Top Executive Coaching with Tony Mayo

Participating effectively in trade shows and conferences requires significant investment of time and treasure. I always encourage my clients to do only as many as they can afford to do thoroughly. What does “thoroughly” mean?

Essentially, have a plan and a purpose. Start early, months before the conference. Have the right people at the conference with the time, attention, and resources necessary to work the plan. Be ready to follow up after the conference. Everyone returns from these with lots of ideas and good intentions that whither the first day back at the office. It’s up to you to pick up the thread and maintain the momentum.

Have a clear goal or purpose that is consistent with your marketing message and sales targets. One way to formulate the goal is to answer the question, “If I Read the rest of this entry »

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Could a simple five-minute interaction with another person dramatically increase your weekly productivity?

…

employees who know how their work has a meaningful, positive impact on others are not just happier than those who don’t; they are vastly more productive, too. … “Even minimal, brief contact with beneficiaries can enable employees to maintain their motivation,” the researchers write in their paper, titled Impact and the Art of Motivation Maintenance: The Effects of Contact with Beneficiaries on Persistence Behavior, published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

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the one-two punch of knowing the beneficiary’s needs and meeting him in person generated the largest impact on motivation.

 

–The Art of Motivating Employees
Knowledge@Wharton

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The New York Times recently ran a nice article about how Google–in its usual highly-analytic, data-driven way–measured the results of different management behaviors amongst its own workforce. The recommendations that emerged from this research will be familiar to readers of this blog.

I wish these were practiced as often as I preach them!

 

Google’s Project Oxygen

Eight Good Behaviors

Be a good coach
Provide specific, constructive feedback, balancing the negative and the positive.
Have regular Read the rest of this entry »

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I assume that you already know and do not need to be convinced that:

• Your most profitable sales and easiest growth come from existing clients.¹
• Unhappy customers are 5-20 times more likely to tell others about their bad experience than satisfied customers are to spread good news.²

A simple, high-return method of learning from your happy and unhappy customers, of knowing your customers better while making them more loyal to you is to listen to them. Customers are people and people love being listened to.

There are many ways to do this. I hope your Read the rest of this entry »

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The problem is that consumer recording equipment is unshielded; cell phones, florescent lights, etc. radiate energy that can induce a current that becomes noise. My solution is to use professional equipment with laptop recording software. It is more money and trouble, but the quality is very high.

Step 1: Get a mic mixer for the PC, so that you can use professional mics. I prefer the ones that plug into the USB or FIREWIRE port so that I can bypass the internal sound card. Others connect to the “LINE IN” jack of your sound card, if it has one (not the computer’s MIC jack).

I used the M-Audio MobilePre USB – 2 Channel USB Mic Preamp with XLR and 1/8″ Stereo Miniplug Mic Inputs

I changed to the Lexicon Lambda just because it works under Vista.

Step 2: Buy an appropriate mic. If the mic does not Read the rest of this entry »

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The Great Recession has led many of my executive coaching clients to reduce 401(k) contributions, celebrations, work hours (through furloughs), and cut other employee perqs. These leaders often explain the reductions as prudent adjustments to avoid layoffs. Employees, unfortunately, are likely to react by becoming less trusting and cooperative with their employers, as this new research illustrates.

Although people reciprocate kindnesses proportionately, slings and arrows prompt bullets and grenades.

By Laura Putre

“Even something that is not so strong as a vindictive action—something simply perceived as a negative act,” [Professor Boaz] Keysar says, “escalates quickly.”

The researchers paired up participants for several games of give and take. In one a designated leader decided how much of $100 to give to a partner. In another, leaders decided how much of $100 to take from their partners. … Subjects in the study also consistently reacted better to receiving something than to having it taken from them, even when the gift left them with less money, say $30 instead of $50.

Leaders, however, thought they were being fair … “They did not anticipate,” Keysar says, “that the other person was going to perceive them as doing something negative.” What’s more, he discovered that as the game wore on, each successive round saw partners grabbing more and more as they alternated the taking role. Perceiving the takers as selfish, the participants became less generous.

How to avoid the retribution? This paper doesn’t say. Other research suggests laying out the facts for employees and letting them design the adjustments. People are much more supportive of changes they have helped create.

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