What is a culture of connection and what does it do for the profitability of a company?

In your industry who is eating who for lunch? (yes you’ll understand what I mean if you read through the article.)

Years ago when I had my IT company we received a $1000,000 RFP. It was a bigger job than we ever had done before. We knew we had a good chance to win it. Everyone in the company worked on parts of it. The accounting department worked on the financials we had to submit with it. Our purchaser got best pricing from our product sources. Our trainers estimated the training costs Our word processing expert figured out how to respond in the format that was required.. I created a document and the verbiage that pulled everything together. We worked on it for a couple of weeks. We were close to deadline and one of our inside sales people offered to call and find out how late the office was open and drive it right to the location and deliver it. Twenty of us really worked together as a team because we had a common purpose, respected each others talents and abilities, and listened to each other’s suggestions. Our company had to meet with a committee and defend it like a doctoral dissertation. One of my salespeople and myself were the key people in that meeting. We had gone over the questions they had sent ahead and we were prepped. We went in and bowled them over with how much we were on the same wave length about how our company’s capabilities matched their needs. We were completing each other’s statements, sensing together when we needed additional clarification, working the committee like a couple of pros. It just flowed and it felt wonderful and exciting.

In this example from my own background I’ve experienced working as part of a team that connects. Each person contributed. No one watched the clock to see if it was 5pm. They were all about getting the project won. Each person was engaged and connected to each other. What are the three elements that come together to form this high level of engagement, enthusiasm and connection? Gerald M. Tomassian knows the answer to this question.

1. Purpose. People feel they are working toward something bigger than themselves. It captures their imagination and their motivation and helps them focus on a target outside themselves.
2. Respect. When each person is recognized as special and valuable, each individual feels worthy and unique.
3. Contribution. When each person feels his/her opinion is heard, even if there isn’t agreement, they feel a sense of belonging and giving. Listening, contributing, and accepting reinforce our bonds to others.

In the ebook “The Connection Culture: A New Source of Competitive Advantage” By Michael Lee Stallard the author defines a connection culture. He writes: “Unless the people who are part of a business feel a sense of connection—a bond that promotes trust, cooperation and esprit de corps—they will never reach their potential as individuals, nor will the organization." An organization with a high degree of connection has employees who are more engaged, more productive in their jobs, and less likely to leave the organization for a competitor. Organizations with greater connection also have employees who share more information with their colleagues and, therefore, help decision-makers make better-informed decisions and help innovators innovate. Connection is what transforms a dog-eat-dog environment into a sled dog team that pulls together. There are ways to learn more about your employees.

So what is connection anyway? When we interact with people, we generally feel that we connect with some and not with others. Phrases such as “we really connected” and “we just didn’t connect” are common in our daily conversations. Connection describes something intangible we sense in relationships. When connection is present, we feel energy, empathy, affirmation and are more open. When it is absent, we experience neutral or even negative feelings. Although we know what it’s like to feel connected on a personal level, few among us understand the effect connection has on us and on the organizations we work in.”

So if you grow a connection culture in your business, how would it help the bottom line?

• 32% more productivity per person according to some studies
• More employee retention, it cost 2 to 3 times an annual salary for someone new to be recruited, hired, trained and come up to speed
• The level of engagement among employees is directly connected to the level of customer loyalty according to many studies. Loyal customers refer more, sing your praises in word of mouth advertising and social media
• Your customer acquisition costs go down, It costs 5 times as much to get a new customer than to keep an existing one, according to the finding of Frederick Reichheld, Bain & Co,
• A 5% improvement in customer retention translates into a doubling of margins, same source
• If a majority of your customers are predictably loyal, you can buy or staff up in predictable patterns - saving you money in the long run
• Loyal customers buy more and cost less to service
• Loyal customers don’t require heavy discounts, they accept higher prices because they understand the value of the relationship and the product/service
• More fun at work, less stress, less money spent on sick time, late arrivals, etc. Save some time when it's time to run payroll by using employee time clock software.
  
• They innovate more and create new products/service/processes that help move the company forward and gain/maintain market share
• They take initiative and handle more responsibility allowing owners to take worry-free vacations, ‘think days’ for strategic planning, and leadership training, ultimately allowing the company to grow exponentially

We did win that RFP.

If you are not fostering a ‘connection culture’ in your company, and if you don’t think it can be a competitive advantage, then your head is in the sand. Your competitors who do will eat you for lunch.

I’d love to read your comments and experiences on this topic.

Have you ever found yourself with the proverbial “foot in your mouth” because of something you said?  We all do that sometimes – and often in situations where we then feel foolish or embarrassed.  I once heard a great way to filter your thoughts before they come out of your mouthand to consider what you are going to say before you say it.

Before you speak, ask yourself first, “Is it true?”  Meaning, is what you are going to say a truth …. Or is it a rumor, or gossip, or something that you are spreading that doesn’t merit discussion?

Secondly, ask yourself, “Is it kind?”  Who will be hurt if you speak your thought out loud?  Is it a kindness to speak it, or hurtful?

Last, ask yourself, “Is it necessary?”  Do you really need to say it?  What would happen if you didn’t?  Does what you are planning to say create positive action or unintended consequences?

This simple routine for considering what you are doing to say – BEFORE you say it – will ensure that you are always a positive influence to those around you.   Using this simple routine might mean that you stop gossip rather than extending it; that you curb the impulse to share an exaggerated story. In asking yourself if what you are going to say is true, kind, and necessary, Diversity speaking behaviors and encouraging others to do the same.

I have a client who struggles with her place within a management team.   She tends to think faster than most, and as a result also talk first and is often the first to raise her hand or react to an idea in a meeting.   Together, we discussed a new technique that she successfully used when with groups of people.  She simply counts to five before she speaks. In that way, she can allow the space around her to slow down, she can consider what she is going to say, and she can apply this test as well – is it kind, is it true, and is it necessary?   When she does speak, then, her words serve her well, and she has become known in that management team as someone who is wise, thoughtful, and kind.

Have you considered how you can apply this simple filter to what you are going to say?  How might it make a difference in your interactions?  Let us hear from you!

Henry has a decision to make. The disgruntled customer in front of him has a valid point. There had been a mix up on the part of Henry’s service team and things had not gone smoothly. It wasn’t the end of the world but the customer had been inconvenienced once and now the ‘fix’ is going to inconvenience this customer again. Henry feels that that the extra discount and consideration that the customer is asking for is not unreasonable. How can this be handled? How would your company handle it? Using a centralized leadership model or a distributed leadership model?

Centralized Leadership Resolution

Henry has to contact a manager. The manager has to stop what she is doingcome to where the customer is, listen to the story, hear the customer’s request, calculate if it’s reasonable and make a decision. Meanwhile Henry is standing there listening and waiting and being unproductive. Then Henry does what is necessary to put through the orders to accomplish the decision. Plenty of time has passed and the customer is thinking about all of his time that is being wasted. If the customer is still not happy, he might ask to escalate his request to yet another higher level manager. His blood pressure is rising if he’s not satisfied and you can be sure all his friends will hear about how they should stay away from this company and especially Henry.

Distributed Leadership Resolution

Henry has been trained and empowered to make decisions on the spot. He sees that the customer’s request falls within what he has been authorized to decide himself. He graciously agrees with the customer and puts through the order immediately. The customer is pleased that it has taken only a minute and his needs have been listened to and satisfied with no hassle. He considers Henry his new best friend and tells all his friends that Henry’s company acknowledges and takes care of their screw-ups without drama. He says he’ll be back when he needs to buy again.

In an organization you can have the leadership be centralized in top management or you can have it be distributed among all the staff. Distributed leadership is when your employees are empowered to make decisions that benefit the customer and accelerate the operations of the company. Distributed leadership is a characteristic of high performance teams. When people are given the latitude to make their own decisions, they try new things. Initiative increases, productivity increases, morale increases because people feel trusted. The leadership model, whether centralized or distributed, is a characteristic of a company’s culture and it is determined at the top. A micromanaging executive cannot generate a culture of distributed leadership because he’s concerned about maintaining control. Distributed leadership is about passing control to people on the front line so customers get taken care of easily, less time is wasted on everybody’s part, costs therefore go down and customer loyalty goes up. Shifting your company from a centralized leadership model to a distributed leadership model is difficult because of the habits that need to be changed. Habits come from attitudes. So the underlying attitudes need to be changed as well, especially at the top. But companies do it all the time because the benefits are so great.

Here are some things to keep in mind if you want to shift your company’s model towards distributed leadership:

Leadership needs the most help in changing attitudes. They no longer manage their areas like fiefdoms. They need to learn how to coach and collaborate, rather than command and control. They have to give up power and change their views on authority. They need to be coached because the shift is not easy. Now their role is more service and support. Others below them cannot make the shift if their managers don’t shift in their own roles.

People need to be developed. You want people to make decisions when before they didn’t? It’s not like flipping a switch. They are going to grow into it, test the new system to see if it is real or just lip service. They will gradually learn to trust their abilities and that management will trust them.

Strong but not suffocating operational guidelines help people make decisions that benefit the company as well as the customers. Sharing the vision and goals of the company/department and especially the reasons why those are written the way they are helps the newly empowered staff make better decisions. Training the staff becomes a big part of the picture. Having clearly defined company values provides structure that guides staff and defines the brand of the company. (double benefit) Sharing some of the finances of the company’s operations helps the frontline people make better decisions while weighing the customer’s needs and the company’s costs. People can’t make decisions in a vacuum so transparency and training is a prerequisite to shifting to this model.

Expect mistakes. When people are trying out their wings, they will make mistakes. Be careful to treat mistakes as learning experiences. Don’t kill the program or eliminate the employee when a mistake happens. You’ve just paid for their training (learning from the mistake). So point it out for what it is, learn from it, and move on. The number of mistakes will decrease as people learn from them.

Look at your hiring practices. Not everyone may work well in a distributed leadership model. The change might be too much for some. Existing employees will weed themselves out. Make sure when you hire new people, you select candidates that are self-leaders, who are itching to serve customers, who can think for themselves and make decisions. There are plenty of assessments that can help with that. Contact me if you want to explore this further.

Companies large, medium and small are moving in the direction of distributed leadership because of all the advantages, reduced costs, time savings, fewer employees in management roles, greater customer loyalty, increased morale and employee retention, great PR and word of mouth, increased market share. Companies like Zappos, Jet Blue, Southwest Airlines, Best Buy, Nordstrom’s, Ritz Carlton Hotels, and Disney have turned it into a unique value proposition that helps them rise above the competition.

If you don’t move in the direction of distributed leadership, will you be left behind by one of your competitors who does?

Have you steered your company towards distributed leadership? Or has your company steered you in that direction? We’d love to learn more about your experiences. Thanks for your comments.

I was rereading the book “Good to Great” by Jim Collins the other day and it occurred to me that with all the talk about sustainability in business we should revisit some of those basic concepts covered in that book. The chapter on Fifth Level Leaders really hits home with what it takes to create organizations that are excellent and have a prayer to be sustainable.

An interesting question came to my mind.

“What if our current elected officials adopted the concepts of a Fifth Level Leader?”

What is a Fifth Level Leader? It is a leader who has two major attributes. The first is a will to succeed no matter what is happening. The second is paradoxical to the first. That is to have a great amount of humility and modesty.

The will to succeed is for the organization not for oneself. This is a foreign concept to most leaders since they are usually focused on themselves first and then the organization. Fifth Level leaders work hard at whatever needs to be done and will not settle for anything less than what will meet the long term objectives of the organization.

What would happen if political leaders became so entrenched in making the organizations they serve succeed that they did not even worry about re-elections because the results would be so overwhelmingly successful that re-election would come automatically? When service is placed above selfgood things happen.

The humility needed to be a Fifth Level Leader is the ability to give credit to everyone and everything else when things go well. When things go wrong, a mirror is placed in front of the leader and blame is apportioned to him alone. The organization’s Buck stops with the leader.

Fifth Level Leaders leave the place better than they found it and cultivate the next generation of leaders to carry on the organization. As Collins says, “most leaders hope the place implodes after they leave so it makes them only look better”. This short-sighted thinking of a lot of leaders does not create sustainability.

Is your organization led by Fifth Level Leaders? If not, what are you doing about it? Although it is not easy to find or develop this type of leader, a Fifth Level leader  will only improve the organization. How will you get from Good to Great?

We look forward to your comments on this kind of leadership.

Since at least the time of Plato and Socrates some 2400 years agomankind has been implored to “know thyself,” in life and in business. Individually, this is often taken to mean knowing your strengths so you can leverage them and knowing your areas of weakness so you can improve them or compensate for them. But it involves much more than this. While at the business level, many organizations struggle with getting more done with fewer people and less resources. As your employees have changed roles or added responsibilities, you need to have confidence that you have the right people in the right positions to get the best possible results.

In some cases you do have the right team members in the right places and in some cases you probably made some wrong choices, as we all have. Companies forced to reorganize made quick decisions resulting in people landing in the wrong roles. Likewise, companies that have experienced significant growth have ended up with similar staffing outcomes. Diagnostic assessments can help you identify

performance gaps and help your company effectively understand and align the talents, behaviors, and motivators of every employee. Having the right employee in the right position is as critical to each individual’s success as it is to the success of the entire company.

The first step in bridging performance gaps is for management to commit to a people development process for employees. It should be based on the skills, attitudes, and behaviors necessary for them to do their jobs successfully. If the size of the organization is large enough, it can be implemented by HR. Regardless, the objectives and strategies of developing employees, and how those emp

loyees are going to help drive results, needs to be owned by management.

After commitment has been gained and the objectives have been identified, diagnostic assessments can help determine individual performance gaps, since developmental opportunities will be employee-specific. Assessments can also be utilized as an important tool for creating skill development as well attitudinal and behavioral improvement while eliminating employee and organizational resistance to change.

There are a multitude of individual assessment tools available, but regardless of which we utilize, when working with clients we focus diagnostically on the whole person as defined by these three key areas:

1. WHAT natural talents do your employees possess? An analysis of TALENTS gets at a person’s ability to do things, how they make decisions and interact with the world around them, as well as how they perceive themselves.
2. WHY are your employees motivated to use their natural talents, based on their personal motivators and drivers? An analysis of MOTIVATORS gets at why people do things. Everyone has their own unique mix of personal drivers and motivators that help guide them toward success. Understanding what really drives a person is a crucial element of success.
3. HOW do your employees prefer to use their natural talents, based on their preferred behavioral style? An analysis of BEHAVIORS gets at a person's manner of doing things; how they do things. Since each individual has their own unique preferences and habits for how they like to behave, this understanding is crucial when working with team members as a leader or a manager, or in an environment that requires conflict resolution.

Establishing new behaviors requires that the employee feels able to adopt those behaviors and feels comfortable doing so. A well-designed people-development process focused on objectives leveraging diagnostic assessments drives long-term change. After the completion of a development process, we consistently see high levels of adaptable change with sustainable results. To learn how to achieve these types of sustainable results for your people and your business give us a call or visit http://danceofbusiness.com/drivingir/whohow-do-we-help/our-approach/individual-assessments

When you are looking in the mirror, you are looking at the problem. But, remember, you are also looking at the solution.

I was at breakfast with a friend the other day and we were talking about networking and building our respective businesses.

“I don’t think I’m threatening enough.” He said.

Excuse me. I wasn’t sure I heard him right so I asked him again. He reiterated that a very successful sales coach told him he’d build his business much bigger if he was more threatening.

“You’re too nice a guy”he said. “Everyone likes you and feels very comfortable with you so it’s hard for you to switch into sales mode.”

My friend felt very uncomfortable with this. He didn’t feel comfortable switching into “sales mode”. He genuinely likes people and doesn’t like to pressure anyone into a sale.

This pressuring, “sales mode” attitude is why most of us hate salespeople. It’s also why most people are uncomfortable selling.  Hard driving sales tactics and techniques are just not who we are. They make us uncomfortable and make our prospective clients put up a great big wall between us.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in, and coach people, on sales processes and techniques that increase the likelihood of making the sale. However, these don’t need to be aggressive and unnatural.  These can help you to build relationships instead of tearing them down.

Here are 3 tips for a no-pressure, natural, relationship building sale:

• Don’t throw up The most important thing to all of us is…ourselves. So when we meet someone new at a networking event, or we meet with a prospect, why do we show up and throw up? Why do we insist on talk about ourselves so much before we know anything about them? If people are most interested in themselves, we should spend 80% of the time asking them open-ended questions to find out more about them. They’ll love you for it and it’ll have the added benefit of telling you what their “hot buttons” are and if they’re a true prospect.

• Consult, don’t sell People don’t want to be sold. They want their problems solved. Instead of selling them, try to help them solve their problems. This shows them what you can do to help better than a canned sales pitch or a PowerPoint presentation. Some people are concerned that would mean giving their services away for free. However, spending 15 minutes or an hour helping someone solve their problems seems like a small investment to make to gain a new client.

• Are you open? "Are you open to some help with that?” If you haven’t “thrown up” and you’ve “consulted” instead of “sold”, closing the sale becomes much easier. Instead of closing hard using a traditional sales technique, all you have to do is ask this one simple, non-threatening question. Most people are “open to some help”. It doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to make the sale, but it does mean you’re much more likely to openly discuss the potential to do so.

Selling this way will ensure that if you don’t make the sale, you’ll at least make a friend. And friends refer other friends. You win either way.

What’s worked for you? What tips do you have to make the sale and make a friend at the same time? We’d love to hear them.