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Envision an environment filled with workers who pursue rather than run from change, one in which workers change their outlooks and connect with themselves, the people around them, and their customers. Imagine that, as a result, you are better able to grow their careers as well as your organization’s future. In this mentor-driven and truly democratic culture, it is pervasive gratitude, the single greatest fuel for high morale and performance, that has become the signature of your workplace.
The wise holocaust survivor and philosopher Elie Wiesel said, “When a person doesn’t have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity. A person can almost be defined by his or her attitude toward gratitude.”1 This dynamic that Mr. Wiesel describes can exponentially grow in its impact on an organization. Over the years, I have often been asked to help an employer decide between two top candidates. I usually respond, “Hire the one that is most grateful.” Why? These are the individuals that are inherently skilled in connecting with others; they bring positive energy to a team, and they demonstrate predictably strong and sustained performance.
Building the skills of engagement and the capacity to change requires that we learn how to become comfortable and skilled in connecting with others in a wide variety of circumstances. Every single day, organizations in America spend about half a billion dollars on training. The value of this training is often diminished by the fact that giving one skills training session is rarely enough to change long-term behavior. In contrast, the skill building suggested in The Workplace Engagement Solution isn’t complicated, yet the long-term sustainability is guaranteed by marrying the suggested skill improvements to smart mentorship. Mentorship, when used consistently and broadly, provides the continuity that makes valuable behavioral changes a permanent part of the culture.
We work towards building organizations filled with talented people who can also connect, look people in the eye, ask skilled questions, and demonstrate active listening. We seek to grow talent that explores the world of change around them, defines needed change within themselves, and speaks the truth. And as our talent develops the skills that build strong support systems, new intelligence flows in from the outside world, bringing innovation and critical improvements to organizational performance. As they build stronger relationships within and without, the culture becomes unstoppable. Employees develop an unparalleled sense of gratitude that stems from their ongoing personal growth, the precious quality of their work relationships, and the un-shakable confidence that they can deal with anything the world of change dishes out to them. Yes, the reality will be messier than this bold vision suggests, but it is where we set our intentions that is so very important. And why shouldn’t we aspire to this?
Let’s start with the skills of drawing healthy attention to ourselves and, conversely, in giving high quality attention to others. Take a moment to think through this notion. With any customer contact role, learning how to draw healthy attention to ourselves and also to give that to others can never be over-applied. In fact, developing these skills within everyone is nothing short of transformative. How do we do this? We teach them the new skills and then we mentor them into sustained behavioral improvements. I call this the “Visibility Initiative” and it includes three specific skill development programs.
Connecting (Sales Training)
Good salespeople are masterful at connecting with others. They listen more actively and effectively. They methodically ask stakeholders the questions that uncover their needs and expectations. They are more aware of other people’s body language and tone of voice. Good sales-people put themselves into the mindset of giving and creating value. Skilled selling helps us to discover what makes people tick. It tends to connect us with passion and this makes us more effective in selling ideas, concepts, and innovations. This is the exact opposite of disengagement. In fact, it’s full engagement. It is a pervasive energy that awakens the team and larger environment. This is one of the many reasons why everyone benefits from sales training.
An across-the-board, inclusive mentoring practice is also critical. When we build strong mentors, it isn’t necessary to send employees to extensive and expensive training programs. If we give our people particularly effective, brief, yet profound learning opportunities followed by consistent mentorship, no time is wasted and the embedded day-today support ensures that the new skills translate into lasting behavioral changes.
The experience of selling can be very uncomfortable at first. Yet with consistent exposure and practice, it builds confidence and helps people become more comfortable in drawing attention to themselves as well as connecting with others. Sales training provides options and can increase income. Learning how to sell can even help someone move beyond their past.
When I joined the staffing industry at 24, I was afraid of my own shadow. I grew up in an abusive household and attention, for me, produced almost-violent responses. I stuttered. I often trembled. My voice quavered. All this meant that learning to be good at selling at my new job was a big challenge, but in my head I believed that I had to stick with it if I was going to survive. Within months, I was making good money while also becoming more confident in every other aspect of my life. My career choices forced me into visibility. That journey changed who I became. And I have watched visibility change thousands of other people’s lives as well.
I encourage selecting training programs that are consultative and question-driven versus solely pitch-driven. The world of making a pitch and overcoming objections is one of the reasons many people are frightened of selling. They have good reason to be. It is not a high integrity and satisfying method for engaging and influencing people. It rarely adds to the meaningfulness of our sales interactions or work. In our training programs, we find that many participants actually become enthusiasts when they realize that consultative selling is essentially good communications. It is the kind of human interaction that puts the buyer at ease. It leads to quality relationships.
Speaking Up (Presentation Skills Training)
As we continue, it is important to remember that the context for this conversation is about helping people get past the barriers they have in connecting with others. The skills of connecting are also the skills needed to gracefully move through change. Creating an environment that builds good presentation skills offers opportunities for people to present what is valuable to them. It opens doors to stronger career paths. It inspires colleagues to become more supportive of one another. It creates an environment that applauds the positive aspects within every employee. Strong presentation skills will create new brand ambassadors who are capable of articulating the multi-dimensional benefits of becoming a customer or an employee with your organization. The experience of becoming a better presenter also helps people become more comfortable in their own skin.
This kind of cultural mojo is not only attractive within the organization, but is magnetic to the outside world. Even better, building this skill set produces more resilience during difficult times. I have often witnessed the strong bonds that grow from a broadly inclusive presentation skills initiative, and these are the very bonds that can help valued talent stay when the chips are down. What an asset for any organization.
A few things are important when providing your employees with presentation skills training. For example, it ought to include actual presentations in front of a room, on camera, and via virtual platforms. The attributes of the program need to provide understanding around body language, posture, tone of voice, and content development. Many of us are clueless that human beings, for thousands of years, functioned without words. We relied on tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language for communication. Even today, most communication studies find that we respond more strongly to these three characteristics than the words coming out of our mouths. As a musician, I pay more attention to the music in people’s voices than the actual words. Many of us who want to connect more effectively have never paid attention to these traits because no one ever told us of their value. Consider the impact from improving our tone of voice, body language, and facial expressions into communication skills that help employees connect more effectively with each other, customers, and the outside world. Consider what will happen when our colleagues become more confident with presentation skills and start speaking up with ideas, innovation, and new value.
The importance of online presentation skills will only grow in the future. Right now, many organizations are building production studios to support most business development and client development meetings. It saves time and money. Developing the skills to be effective in these mediums will improve every aspect of performance and profit. Emerging technology behind virtual reality will also continue to transform training, business development, and employee meetings in ways that will require even more advanced skills in this area. For those who continue to resist change, who are perhaps still complaining about using social networking platforms that emerged 10 years ago, beware the dinosaur syndrome.
But rather than getting caught up with the changes ahead, the point of providing presentation skills training for all employees is especially about their abilities to connect, listen, organize thoughts, appreciate others, and generally build consistency within the culture as well as bench strength for the entire organization. Building and deepening these skills also requires continuity, which can take place in casual “lunch and learn” sessions in which employees can take turns presenting to each other. It is also easy and inexpensive to establish a Toastmasters chapter within your organization. All that you need are 20 people over the age of 18. If your business isn’t large enough, there are invariably Toastmasters Chapters nearby as well.
Long before organizations started seeing the value of across-the-board presentation training, Dale Carnegie touted the benefits to everyone who would listen. In his book The Art of Public Speaking, he said:
Students of public speaking continually ask, “How can I overcome self-consciousness and the fear that paralyzes me before an audience?” Did you ever notice in looking from a train window that some horses feed near the track and never even pause to look up at the thundering cars, while just ahead at the next railroad crossing a farmer’s wife will be nervously trying to quiet her scared horse as the train goes by? How would you cure a horse that is afraid of cars—graze him in a back-woods lot where he would never see steam-engines or automobiles? Or would you drive or pasture him where he would frequently experience the noise and commotion accompanying the machines?2
Mr. Carnegie’s point of view is so pure and simple, and yet it applies directly to what I am advocating here. For those of us who find connecting with people to be painful, jumping in, plunging into the water changes the game. Learning to stand in front of our peers will lead us to stop shying away from opportunities to connect. Without doing it, we can read about the subject for years and never attain any progress.
Beyond the fear are also some beautiful gifts. Plunging in together can be a very exciting, celebrative, and deeply bonding experience. All the while, the immersion into this new territory gives us an understanding of how to connect with the world around us in new and meaningful ways. And so I say, it’s time to speak up!
Community Building (Social Networking)
Gary Vaynerchuk wisely said, “When I hear people debate the ROI of social media it reminds me why so many businesses fail. Most businesses are not playing the marathon. They’re playing the sprint. They’re not worried about a lifetime value and retention. They’re worried about short-term goals.”3
I am continually surprised at the marginal competency most people have with using social media to build their careers, their businesses, and, more importantly, their communities. We can witness the marginal value social networking has in the workplace through the debates about its appropriateness and clumsy policies around social media use among employees. As they fumble around, social media is currently the fastest, most effective medium for growing a successful support system. Motivational speaker Jim Rohn famously said, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”4 We can recast this statement today by suggesting that your social media success is based on the average of the five thousand people in your network. Social media is where we live today.
My advocacy for universal social media skills came from a deeply personal experience. I characterize October 2008 as the business owner’s 9/11. Most of my entrepreneurial friends can recount where they were and what they were doing when they found out the economy was collapsing. My own company lost about a third of our contracts during the first week and the balance were gone by the end of the first month. We had a gentleman who sat in his office for hours working on business development with LinkedIn. After a year, the results were so minimal that I used that experience to support my own cynicism about investing in social media. My business development success up until that time had been based on proven formulas such as making sales calls, building face-to-face persistent sales skills, and engaging in lots of follow-up, lunches, personalized notes, and regular calls. All of a sudden, I had very little to show for it.
Out of some desperation and growing curiosity, I took a much closer look at social networking and realized that most of us were experiencing something like the following.
We receive a generic, automated note that says “I would like to add you to my connections.” We often wonder what they want and mostly feel they are likely trying to sell to us. We mindlessly accept the connection. We may briefly glance at their profile. We never hear from them again.
As a technical platform, social networking offers speed and access in ways that humble old sales skills such as prospecting, qualifying, knocking on doors, and getting in do not. The core problem with typical social networking competency is that the vast majority of it resembles junk mail and inserts very little warmth, attractiveness, and connectivity in our approach. So I designed a high-touch business development protocol into social networking, and the results were staggering. At the time I had maybe 400 connections that primarily included people that I already knew or people that I had never talked with. Today I have more than 11,000 connections, most of them active and more than 90 percent of them are people that I had never met or talked to previously. Today, most of our new business comes from social networking with referrals as a close second. I used social networking to build my publishing platform. My blogs now reach more than six million readers.
So much time is spent on studying generational differences and what to do about the Millennials; we actually have so much to learn from their success with social media. On 60 Minutes, Bill Whitaker asked Kim Kardashian, “Other people sing, or they do comedy. What’s your talent?”
Kim: “It is a talent to create a brand that is really successful off of getting people to like you for you.”
Whitaker: “You’ve turned you into an empire, worth in excess of a $100 million dollars, I’ve read.”
Kim: “I would think that involves some kind of talent.”5
Taylor Swift is the world’s master of building profoundly connected relationships with her fans through the savvy use of social media. Swift is part of a generation that used social media throughout their developmental years. What makes Taylor Swift so unique within the industry is that she builds these relationships not by touting her glory but by giving high-quality attention to her fans, asking them to share their needs and wants, their joys, fears, and dreams. They become part of a narrative that tightly bonds them to the star. Her social media practices are not only brilliant, her skills represent the types that I promote: high touch, engaging, and focused on the fans rather than on oneself. CEOs and marketing executives would do well to study her marketing genius. What does this have to do with employee engagement and personal change?
We want to not only promote social networking within our organizations, we want to give people the kinds of skills that help them rapidly connect with the people that can contribute to their personal and professional growth. For the last three years, we have taken the social networking process I created to rebuild Inspired Work and turned it into a social networking curriculum that is delivered to intact teams and professionals, both in classroom and virtual environments. We teach people how to define an online brand with their profile and their communications. The brand is designed to provide consistency and attractiveness. More importantly, we teach people to never rely on generic site-based communications ever again. We show people how to reach out to prospective connections with messages that are about them rather than about us. The communication progression begins with comfortable and casual dialogue, and mindfully builds the relationship to the point of a phone call or face-to-face meeting. For the more ambitious, the final training module gets them started with online publishing, blogging, and style differences across a broad series of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
The benefits of building social networking skills are endless. Human resources departments use social media to strengthen recruitment efforts while lowering costs. They quickly and easily establish new sources of business intelligence. They build relationships with other human resources organizations. They develop stronger careers by locating skilled mentors. Financial professionals stay abreast of innovation and trends. Others realize they actually love this form of community building and become skilled bloggers themselves.
But let us return to the steps involved in successful personal change. The obstacle “they’ll hurt me” accompanies drawing healthy attention to oneself. For the vast number of individuals who work very hard to avoid attention, this process can be life-changing. Simply pointing out the obstacle creates awareness and begins to remove some of the blind spots that lead to hiding in one’s own skin. Developing the actual skills can impact every aspect of organizational performance while transforming confidence levels. When we also add mentorship and peer forums to further develop the skills, we observe a new level of appreciation and awareness for one another.
Why do I consistently add the word “healthy” to attention? Organizations will generally have a number of employees who grew up in environments filled with negative attention. Biologically, the human nervous system requires attention to function in a healthy way. At the core, our nervous system doesn’t differentiate between good and bad attention. Consequently, those of us who grew up in negative circumstances will often find ways to get attention through negativity. These are the individuals who often create disruption during change and confront colleagues in inappropriate ways. Many of them are also significant contributors and revenue generators, so we put up with them. But as we develop healthy attention-getting skills within our talent, we provide opportunities to mentor and coach these valued team members so that they gain insight about how they are operating and what they can do to improve going forward.
This whole area of getting attention reveals the best and the worst in us. Some individuals may have such deep-seated negative behavior—or perhaps they simply don’t fit within the culture—that it will become clear that it is time to part ways. This is a good outcome. After taking all the necessary steps to turn a situation around, departure is not a loss; it is an improvement. For example, when we take intact teams through the Inspired Work Program, about 5 percent will self-select to leave within 30 days and 2 percent will be counseled out. Invariably, these are the individuals who are routinely discussed in briefings with our internal partners, taking up valuable time and energy. The partner may make statements such as “I don’t know if he is working out” or “She does nothing but attack progress and new ideas.” Countless managers are surprised by the comments and behaviors that emerge from employees who work in highly siloed environments after participating in our program. In essence, these developmental turning points give everyone the opportunity to examine where they are with attention, engagement, connectivity, and enthusiasm for growth. The process is transformative and improves the circumstances of establishing responsibility for all behavior.
Throughout the development process, leaders can contribute to raising the value of the outcomes by establishing their expectations for engagement, change, connecting with others, and building one’s confidence. Mentors should be briefed on desired improvements with team members. But this is often not even necessary. We find that when people go through the self-inquiry process, we are proposing they are far more willing to take the initiative to change, to develop their courage, and to ask for support. This is actually a healthier dynamic, one in which individual employees take full ownership of their own career success. But it is important to know that you should only promote sales, presentation, and networking skills to your people after they have engaged in self-inquiry exercises and found their internal motivation. Without this, developing talent can be exhausting and ineffective for all involved.
Throughout the process of developing these skills, it is important to teach the value of giving and also accepting praise. It is a time to praise employees who demonstrate courage. Those who step forward with significant fear of presenting, who not only live through the experience but consequently have a breakthrough, are the ones we most want to acknowledge and reward. They will become the most potent role models for those who are still frightened by the process of building these skills. So let your “rock stars” shine!
Compassion is also a key ingredient in making the experience as illuminating as possible. When giving feedback about presentations, about anything that requires courage, the last thing we want to do is give hurtful messaging. Award them for the courage it took to stand-up. If they are clearly afraid, save any critiques for later. Praise them again and then suggest ways that future presentations can be more effective. In the spirit of building a high-quality, healthy-attention environment, promote the practice of not taking anything personally. It is through the practice of not taking anything personally that everyone becomes more of a partner in learning how to connect at the highest levels.
The visibility initiative offers organizations an opportunity to create a strong and healthy relationship with the outside world, a richly rewarding interior world, and an environment that fosters unexpected growth. Some will question it, but many others will come to see the value despite their initial discomfort. You will also have brave pioneers who will plunge in easily and emerge with deep gratitude. These are your mentors.