the best results happen not when leaders are ordering people to go from point A to point B, say, but when they are having them want to go from A to B. Instill “want to” in others is what the Leadership Talk does. That “want to” cannot be mandated; it is the free choice of the people. In other words, great results happen in the realm of free choice of the people you lead.

The Leadership Talk creates an environment conducive to people exercising free choice. In order to create this environment, you must first ask three questions about the people you’ll speak to.

(1) Do you know the needs of the people? (2) Can you bring deep belief to what you’re saying to them? (3) Can you have the people take action?

If you say “no” to any one of these questions, you can’t give a Leadership Talk.

Asking and answering these questions many times daily throughout your career with people of all ranks and functions will help you create a fortunate environment of free choice leading to great results.

Let’s see how these questions played out with Fox and Penn.

DO YOU KNOW THE NEEDS OF YOUR AUDIENCE? Fox’s reply went to the heart of Penn’s needs. Penn was the scion of an aristocratic family who in his youth had powerful religious experiences. Penn’s needs were clear: He wanted to live by the imperatives of those experiences, which were deeply and personally felt. Fox’s spiritual revelations, to use a Quaker saying, “spoke to his condition.”

CAN YOU BRING DEEP CONVICTION TO WHAT YOU’RE SAYING? George Fox certainly spoke with conviction. Penn described Fox in his journal as “…. plain and powerful in preaching, fervent in prayer … a discerner of other men’s spirits, and very much master of his own.” He added that Fox was able to “speak a word in due season to the conditions and capacities of most, especially to them that were weary, and wanted soul’s rest …. valiant in asserting the truth, bold in defending it ….” The two met when Fox was being jailed frequently for his beliefs. Coming from a man holding such deep convictions and being repeatedly jailed defending them, the words “Wear it while thou canst” deeply impressed William Penn.

CAN YOU HAVE THE AUDIENCE TAKE ACTION? The next time Penn saw Fox, he was not wearing his sword. He said, “I wore it as long as I could.” He would never wear a sword again. After he joined the outlawed and persecuted Quakers, he was exiled from English society, thrown out of Oxford University, and arrested several times. Yet he never wavered from promoting and living by the Quaker ideals. That action, NOT putting on his sword (sometimes the best action is no action) when all of social convention cried out that he should, was made all the more notable and instructive because it came from his own deeply-felt urging.

Mind you, don’t mistake the Leadership Talk principle of free choice as some psychological delicacy. I’m talking results here. Leadership is all about getting results. The principle does and should have practical functions. The point is those functions are best manifested in environments of deep, human, emotional relationships. Such relationships can most effectively be established by your being open to and trusting in the choices people make. Guided by the principle of “Wear it as long as thou canst”, you can markedly improve your leadership effectiveness.

2006 © The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

The author of 23 books, Brent Filson’s recent books are, THE LEADERSHIP TALK: THE GREATEST LEADERSHIP TOOL and 101 WAYS TO GIVE GREAT LEADERSHIP TALKS. He is founder and president of The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. – and for more than 21 years has been helping leaders of top companies worldwide get audacious results. Sign up for his free leadership e-zine and get a free white paper: “49 Ways To Turn Action Into Results,” at http://www.actionleadership.com. More about the Leadership Talk: [http://www.theleadershiptalk.com]

PERMISSION TO REPUBLISH: This article may be republished in newsletters and on web sites provided attribution is provided to the author, and it appears with the included copyright, resource box and live web site link. Email notice of intent to publish is appreciated but not required: mail to: [brent@actionleadership.com]/>

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Brent_Filson/1911

 

Leadership

Unlocking Organizational Value Through Leadership

For more than two decades, in many ways, in many forums, with thousands of leaders, I’ve taught that organizational results are limitless.

Those leaders who don’t understand this don’t understand the soul of leadership. When I say “soul”, I don’t mean it in a religious sense, but in a human sense, and not as a static entity but as a fundamental process that manifests the value inherent in all organizations. The soul of leadership is that which triggers and guides the best organizational activities to achieve the best results.

However, there is another soul at work here. It is the leadership soul of the individual leader. Again, I am not using the word in a religious sense but in a human sense, and as a fundamental process that manifests the human value inherent in each individual leader.

The leadership soul of the leader is that inner strength and commitment an individual draws on in order to carry out the activities of the soul of leadership.

Mind you, I am not counting angels on the head of a pin. The difference between the soul of leadership and the leadership soul of the individual leader is not a philosophical fine distinction. The difference may not be readily apparent, but it is manifest, and it is decisive. It’s a difference most leaders and their organizations are not aware of — to their detriment.

The soul of leadership looks outward, the leadership soul of the individual looks inward. Working in tandem, both outer and inner directed activities can notably increase the effectiveness of your leadership. When both the soul of leadership and the leadership soul unite, great things can happen.

That’s where limitless results come in. Most organizations have far more value locked up than their leaders realize. Those organizations consistently fail to tap the deep reservoirs of their members motivation, talent and skills. After all, most members of most organizations want to do well. In fact, in each organization, the members, naturally and collectively, represent an on-rushing current of ardent commitment to succeed. However, through misguided leadership, leadership that is tyrannical and micro-managing, leadership that coerces rather than motivates, that current can be blocked, impeding results.

The blockage occurs when leaders focus exclusively on ordering the establishment of surface drivers such as sales and marketing activities, logistical dynamics, organizational strategies and tactics, financial strategies and tactics, human resource undertakings, and the like — what business schools teach.

Clearly, the surface drivers are necessary in realizing the value an organization possesses, but they’re not sufficient. In focusing exclusively on the above drivers, leaders often neglect the deepest and most important realm of all, the realm which largely determines the success or failure of the organization, the realm of human relationships — what business schools don’t teach.

For example, I’m sure you’ve heard of the classic case of the railroads of the mid-20th century neglecting to understand they were in the transportation business and losing out to airlines in the passenger market. Railroad leaders did a fair to middling job of dealing with sales, logistics, administration, etc. But their hierarchical, top-down management structures and culture that viewed their employees much like rail cars to be pushed and pulled here and there, probably prevented them tapping into the immense collective value of those employees. If the employees had been empowered, motivated and unleashed, they would have brought a richer vision of market dynamics to railroads that could have forestalled their decline.

On the other hand, I know of a company that has consistently tapped into the strengths of its employees. In the 1930s, they were in the tea bag business. However, they didn’t see themselves in the tea bag business but in the materials’ business. As markets kept changing, their offerings kept changing and today, their tea bag paper products have morphed into hi-tech thermoplastics. They couldn’t have done it without tapping into the value of their employees.

There are many ways to unlock value in an organization. Those are not the purview of this article. The main point I’m making is about the leadership soul of the leader and unlocking its value.
Just as the results-potential of organizations are limitless, so the interior of each leader is a limitless world of value.

To unlock the value within an organization, leaders must unlock the leadership value within themselves.

What is this leadership value? It is the value you have simply being a human being. All human beings have a powerful capacity for transformation because they possess an innate capacity to direct a strong sense of determination and action in whatever direction they choose.

Furthermore, humans also have an powerful capacity to form and manifest deep, transforming relationships. And it is in the on-going transforming of relationships that you find and unlock the leadership value within yourself.

How do you unlock the value inherent in your organization and in yourself? Fortunately, there is a simple, powerful tool to do that. I call it the Leadership Imperative: “I will lead people in such a way that we not only get results but grow as leaders and human beings.”

Make this principle live in your daily actions, and you’ll be unlocking and unleashing great organizational value — as well as great value in your career and your life.

2006 © The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

PERMISSION TO REPUBLISH: This article may be republished in newsletters and on web sites provided attribution is provided to the author, and it appears with the included copyright, resource box and live web site link. Email notice of intent to publish is appreciated but not required: mail to: brent@actionleadership.com

The author of 23 books, Brent Filson’s recent books are, THE LEADERSHIP TALK: THE GREATEST LEADERSHIP TOOL and 101 WAYS TO GIVE GREAT LEADERSHIP TALKS. He is founder and president of The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. – and for more than 21 years has been helping leaders of top companies worldwide get audacious results. Sign up for his free leadership e-zine and get a free white paper: “49 Ways To Turn Action Into Results,” at http://www.actionleadership.com

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Brent_Filson/1911

 

Leadership

Making Your Leadership Your Life

Companies facing global competition are expecting more from all employees, more initiative, more innovation and more results.

Critical to meeting these expectations is leadership. The word “leadership” comes from a old Norse word meaning “to make go.” Leadership is needed in organizations to make things go, to muster and coordinate direction, ardent commitment and resource alignment.

Working with thousands of leaders of all ranks and functions during the past 21 years, I’ve seen that most leaders deem leadership as exclusively an on-the-job dynamic. They don’t see it as a life dynamic.

Companies seeking more from their employees must promote leadership that delivers more, and that leadership can only deliver more if it is effective both on and off the job.

If you don’t make your leadership your life and your life your leadership, you diminish both your leadership and your life.

The reasons are simple. The best leaders establish a deep, human, emotional connection with the audience. Why is that necessary to achieve organizational results? Leadership isn’t about getting people to do what they want to do. If people simply had to do what they wanted to do, leaders wouldn’t be needed. Instead, leadership is about getting people to do what they don’t want to do and be totally committed to doing it. These people have a good chance of achieving a lot more results, achieving those results faster, and achieving “more, faster” on a continual basis. One may tyrannically order people to get results, but the effectiveness of such leadership is not as consistent nor as substantial as having people make the free choice to get results. And people will make that free choice mainly in an environment in which deep, human, emotional relationships are developed.

Look at the leaders in your life. I’m sure you’ve been at the receiving end of both the tyrants and those with whom you’ve had deeply beneficial relationships with. Weren’t you more likely to go all out for those leaders who promoted an environment in which those better relationships flourished?

Clearly, that’s an environment one should seek to establish in one’s life as well. The relationships you develop as a leader can be similar to the relationships you should develop in your life outside your job. In my many seminars on the Leadership Talk, I have seen people use my processes outside their job, with their spouses, friends, and children, etc.

There are many values that should be promoted in our lives: trust, honesty, integrity, coming through on commitments, fairness, tenacity, tolerance, and more. Let’s “trust” as one example.

I believe we should live a life of trusting others. I call it “living in trust.” Of course, trust can be taken too far, and we may open ourselves up to be deceived and betrayed. My wife says I often trust others too much; and certainly I have paid in many ways over my life for such a propensity. But I believe that even though we may be deceived if we trust too much; we will nevertheless suffer more if we don’t trust enough.

Living in trust means extending trust without conditions until that trust is clearly betrayed. And then, depending on the circumstances, we may continue to extend trust even if it is betrayed. For when it is betrayed, we may not necessarily be the poorer for it. We may indeed be the richer; for without trust, we cannot establish deep relationships.

My view of trust in life can be extended to leadership. Leadership is about getting continual increases in great results. To do that, leaders must engender trust in the people they lead. In fact, great results can’t accrue without strong bonds of trust established between the leader and the people.

I’ve often said that it is better for a leader to have bought the Brooklyn Bridge for a nickel rather than to have sold it for one. People will not be led by you to do extraordinary things unless they trust you; but they won’t trust you unless they know you are taking the risk to trust them. In fact, many organizations get into trouble when the people don’t trust or stop trusting their leaders; and when their leaders stop trusting them.

So, trust operates both in our lives and on our jobs as leaders and must be cultivated both on and off the job.

There are many other values that should be manifested in both the life one leads and the leadership one manifests. The point is that when you make sure the leadership traits you carry out on the job are the very traits you live by in your life, you enhance the quality of your leadership and your life.

2006 © The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

PERMISSION TO REPUBLISH: This article may be republished in newsletters and on web sites provided attribution is provided to the author, and it appears with the included copyright, resource box and live web site link. Email notice of intent to publish is appreciated but not required: mail to: brent@actionleadership.com

The author of 23 books, Brent Filson’s recent books are, THE LEADERSHIP TALK: THE GREATEST LEADERSHIP TOOL and 101 WAYS TO GIVE GREAT LEADERSHIP TALKS. He is founder and president of The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. – and for more than 20 years has been helping leaders of top companies worldwide get audacious results. Sign up for his free leadership e-zine and get a free white paper: “49 Ways To Turn Action Into Results,” at http://www.actionleadership.com For more on the Leadership Talk: [http://www.theleadershiptalk.com]

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Brent_Filson/1911

 

Leadership

The Seven Faces of Servant Leadership

The 7 Faces of Leadership

Most people can manage when things go well, but true leadership is how we cope with people when times are tough. Our expectations are often unrealistic and not centered on what leadership is really about. Too often people confuse a strong-willed personality as an effective leader. Leadership is not being strong-willed, rather having a strong sense of purpose and compassion. Too many organizations substitute strong-willed people for ethical leaders and see no distinction, because the people who put them in power don’t know the difference. Effective Leadership involves equipping people to live competently and confidently.

Effective leadership traits are as varied and numerous, not to mention subtle, as the human mind and heart themselves. No list will ever be complete, nor will it be the best suited for each individual reader. The bible gives some insight of the essential characteristics of effective leadership in I Corinthians, Ephesians, and 2 Timothy such as humility, integrity, focus, courage, discipline, compassion, and encouragement. The following paragraphs will place those characteristics into an organizational context.

The Humble Leader

“Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.” (Ephesians 4:2)

Humility is not just about our relationship with God but it’s also about our relationship with other people. Relationships are built on listening, to God’s Word and to each other. The relationship between a leader and follower is only as good as their ability to listen. The effective leader will not be a force of just personality and power plays but relationship oriented, centered on building and mentoring.

From and organizational context humble leaders invite feedback and turn lessons into failures. “The leader that is poor in spirit recognizes that many people know more than he or she does and, as such, shows respect to everyone.” (Winston 2002) Humility is acceptance of our human limitations coupled with the resolve to do something about it — I can’t do it alone so I will enlist the help of others. This is the essence of leadership.

The Honest Leader

“Each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to his neighbor, for we are all members of one body.” (Ephesians 4:25)

Honesty is achieved through Discretion and truthfulness. Discretion keeps our minds and focus on sound judgment, giving serious attention and thought to what is going on. It will carefully choose our words, attitudes, and actions to be right for any given situation, thus avoiding words and actions that could result in adverse consequences. Truthfulness means being straight with others and doing what is right.

“It’s after we have contemplated our own actions, measuring how they align with our values, intentions, and words, that we are most likely to make a contribution of integrity to the world.” (Sherman, 2003) Discretion and truthfulness allow leaders to earn trust by being accurate with facts and situations. This doesn’t simply mean honesty, or acting in accordance with a consistent set of values. This also means integrity in the sense of soundness, completeness, and unity. Aligning our personality with our values and not compromising ourselves is the spirit of leadership.

The Focused Leader

Leaders must be willing to carefully explore their values and how they can move their organization in the direction of a vision that is unwavering. Effective Leaders lead with a purpose rather than “run like a man running aimlessly” (1 Corinthians 9:26-27). From the biblical sense this means that we live for His purpose, not ours. As Christians, we recognize that our need for Christ will bring us beyond our failures so we can grow increasingly effective for our Lord. As we grow in Christ, we will become aware of our futility and inadequacy as human beings.

From an organizational perspective, “leaders need to continually put the vision and mission (related to the purpose) in front of followers.” (Winston, 2002) Followers must understand the organization’s vision and know their role in support of the mission. They must know their purpose and how it contributes to organizational success, this is the soul of leadership.

The Courageous & Disciplined Leader

“For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline” (2 Timothy 1:7)

The goal of the servant leader must be to do God’s will. Otherwise we will be too afraid to go beyond our comfort zones to do anything of significance. When we are dependent on the Holy Spirit; then our self-confidence becomes rooted and dependent in Christ working through us. So we are not self-driven but Christ driven; resulting in our will to be in total surrender to God’s will as the driving force for our existence. When we’re aware that we are not responsible for the results of our leadership, but only the obedience to His call, only then can we persevere to press on to serve Him without the fear of failure.

Malphurs (2003) refers to courage as “the strength to lead in these difficult circumstances, meaning that courageous leaders are strong and unlikely to quit.” This kind of courage displays itself in an organization when a leader is willing to admit his mistake, when she is willing to stand up for her beliefs, or when he must challenge others.

Courageous leaders routinely get extraordinary results from their followers because they aren’t afraid to do what’s right. This is evident in Paul’s letter regarding discipline in 1 Corinthians 8:13, “if what I eat causes my brother to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause him to fall.” Conveying who you are, your goals and what you stand for can have a significant impact on follower performance and attitudes. Controlled discipline, according to Winston (2002), “draws people closer to you, whereas uncontrolled discipline drives them away.” Leaders and followers are two sides of a single coin and the actions of one impact the other. Courage and discipline are the armor of leadership.

The Compassionate Leader

The compassionate leader is rooted and grounded in the spiritual disciplines of faith. “Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes”. (Ephesians 6:11). With the power of the Holy Spirit and the conviction of faith in Christ, when we are modeling His image with love, we become a strong building with the foundation of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit who gives the realization to be our best for God’s glory.

“Loyalty and devotion to task and grow out of trust and the knowledge of protection that comes from the employment relationship.” (Winston, 2002) Compassionate leadership is acting in the interest of your followers, your peers, and your organization. This is the boss for whom the employees are willing to work their hardest. The employees can feel her support for them and are compelled to give their full support in return. This manager brings out the best in her subordinates by her own example. There is often a line of people waiting to join this department. This is the heart of leadership.

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