Don't fly Alone - Make Sure You Have Your Fight Crew With You!
Successful business owner and organizational development expert Jim Canada opens his presentation with the truism that if you are not moving ahead, you are falling behind. He asserts change is key to how well you grow and succeed in your personal and professional life. He also maintains that cultivating resiliency in the face of change is key to making changes positively and effectively.
In his talk, Jim describes that when capability is greater than challenge, people get bored. When challenge is greater than capability, people get overwhelmed and stressed. The ideal is to maintain an equal balance between capability and challenge. Then people can weather the myriad of feelings they have as they go through change. If people do not develop resiliency, they can get thrown by some of the negative thoughts, feelings and struggles that are a natural part of the change process.
People feel in control when expectations match experiences. Developing personal resilience helps people maintain a sense of control. Jim describes it as the ability to absorb high levels of disruptive change while displaying minimal dysfunctional behavior. Those who are resilient maintain their equilibrium, high productivity, good health, success and rebound well from setbacks. Resilient people are:
Jim Canada ends his presentation by stressing the importance of creating a strong workplace culture in which your people are able to find a new normal occurs easily because you effectively communicate the positive consequences of change and they remain inspired to stay the course through discomfort. The bottom line: learn how to be resilient and promote resilience so you and your business can move ahead successfully.
To learn more about how to enact positive changes in your workplace culture, contact Jim Canada at: http://www.alliancetechnologiesllc.com/contact-us
Pricing expert, author and contrarian Dale Furtwengler raises awareness concerning the importance of communicating your brand promises in a straightforward, clear and responsible manner. He opens his presentation reminding viewers that prospects and customers don’t care what you are doing and how you are doing it. They care about what benefits you are providing to them. They want to know what results they are going to get from you to help them to improve their life and work. Unfortunately, many taglines don’t reflect these results.
Dale describes the difference between an ineffective vs. effective, results-oriented taglines. He takes four examples of taglines and shows why they are effective because they meet the following key criteria:
When your tagline meets these criteria fully, your customers and prospects are much more likely to confidently engage you as a service provider. A good tagline allows you to answer questions in such a manner that your credibility increases during each stage of the conversation. Dale’s use of real-time stories and examples allow the viewers to quickly re-structure their tagline so that everyone wins. Both customers and providers are able to easily determine when there is alignment and a good fit for entering a business relationship. The stage is set to command prices that reflect your promises and ability to fulfill on them.
Dale Furtwengler is an internally acclaimed author. His company, Furtwengler & Associates, Inc., helps companies get higher prices regardless of what their competitors or the economy are doing. For more pricing/branding/marketing/sales tips visit Dale’s website, PricingForProfitBook.com
In order to develop an effective work team, those in leadership must understand the role of individual private logic (also called paradigm) for how each person sees the world and their role in it. Additionally, leaders must consider how best to influence each team member so they are effective in gaining their willing participation.
Sales and management expert Bill Prenatt shares the wisdom of Steven Covey plus his own experiences and observations on recognizing, respecting and relating well to direct reports who require guidance to fully engage and contribute in your working team in a responsible, productive manner. The following are important to consider when influencing your team members so they mesh well and support the success of all.
Perceptions and Paradigms
We all experience the world in different ways. People are not motivated by facts, but by assumptions – what they believe the facts to be. Our assumptions arise from our experience, our paradigms.
Every normal person craves direction, and a sense of dignity and purpose. Our basic drive is to protect what we perceive to be in our own best interest. We do what someone asks because we will realize personal gain.
Successful supervisors influence people to do things because they want to. The interaction provides a perspective that re-defines the environment into one where people ‘like to do’ and are ‘capable of to do,’ with supervisors helping each person feel useful and contributing.
Supervisors have an opportunity and an obligation to ‘identify and influence people who need their guidance. The role of the supervisor is to clearly define critical issues, plan out how to overcome problems, resolve frustrations, and eliminate or reduce waste, leaving people free to enrich their lives and achieve their goals.
Paradigms and Patterns
Supervision has its roots in the understanding that people, as the principal asset, are the catalyst that make things move. Supervisors create and provide the conditions in which each individual member and the team collectively, can be successful. They call forth each person’s potential by demonstrating faith they can excel when managed properly. In contrast, an authority merely provides a supervisor with the right to expect certain standards of performance.
By the time a person gets to be a supervisor, he/she has spent a lifetime developing specific patterns of thinking and behaving. Each of us likes our ideas of how things should be done and changing our minds can be a problem. We develop a comfort zone. Behavior patterns are buried deep and do not change quickly. These patterns become so fixed they legitimately can be called a second nature. Then behavior plays out naturally without conscious thought because it has been reinforced over a lifetime.
Organizations and companies become fixed in this way too. They have developed a culture that works on its members silently. Then this too becomes second nature to all within its walls. All the traditions, preceding practices, norms, standards, habits, rituals, attitudes and expectations that have evolved over many years, have been woven into how everyone thinks, feels, speaks and acts.
These two factors; the supervisor’s personal patterns and the organization’s culture have a powerful effect on change.
Patterns and Persuasion
Our paradigm is the way we see the world – perceiving, understanding, and interpreting it; in a sense our paradigm is our map.
Each of us has many maps in our head. Maps of the way things are (realities) and maps of the way we should be (values). We interpret everything we experience through these mental maps. We seldom question their accuracy; and we’re usually unaware we have them. We assume the way we see things is the way they really are, and the way they should be. And our attitudes and behaviors grow out of those assumptions. The way we see things is the source for the way we think and then act.
Conditioning has a powerful effect on our perceptions. We have a lifetime of conditioning – family, school, church, work culture, friends, associates, and current social paradigms. All have made their silent unconscious impact on us and help shape our frame of reference, our paradigms; our maps.
These paradigms are the source of our attitudes and behaviors. As clearly and objectively as we think we see things, we come to realize that others see them differently, and from their own apparently equally clear and objective point of view.
Each of us tends to think we see things as they are; that we are objective. This is not the case. We see the world not as it is, but as we are -- or, as we are conditioned to see it. When we open our mouths to describe what we see, we in effect describe ourselves, and our perceptions. This is the power of our paradigm. When other people disagree with us, we immediately think something is wrong with them. In reality, each of us sees things differently, each looking through the unique lens of experience.
Trying to change outward attitudes and behaviors does little good in the long run if we fail to examine the basic paradigms from which our attitudes and behaviors flow.
The more aware we are of basic paradigms, maps, or assumptions, and the extent to which we have been influenced by our experiences, the more we can take responsibility for our paradigms, examine them, test them against reality, listen to others, and be open to their perceptions too, thereby getting a larger picture and a far more objective view.
Persuasion and Paradigm Shifts
Paradigm shifts move us from one way of seeing the world to another. Whether paradigm shifts are in a positive or a negative direction, whether they are instantaneous or incremental, they create powerful change. Our paradigms, correct or incorrect, source our attitudes and behaviors, and ultimately our relationships with others. If we want to make relatively minor changes in our lives, we can perhaps appropriately focus on our attitudes and behaviors. But if we want to make significant, quantum change, we need to work on our basic paradigms. Until we change our basic paradigms, we are unable to create quantum change in our situation or ourselves.
Many people experience a fundamental shift in thinking when they have a life-threatening crisis and suddenly see their priorities in a different light, or when they suddenly step into a new role, such as that of husband or wife, parent or grandparent, or into the new role as a supervisor. Paradigms are powerful because they create the lens through which we see the world. The power of a paradigm shift is the essential driver of quantum change, whether the shift is instantaneous or a slow deliberate process.
In all of life, there are sequential stages of growth and development. A child learns to turn over, to sit up, to crawl, and then to walk and run. Each step is important and each one takes time. No step can be skipped.
Paradigm Shifts and Principles
This is true in all phases of life. To understand and accept these principles can be difficult. Consequently, we sometimes look for a shortcut, expecting to be able to skip vital developmental steps in order to save time and effort while still reaping the desired result. It is simply impossible to violate, ignore, or shortcut the development process. It is contrary to nature, and attempting to seek such a shortcut only results in disappointment and frustration.
To relate effectively, we must learn to listen. This requires emotional strength. Listening involves patience, openness, and the desire to understand – highly developed qualities of character. It’s so much easier to operate from a low emotional level while giving high-level advice.
Our levels of development physically are fairly obvious, but not so concerning character and emotional/social development. We can ‘pose and put on’ socially for a stranger or an associate. We can pretend. And for a while we may get by with it – at least in public. We may even deceive ourselves. Deep down inside, most of us know the truth of who we really are and many others can discern this too.
Principles and Positive Change
In today’s complex and demanding business environment, we need to solve chronic underlying problems and focus on principles that bring long-term results. Utilizing Coaching as a valuable tool is one step closer toward being an effective supervisor.
Taken from “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen R. Covey.
PARADIGM SHIFTS
Chris Torbit is a successful business owner with a growing, thriving business. He walks the talk, making culture and guiding principles a priority. He shares many stories about how he defines, clarifies and keeps his culture statement front and center with not only himself and his employees, he shares them with vendors and clients. In his presentation:
Chris Torbit is a consummate professional who is wise enough to know that business is more than sales and marketing. He knows that having a values-based and purpose-driven business is key to sustainable and effective growth. To learn more about great business strategy or for help in selecting the best in phone technology, contact Chris Torbit at 314-801-6700.
As a child deeply in love with nature, living on the edge of a park, and the fifth of six children, I knew a lot about chaos, the beautiful, free, creative and exhilarating kind. Starting out free to explore from infancy, school at age five felt like bitter confinement and at times crushing domination, and was the first time I was acutely aware of the down-side to our civilization process. As a result, I have always been drawn to unorthodox concepts of how people might form community, develop into good, contributing, caring citizens who are empowered to be victorious in their lives. In the last 30 years I have turned that awareness into an obsession (and a company), leading to questions that have since liberated my life and the lives of others.
It’s clear our current organizational structures are not working well. News headlines make us all too aware of the meaning of the term dysfunctional within schools, families, businesses and institutions. Schools struggle to effectively educate, many businesses, marriages and families are in a state of crisis. And then there’s the current state of health care, the economy, welfare, our judicial systems, the environment, and governments, to name a few.
Additionally, a requirement for mutual cooperation is essential as we expand our increasingly technological and global community. We are evolving at an accelerated pace which creates greater stress and a pressing need to be more inter-dependent and streamlined in our evolution. What once took years and even decades to create now takes only months or days and our outdated organizational systems can’t keep up with our present or future. What’s the answer?
Recently, in studying a variety of organizational models, I was delighted to discover a human system that is synonymous with the work of my company LifeWork Systems. The model is called a chaord, derived from a combination of the words chaos and order. In a chaord, all the best within human beings and all manner of systems are honored and focused towards what is both most meaningful and effective.
Leading scientists from many disciplines have recently discovered that life itself thrives on the edge of chaos with just enough order to give it patterns we have taken for granted and assumed developed in a linear, plodding manner. It’s just not true. Much of what exists in nature formed in both a complex and simultaneous way. In other words, a variety of systems acting independently worked in harmony to rapidly collaborate and create what could not otherwise occur. Nature literally explodes with creativity and cooperation. What’s key is that each element involved in any healthy system not be confused nor impeded in living to their distinct purpose, values and vision.
A chaord is similar to this beautiful discovery in nature; when people share power, are equipped to co-create change, and independently self-govern, then everyone can harmoniously blend available chaos with order for rapid, effective change. In ordered chaos, each person is first and foremost purpose-oriented, focused on individual and group purpose, values and visions. Next, everyone is organized to expediently harness the creativity, gifts, initiative and collective talents available in service to that purpose or vision. Ordered chaos is to vision what a bow and arrow is to a target. Control is released so the arrow can literally fly to the target. This is the path from victim to victor.
What does this mean specifically? Organizations operating as a chaord function by a set of principles in which power is shared, knowledge and initiative are distributed at all levels and self-governing, socially and emotionally intelligent individuals and teams work independently to accomplish their goals with faith in each other to deliver their part. Imagine homes, educational institutions, community organizations and businesses in which adults and children learn to share decision-making, governing, and whole tasks are delegated to individuals and teams independently and yet, interdependently.
In this system internal motivation, purpose, vision and self-management are top priorities that replace traditional command and control, linear top-down managing so that joyful participation from passion and purpose reign. I have successfully created this very system in my own family and in client sites, including businesses, non-profit organizations, churches and schools.
During the first half of the 21st century, it was the practice of parents to shape the minds and hearts and lives of their children and to a large extent this is still a worthy role. At that time however, this was out of balance. There was something crucial usually missing in the formula for influencing children’s lives. Too much emphasis was focused on the shaping of the child and not enough on the child’s individual internal motivation, inductive reasoning and discovery and development of their unique purpose, values and vision for their life. They were not developed into leaders and proactive participants as part of their rearing. The result: Many adults turn into people who are out of touch with their ability to make choices from internal motivation and instead feel like “victims” to the whims and preferences of others. Their internal roadmap is buried and their power atrophied.
A result from my experience of my childhood and the well-intentioned, control-driven attempts by my parents, other adults, and educators, to make me a good citizen, was an unbalanced need to do what my parents and other authorities wanted from a sense of fear and disempowerment. I have come to realize many others experience the same. Maybe that’s why Brene Brown, renounced expert researcher on Shame and Vulnerability states,
"We are the most over-weight, over-medicated, in-debt, addicted cohorts in the history of the world."
The emphasis on shaping human beings from the outside in, is costing us more than we could ever imagine and at the root of co-dependency, shame, repression, suppression, addiction and many neuroses. It is at the root of victim consciousness. When parents raise children this way and educators teach students this way and managers manage employees this way, there grows a disconnection between the one leading and the one being led, and a disconnect within each person.
During that era and today, the mainstream methods for how to lead others is still a source of much dysfunction. When we use a control-based approach for leading others, this is a form of over-protecting, pampering and spoiling. I’m not referring here to spoiling others with too many material goods but rather, with taking too much responsibility for the ideas, happiness, behavior, choices and results of those they lead.
In the words of psychologist Alfred Adler (father of individual psychology), “people often make the mistake of taking too much responsibility for other’s achievements and too much blame for their mistakes. They forget the person is always observing, interpreting and deciding for him or herself.” When we leave out the purposes and subjectivity of the individual, and don’t guide others in the wise use of their power, we are teaching others to be less responsible. What we protect we make weak and we should never do for others anything they are capable of doing for themselves.
The job of a good leader is to help a person become able to respond (responsible) in their life; to help them by transferring responsibility to them in such a manner that they discover their own high purpose and how to live it. Then they can do the same for others. It’s been my life’s work, first with my family, then in over 70 schools and now with many business and community organizations, to provide the missing tools and information that allows leaders to improve success in others and bring out the best already residing in those they lead.
We live in exciting times with tremendous opportunity to expand into the amazing, capable, creative human beings we are and to have fun alone and with others. A chaordic model is exciting because it provides meaningful uncertainties, risks, challenges and opportunities to develop leaders who contribute in ways that cannot be found in traditional models. Vision, with action, leads to infinite possibilities. It’s time to buckle up, and go for the ride of our lives. We are designed by nature itself to function within organized chaos on purpose when we are given the appropriate training and support for how to do so! We are meant to be victors, not victims!
Judy Ryan is Owner of LifeWork Systems and a human systems expert. Executives, community leaders and educators hire Judy and her company because they want the advantages of a healthy workplace. To contact her, you can call her at 314.239.4727, by emailjudy@lifeworksystems.com or on her website www.lifeworksystems.com
Human Systems Specialist Judy Ryan provides practical advice and tools to help improve the level of caring and overall quality of relationships. During this video, she demonstrates use of several tools she introduces in this presentation which includes how to become skilled in:
Judy Ryan is the owner of LifeWork Systems. She is an award-winning trainer, consultant, coach, keynote presenter and columnist. Judy works with progressive thought leaders, executives and change agents who want to succeed by building healthy culture and highly productive teams. If you would like Judy Ryan’s support, you can reach her at Judy@LifeWorkSystems.com, visit her website www.LifeWorkSystems.com or call her at 314.239.4727
Having an understanding of the following six specific team tools and techniques provide structure and an approach to addressing problems and issues within your organization. Many team facilitators and organization leaders understand some of the following tools and techniques but do they know the proper do’s and don’ts for each and how to use them? Do they understand the benefits and procedures that make them effective? The six team tools and techniques for effective problem solving within your organization are defined as the following:
Brainstorming
Brainstorming is a structured group thinking activity used to help a team generate as many ideas as possible within a short period of time.
Multi-voting Polls
Multi-voting is a way to reduce a large list of items to a manageable size by conducting a poll. It limits group discussion and minimizes difficulty. This is accomplished with a series of votes. Multi-voting often follows a brainstorming session.
Prioritization
Prioritization is a method of assigning scores to issues based on multiple criteria. The total scores for each issue are then compared to select the issue(s) to focus on first.
Fishbone Diagram
Cause and effect diagrams are also known as fishbones (because of their shape) or Ishikawa diagrams, (after their inventor, Dr. Kaoru Ishikawa, the Japanese quality control statistician). The fishbone diagram is a visual display of information using lines, arrows and words. It is designed to focus on root causes rather than symptoms and to represent the relationship between an effect (what is wrong) and its causes.
Checksheet
A checksheet is a worksheet used to collect data. Data must be collected carefully and accurately. Using a checksheet makes it easier to collect, compile and analyze data consistently.
Pareto Chart
A Pareto chart is a form of a vertical bar graph with a cumulative percentage line overlaid. Pareto charts help organize data to show the major factor(s) that make up the subject being analyzed.
To learn the full definition, when to use, the benefits, procedures, do’s and don’ts and examples for all of these Tools and Techniques, go to the following address and request a copy of the full article “Team Tools and Techniques for Problem Solving”:http://www.alliancetechnologiesllc.com/contact-us
