Big Presentation Coming Up? Make it Your Best One Yet

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A Q&A with CEO Mark Murphy

There isn’t a presenter alive that doesn’t want their audience absolutely riveted; sitting on the edge of their seats with rapt attention. Yet, the reality in most presentations is that the audience is sitting back, kind of relaxed and spacing in and out.

Here Leadership IQ CEO and best-selling author, Mark Murphy, shares some ways anyone can deliver a killer presentation.

Q: You say storytelling is a critical element in delivering killer presentations that really catch and keep an audience’s attention. How does that work?

MM: It’s all about dopaminergic response. Basically, when something really interesting, like a good story, happens, the brain starts to light up. And if the story is really exciting, the amygdala gets involved (that’s what you want) and says, “Wow! This is fascinating stuff! I’ve got to start activating some of the other chemicals in the brain—we’ve got to pay close attention to this!” So it goes and starts activating dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter for highly pleasurable things, highly attentive things.

And whoa! Once dopamine gets involved people really start to pay attention. Plus dopamine helps sear whatever it is folks are experiencing (in this case, your killer presentation) into their memory so they don’t forget it. So a great story is a way of getting the brain to say, “I am really engaged with this. I don’t want to miss a word that’s being said here. I am going to remember every word I hear.”

Next time you’re listening to someone else’s presentation, pay attention and see if you experience any moments that leap out at you and just get seared into your brain. Where you walk out of there quoting something you just heard to everyone you run into that day. If you don’t have that kind of experience then it is likely that the person speaking didn’t get anywhere near activating anything beyond your prefrontal cortex. They didn’t get into your limbic system, and they certainly didn’t excite your amygdala.

Q: So what’s the secret to telling a great story that excites the amygdala?

MM: There are a number of different ways to tell stories that really get people’s attention. Here’s one that uses an unexpected twist. Imagine you began a presentation by saying, “Six months ago, we upgraded our servers. Our website visitor capacity doubled. Our website loading speed tripled. And our profits dropped by 80%.” You can do something like that. Take your audience in one direction and then all of a sudden take them in a totally different direction. That’s one of those things that will make people’s heads spin a bit and get them to think, “Wait a minute, did I just hear what I thought I heard? I better start listening more closely.” You can also tell stories that build an emotional connection or introduce a startling fact.

Q: What’s one big thing to avoid when giving a presentation?

MM: Narcissism. When you talk about others more than you talk about yourself, that’s good. But when you talk about yourself more than you talk about others, that’s bad. But that can be challenging in some presentation situations. Leadership IQ teaches presenters to apply the Narcissism Ratio which is a little check that signals when it’s time to tell a story or to talk about somebody or something other than yourself. That way you don’t spend 20 minutes talking about all of the awards your company has won – something about which your audience probably doesn’t care. And it directs you to talk about something about which they do care, something that’s really going to activate them and get them on the edge of their seats.

To apply the Narcissism Ratio to your next presentation, keep track of how many times you say “I” or “me” versus the number of times you say “customers” or “employees” or “you” or “they” or anybody other than you. It takes some practice, but it’s really quite an effective way to keep your finger on the pulse of where your presentation is going as it happens. That way you are always on track and making sure your  audience stays fully engaged.

For more tips on delivering memorable presentations, join us for our upcoming webinar The Secrets of Killer Presentations.

A professional corporate writer with over 20-years’ experience crafting just the right words for executives to use in challenging situations, Lyn is a passionate and adept qualitative researcher. Her seasoned skills as an interviewer make her quick to identify the unique attitudes and behaviors that define an organization. Lyn’s extensive expertise in public relations and persuasive communications translates strongly in her contributions to Leadership IQ’s custom-training programs.

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Delivering Presentations: The Rules of Dating Apply Here Too!

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Imagine you’re out on a date and your goal is to really impress. You want to be the only person in the room your date can see or hear. Given that goal, what would you say is the best way to start the date:

Start the date by sharing your life history including all your great accomplishments and the things that matter most to you.Start the date by talking to your date about the kinds of things he/she finds valuable.

Now, in the dating world, pretty much everybody gets it right, you talk about “them.” But here’s the shocker: once we move into the world of business presentations; another place where winning quick audience favor is critical, pretty much everybody gets it wrong. Because instead of using what we know works, most folks begin their business presentations by talking about “themselves.” In fact; over 90% of the presentations we’ve studied began with a slide that looks like this…

And unless you’re attending a narcissist’s convention, this is just a terrible slide and horrible start to your presentation. You don’t even have to read every bullet point to feel the automatic turn off. This slide is all about “you”: when you were founded, how many clients you have, how big you are, how many awards you’ve won, etc. If you used a personalized version of this slide in a dating situation, I guarantee you’d be sitting alone at the bar before the first round of drinks arrived.

It doesn’t matter if you’re presenting to one person or a room of a thousand, the only way to grab your audience’s attention is to spend the first 10 minutes addressing issues that matter to them. Neurologically, those first 10 minutes are when your audience forms their opinions about you. It’s when their brains absorb all the incoming data (that would be you) and then decide whether or not to allocate any more neurological energy to listening to that big noise coming at them (again, that’s you). And because you know this little tidbit of knowledge that comes to us from the world of brain science, you can use it to your advantage.

Dating Research that Proves Affect of Opening with Messages About “Them”

Let’s jump back to dating for a minute. Perhaps you’ve heard of a free online dating site called OkCupid that was created by a couple of guys who met while at Harvard. Now, I married my high school sweetheart, so I don’t go there trolling for dates. But back when the founders were still actively blogging, I used to check out OKTrends and I was pretty impressed with the statistical research they shared. Like the study where they looked at the kinds of words men use in their opening messages to women, to learn what does (and doesn’t) generate a reply. As you can imagine, some of the opening messages were incredibly cheesy. For example, some of the words the study revealed that DON’T work (i.e. women did not reply to the man’s message) were: “sexy”, “beautiful” and “hot.”

I’m happy to report that there’s a redeeming flip side to this. Because there were some words and phrases the guys used in their emails to women that generated huge numbers of responses.  For example:  “You mention…”, “noticed that…” and “curious what…” all got fantastic responses (statistically, messages with those phrases get double the normal response rates). So basically, if a guy appears to have read a woman’s profile, and he shows knowledge and interest in the things she’s interested in, he’s got a much greater chance of hearing back from her. A good “guy message” would sound like this: “You mention that you like cooking and I noticed that you travelled to Italy. I’m curious what your favorite region was in terms of cuisine?” That’s a guy I might let my daughter go out with—when she gets to dating age, and luckily, that’s far in the future.

The lesson in all this is: whether you’re dating or making million-dollar presentations, start by talking about the other person and their interests. Let them know that you know what they want to hear about, that you are sensitive to what they want to gain from this interaction and that you care about the same things that they care about.

In my upcoming webinar, The Secrets of Killer Presentations, you’ll learn how to assess the four personality types you’ll find in your audience so you can begin every presentation knowing exactly what your audience wants to hear from you. And if you’re addressing multiple personality types, you’ll learn how to time a presentation to safeguard those different attention spans so you know when to deliver the bottom line, when to be to linear, when to stick to the facts and when to get warm and fuzzy to build an emotional connection.

An expert in aligning goals and people to create thriving organizations, Mark leads one of the world’s largest studies on leadership and employee engagement.

Mark’s award-winning work has been featured numerous times in publications including The Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Washington Post. His media appearances include CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News and NPR. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, University of Rochester and University of Florida. Mark is the author of five books including the McGraw-Hill international bestsellers, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More and Hard Goals. Mark’s most recent book, Hiring for Attitude, reflects the team’s latest research and insight into how hiring decisions can align with engagement goals and culture characteristics.

Leadership IQ’s turnaround, culture change, and performance enhancement through employee engagement work has been recognized in a diverse set of industries including healthcare, financial services, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and hospitality. From his roots as a turnaround specialist, Mark created Leadership IQ to address problems in performance before they hit the bottom line.

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Consider these 4 Communications Styles When Delivering your Next Presentation

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You may be presenting to a group from within the same industry or even department, but that doesn’t mean everyone in your audience has the same preferred communications style. Different people have very different ways they prefer to give and receive information. Which means that the kind of delivery that engages some people may send others in your audience scrambling for the exits.  One of the big challenges when presenting to a mixed group is correctly adapting your communication style so your whole audience stays focused on what you’re saying.

To make it easier, we distilled it down into four basic default communication styles people can fall into. These are not personality types; this deals specifically with how you like to give and get information. Here’s a brief description of each default communication style:

The Intuitive type refers to those people who are not terribly emotional, but who are quite free form. Intuitive types don’t necessarily like things to flow from A to B to C and so on. They like to cut to the chase, so it’s best to skip directly to the end: what’s the real value you are bringing this person today? If you can get the Intuitive types in your audience to buy in on the end result right away upfront, you’ve got a much better shot at getting them to listen to all the other stuff you’ve got to say.The Analytical type refers to those people who prefer things unemotional but linear. These are your “just the facts” kinds of people. They don’t want to hear a lot of warm-and-fuzzy feeling words, so don’t waste the Analytical-type communicator’s time by telling them you understand their pain; instead just give them the numbers and data they need and want.The Functional type refers to people who generally like their communication to be emotional and linear. These folks like to have control of the process so it’s always best to move in a linear fashion: from A, to B, to C and then follow through right to the end. If you try to skip around in your presentation or jump to the enticement of your “wow” finish, you risk losing the attention of the Functional-type communicator.The Personal relater is both free form and emotional. These are the folks who want the warm-and-fuzzy emotional approach.   So feel free to dive right into all the details such as: Who else is going to be involved/ how getting involved will make them “feel”/ who else they will touch by getting involved, etc.  You can’t just come in and dump a bunch of facts on personal-type communicators, even if they are startling facts. These folks are still going to need a more interpersonal connection.

Even from these brief descriptions of the four communications styles, the conundrum is obvious: they all want something different. The good news is that, by knowing what the 4 types are, you can plan your next presentation knowing you need to hit all 4 types in your delivery. And we’ll teach you how to do that in our upcoming live webinar The Secrets of Killer Presentations.  But here’s a quick little take away secret you can start using now:

When great speakers present to a new or unknown audience, they assume all four communications styles are present. And there’s a certain order they present their information, in order to communication to each style. They begin by addressing the Intuitive types, then they speak to the Analytical types, then to the Functional types and they close by speaking to the Personal types. We see this often in presidential speeches or wherever there’s a mixed audience of preferred communication styles. Working in this order, from the Intuitive to the Analytical to the Functional to the Personal addresses attention span: Intuitives have the shortest attention span, then the Analyticals, then the Functionals and the Personals have the longest attention spans.

An expert in aligning goals and people to create thriving organizations, Mark leads one of the world’s largest studies on leadership and employee engagement.

Mark’s award-winning work has been featured numerous times in publications including The Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Washington Post. His media appearances include CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News and NPR. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, University of Rochester and University of Florida. Mark is the author of five books including the McGraw-Hill international bestsellers, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More and Hard Goals. Mark’s most recent book, Hiring for Attitude, reflects the team’s latest research and insight into how hiring decisions can align with engagement goals and culture characteristics.

Leadership IQ’s turnaround, culture change, and performance enhancement through employee engagement work has been recognized in a diverse set of industries including healthcare, financial services, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and hospitality. From his roots as a turnaround specialist, Mark created Leadership IQ to address problems in performance before they hit the bottom line.

View the original article here

How Can Leaders and Managers Make Performance Reviews More Meaningful?

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A Q&A with CEO Mark Murphy

Q: Leadership IQ’s research into the effectiveness of performance reviews produced some pretty discouraging results. What are the exact numbers?

MM: We did a study of a little over 48,000 people and only 13% of managers and employees thought their year-end reviews were effective. And by effective I don’t mean that they liked the experience, but rather only 13% said their review had a positive impact on their future performance. And just as disturbing, only 6% of CEOs thought the performance reviews their organization used were effective. That’s a lot of resources being funneled into something that is producing more or less zero benefit, and probably even creating new problems. Poorly conducted performance reviews are a big demotivator for most employees.

Q: What can leaders do?

MM: There’s actually a lot that can be done. Starting with the process side, there are factors like: What kind of content you should have in this conversation? What order the conversation should take place? What is the correct basic structure of this conversation? Leadership IQ has specific scripts we teach for talking to high and middle performers, which are really different than the low performer conversations you should be having. And then there’s the development side of a performance review, knowing the right way to plan with the employee for what comes next.

Q: What’s one of the biggest things most performance reviews miss?

MM: Attitude. I see this all the time where a manager gives somebody a 5 out 5 on a performance review and then three months later he’s calling HR saying, “Oh, hey, listen, I need to fire this person.” And HR comes back and says, “What do you mean you need to fire them?  You just gave them a 4 or 5 on their performance review, they just got glowing marks, how could you possibly need to fire them?” And the manager says, “Well, you know, it’s for attitude, it’s for reason that our system doesn’t really evaluate. So I had to give them good marks because they have great skills, but their bad attitude is just killing me and the whole department is suffering.”

Q: Why do so many reviews skip evaluating attitude?

MM: There’s a big misunderstanding about what objective means and it keeps a lot of managers from realizing that attitude absolutely is measurable. Objective means verifiable and observable, it does not mean quantifiable. So just because you can’t assign a number to something, like a bad attitude, like gossip or stirring up conflict, it does not mean it is not a valid issue. Attitude leaks out in behavior, and attitude can be measured to the extent that it emerges in the form of those behaviors. And, of course, behaviors can be verified and observed. Managers may not be able to mind read, we can’t climb into people’s heads and divine what our folks are thinking, but we can observe their behaviors and determine what’s appropriate and what’s not.

Great organizations like Southwest Airlines, Ritz Carlton and Disney; they all regularly assess attitudinal issues. And it’s those attitudes that make those companies so famous and so successful. So this is one of the things you have to be crystal clear about. You don’t want your managers who are conducting reviews avoiding tackling issues related to attitude because they think attitude can’t be measured. That’s just sending low performers with bad attitudes back out there with strong validation that they are welcome to keep on exhibiting those bad attitudes. It’s just a fact that too many managers mistakenly avoid tackling attitudinal issues because their definition of objective is distorted.

Q: Employees tend to hate performance reviews as much as the managers who have to give them. What can managers do to make it easier on employees?

MM: A lot. You can start by making sure that you call in your high performers first. Let them take that walk into the review with full knowledge that they are in the first group and that defines them as a high performer. Not only is this going to make them feel great, it’s going to send a clear message to your low performers. Especially when you next call in your middle performers.

Also, if you meet with low performers first, they are going to go back out there and interact with their peers and have all kinds of negative things to say: lots of denial, blame and excuses. They’re going to be angry and they’ll want to take others down with them. You take that power away from low performers when you meet with them last, because by then you’ve already got all these high and middle performers out there who are feeling pretty good about things. They’re not going to be interested in listening to low performers gripe and bash. And that’s going to make low performers feel the sting of a poor review even more.

Q: What’s one of the biggest mistakes that happens in low performer reviews?

MM: One of the worst things you can do, and lots of managers do it, is use a compliment sandwich. And that’s a compliment followed by some corrective feedback followed by another compliment. It sounds something like this: “You know, listen, Bob, you’re just so talented.  You’re the smartest person on the team. You get nasty and caustic when we’re in these team meetings and it’s really hurting our morale. You’re just so smart. I want everybody else to see how smart you are.” So basically, if I’m Bob, what I just heard is “I’m great, I’m smart. I hear a compliment. Then I hear Charlie Brown’s teacher (“wawawa”), but, wow, then I hear another compliment, the boss just said he wants everyone to know how smart I am. Oh boy. I’m great. I am golden.” The compliment sandwich is a giant fail. No one hears the corrective feedback shoved in the middle of two compliments.  The only effective way to deliver corrective feedback is to state the facts.

Attend our webinar Taking the Pain Out of Performance Reviews and learn more specific scripts for talking to high, middle and low performers. Learn about the other mistakes managers make when reviewing employees and some simple fixes you can make to conduct more effective reviews.

A professional corporate writer with over 20-years’ experience crafting just the right words for executives to use in challenging situations, Lyn is a passionate and adept qualitative researcher. Her seasoned skills as an interviewer make her quick to identify the unique attitudes and behaviors that define an organization. Lyn’s extensive expertise in public relations and persuasive communications translates strongly in her contributions to Leadership IQ’s custom-training programs.

View the original article here

Why do so many goals end up in failure?

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A Q&A with CEO Mark Murphy

Q: Why do so many goals end up in failure?

MM: Many corporations have formal goal-setting systems, like SMART Goals, to help employees develop and track their goals. But a big part of the problem as to why those goals are not being realized is that people and organizations get so hung up on making sure their goal-setting forms are filled out correctly, checking and double checking that their goals are realistic and achievable, that they neglect to answer the single most important question: Is this goal even worth it? And then, if it is ‘worth it,’ if it is a goal worthy of the challenges and opportunities we face, we next need to ask: How do we sear this goal into our minds, make it so critical to our very existence that no matter what obstacles we encounter, we will not falter in our pursuit of this goal? That’s why Leadership IQ teaches HARD Goals.

Q: Why do HARD Goals work?

MM: Leadership IQ research found a distinguishing characteristic in the people who set and achieve extraordinary goals. And it isn’t daily habits, or raw intellect, or how many numbers you can write on a worksheet that defines that success. It’s actually the engagement of your brain. When your brain is humming with a goal, as happens with HARD Goals, everything you need to take your goal and run with it falls into place. But when your brain is ho-hum about your goals, all the daily rituals and discipline in the world won’t help you succeed.

The way to achieve any goal (health, financial, career, business, etc.) is to seek HARD goals—so whether you set a goal to save money, lose weight, hit a sales target or invent better products, every goal you set has to meet the following criteria:

Heartfelt—you’ve got to have an emotional attachment to your goal; it has to scratch an existential itch.Animated—goals need to be motivated by a vision, picture or movie that plays over and over in your mind.Required—it needs to feel so urgently necessary that you have no other choice but to start acting on them right here, right now.Difficult—goals need to drag you out of your comfort zone, activating your senses and attention.

Q: That’s quite different from SMART Goals, generally defined as: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-Limited. What do you say to someone who says, “But everyone else is using SMART Goals, why shouldn’t I?”

MM: Look, from Einstein to Bill Gates to the late, great Steve Jobs, the greatest thinkers and leaders in history saw opportunities that others didn’t see. The people who achieve the extraordinary don’t just use the same warmed-over ideas as everyone else and they don’t just do what everyone else is doing. They are bold and they do what is right for them, and part of that is in how they set and go after their goals.

Steve Jobs made a career out of doing extraordinary things that quite frequently others said couldn’t be done, and trust me, no goal he ever set would pass the Achievable and Realistic test for a SMART Goal. He had the courage to change his mind, to say “this isn’t working for me” and to try something new.

Lots of leaders and organizations say they want to take the world by storm, to create the next iPod or whatever great thing it is, but then they go right back to running things like they’ve always done. And if you do things the same way they’ve always been done, you’re going to keep getting the same results.

Too often SMART Goals act as impediments to, not enablers of, bold action, and actually encourage mediocre and poor performance. “Hold on a minute,” SMART goals seem to say. “Don’t push beyond your resources, don’t bite off more than you can chew, play it safe and stay within your limitations.” Even a factor like Specific, which sounds okay, can suck the life out of goals. For most people Specific means turn your goal into a number and jot it down (e.g. I want to lose a specific weight, like 27 pounds, or meet a specific sales target, or whatever).

But that definition of “specific” pales in comparison to the intensely-pictured Animated goals of achievers like Jobs and others. Sure they’ve got a number, but they also know what their body looks like 27 pounds from now, what clothes they’ll be wearing, even how they’ll feel when they no longer carry the weight. For them, 27 pounds isn’t an abstract concept or a number on a form; it’s a vision into the future that feels so real, it’s as if it’s already happened. And SMART Goals just don’t do that. However, there are steps you can take to make SMART Goals more powerful.

Q: As leaders and organizations head into 2013 what goal-setting advice can you offer them?

MM: It’s a truly unsettling world right now. But we all know that denial, blame, excuses and anxiety are not going to make it any better. We need to harness the energy of this moment, scary though it may be, and turn it into greatness. Whether we’re going to grow our company, lose weight, run a marathon or change the whole darn world, we’re going to have to saddle up a HARD Goal and ride that sucker at a full gallop.

Too many leaders say “I have had this training,” whether it’s SMART Goals or something else, and that’s where they stay, indefinitely, even if it falls short of inspiring themselves and their employees to be more effective and to constantly reach for better and better results. Don’t be afraid to ask, “Is what I’m doing getting the best results?” And if it’s not, if you’re not getting the results you want, or you just keep getting the same results over and over again, then dare to debunk the standard practices that aren’t working for you and try something different.

Get started on your HARD Goals by attending our webinar Beyond SMART Goals. Learn how to push yourself and your people to achieve the extraordinary, even in the toughest of times.

A professional corporate writer with over 20-years’ experience crafting just the right words for executives to use in challenging situations, Lyn is a passionate and adept qualitative researcher. Her seasoned skills as an interviewer make her quick to identify the unique attitudes and behaviors that define an organization. Lyn’s extensive expertise in public relations and persuasive communications translates strongly in her contributions to Leadership IQ’s custom-training programs.

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Overcoming Fear of Failure to Achieve Difficult Goals

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Advancing your career, starting a business, doubling sales revenue, losing weight, running a marathon, quitting smoking, going back to school, and saving more money are all challenging goals that can be pretty intimidating. It’s so intimidating that just thinking about it is enough to make most people hesitate or even back off entirely from even starting the goal. But it is possible to overcome the fear and become part of the select group of people who actually do achieve their difficult goals.

A big issue here is the common misbelief that the more difficult your goal becomes, the higher the possibility that you could fail. When the truth is, the more difficult your goal, the better your performance is likely to be. That’s because difficult goals give you a jolt; they stimulate your brain, push you out of your comfort zone and excite you emotionally all culminating in you delivering your best performance. But all that notwithstanding, a sizeable group of folks are still fundamentally afraid that if they attempt a difficult goal they might fail.

“What happens to me if I fail at this goal?”

Getting past the trepidation requires rewiring the way we think, and it starts with the simple question: “What happens to me if I fail at this goal?” A simple question, but not an easy one, and truthfully answering it requires a deep look into some of your inner mental processes. When I ask this question to the individuals and organizations Leadership IQ works with, I generally hear responses like:

“People will think I’m weak and couldn’t hack it.”

“I’ll be exposed as someone who talks a good game but can’t deliver.”

“People will be disappointed in me.”

“No one will ever believe in me again, and I sure won’t believe in myself again.”

 “I’ll die from embarrassment.”

“If I can’t do this, it means I’ll never be able to do anything.”

“It’ll mean that I’m not as smart/talented/skilled as I like to think I am.”

The obvious problem here is that all these responses use serious and highly-charged words like “never”, “always”, “only” and “die”. And, when we assess the actual facts, we find these words tend to be overstatements that fall into the categories of interpretations, assumptions, emotionally-charged extrapolations, castastrophizing, irrational beliefs, or whatever else you want to call them. The thing they typically are not, are proven facts.

Fear can be healthy, you just have to disprove the negative statements that got you there

Now, all of this is not to say all fear is unhealthy. Certainly, from an evolutionary perspective, a fear of sabre-tooth tigers kept us alive. But there are times in this modern world where our fear reactions get pointed to something quite abstract, and perhaps even imagined. If you fail in your goal to escape a sabre-tooth tiger, you will almost certainly be dead minutes later. But if you fail in your goal to increase your savings this month, you’ve got at least a decent chance of still being alive 30 minutes later. The fact is, most of the repercussions we face if we fail in achieving our goals are not going to kill us. And, not only will we not actually die of embarrassment, we might not even have cause for any embarrassment.

However, we are human beings, not computers, so we can’t just flip a switch and say, “Feeling like I’ll die of embarrassment is irrational, so I’ll just stop feeling that way.”  Instead, we’ve got to debunk these thoughts in our head, just like if we were an attorney cross-examining a witness. So we’re going to take each of these fear statements, or whatever your personal fears are, and, one by one, ask ourselves if we can find any examples that might provide evidence to the contrary of what we said.

Let’s take the example: “If I fail to achieve my goal, I’ll die from embarrassment.”  Can you find any examples in your life (or even someone else’s life) where you failed to achieve a goal but didn’t die? And to take it a step further, can you find any examples where any embarrassment you felt was far less than what you were expecting? Now, by virtue of your being alive and reading this right now, I’m guessing you found at least one example that refutes the belief that “I’ll die of embarrassment”. And the same can be done with each of the responses listed above.

Once you’ve finished that exercise, it’s time to rewrite those fear statements. You’ve debunked them so now turn them around into something a lot more encouraging. For example:

“If I fail at this goal, people won’t think I’m weak. In fact, they may even rally to my defense.”

“If I fail at this goal, people will still believe in me.”

“If I can’t do this specific goal, it has no bearing on my ability to tackle other difficult goals.”

You’ve disproven the negative statements you started with, so it’s just a question of closing the loop and cementing this logically-sound bit of encouragement in your consciousness. It’s simple, but it really does work.

Overwhelmingly, we have little or nothing to fear from attempting (and even failing) at a difficult goal. Because it’s only by attempting difficult goals that we hone our ability to successfully achieve them. And remember, we’ll have absolutely no control over our lives and destinies if we allow ourselves to remain paralyzed by the fear of the mostly imagined consequences of failing at a difficult goal.

Get more tips on overcoming the fear of achieving difficult goals by attending our webinar Beyond SMART Goals.

An expert in aligning goals and people to create thriving organizations, Mark leads one of the world’s largest studies on leadership and employee engagement.

Mark’s award-winning work has been featured numerous times in publications including The Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Washington Post. His media appearances include CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News and NPR. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, University of Rochester and University of Florida. Mark is the author of five books including the McGraw-Hill international bestsellers, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More and Hard Goals. Mark’s most recent book, Hiring for Attitude, reflects the team’s latest research and insight into how hiring decisions can align with engagement goals and culture characteristics.

Leadership IQ’s turnaround, culture change, and performance enhancement through employee engagement work has been recognized in a diverse set of industries including healthcare, financial services, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and hospitality. From his roots as a turnaround specialist, Mark created Leadership IQ to address problems in performance before they hit the bottom line.

View the original article here

One Thing Leaders Can Do to Be Better Listeners

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One thing we as leaders can do to be better listeners is to acknowledge that there are certain emotions that, when we feel them, we shut down and stop listening.

We need to be aware of these patterns in our own behavior so that when we experience the triggers that set us off, we can anticipate that we’re probably going to have some bad reactions and circumvent that from happening. At the core of all this, of course, is that when we have those bad emotions, we need to figure out what caused us to feel that way so we can avoid having it happen again in the future. 

This is the essence of listening

If you know that when you hear somebody talk about something in a particular way that causes you to feel something negative, and as a result of that negative feeling, you react badly and it shuts down your ability to listen, you’ve just established an emotional chain that you need to break. Because once you know there are certain things that when you hear them, they set you off and cause bad reactions, you are prepared to recognize it coming and say “Oh wow, this is going to spark an emotion I want to avoid.” This allows you to handle that emotion differently so you stay plugged in and listening to what’s being said instead of wandering off into a negative emotional reaction.

It is fascinating and amazingly reinforcing that when you start to become more aware of an emotion, you become more aware of yourself. And the more self-aware you are, and the more aware you are of others, the more control you have. So, try to anticipate the situations that are going to set you off so you can put yourself in the right frame of mind to be able to compartmentalize your own emotions, bracket them, and key into what other people are saying. This way, you do hear that critical nugget of information that you absolutely need to hear.

For more tips on great listening, including how to stop yourself from making snap judgments and learning to dissect every conversation in order to ensure you hear the message that’s truly being delivered, attend our webinar Lead by Listening.

An expert in aligning goals and people to create thriving organizations, Mark leads one of the world’s largest studies on leadership and employee engagement.

Mark’s award-winning work has been featured numerous times in publications including The Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Washington Post. His media appearances include CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News and NPR. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, University of Rochester and University of Florida. Mark is the author of five books including the McGraw-Hill international bestsellers, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More and Hard Goals. Mark’s most recent book, Hiring for Attitude, reflects the team’s latest research and insight into how hiring decisions can align with engagement goals and culture characteristics.

Leadership IQ’s turnaround, culture change, and performance enhancement through employee engagement work has been recognized in a diverse set of industries including healthcare, financial services, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and hospitality. From his roots as a turnaround specialist, Mark created Leadership IQ to address problems in performance before they hit the bottom line.

View the original article here

A Listening Exercise to do Next Time you Watch a Movie

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AppId is over the quota

Leading by listening requires developing two kinds of awareness. There’s self-awareness, which involves getting a handle on personal triggers so you know what sets you off, what makes you pay attention, etc. And then there’s awareness of others, what we like to call “other-awareness” where we learn to observe and interpret the emotions of others so we can wipe out any wrongful assumptions we might otherwise make and just stay focused on the facts.

There are two parts to developing other-awareness. The first is developing our observational skills, which is all about focusing and paying attention, and the second part is interpreting those signals. Now, I’m aware this all sounds amazingly easy: we just pay attention and that gives us more other-awareness… piece of cake, right? The problem is we observe all day long, but we typically don’t pay that much attention to what we’re seeing. Consider, for example, a dime. You’ve handled dimes plenty of times in your life, and you’ve had ample opportunity for observation. But can you really describe a dime? “It’s silver and ridged on the edges,” most of us will say. Fewer will know it’s Franklin D. Roosevelt’s face on a dime. And even fewer will be able to correctly say which direction his profile faces, or what’s written on the back of a dime. This is where other-awareness comes in; it’s keying in and really paying attention and more accurately processing everything that’s going on.

Build other-awareness with this fun exercise 

To build other-awareness, there’s an exercise you can do the next time you watch a movie. The movie just needs to be on DVD or on-demand, any format that allows you to pause and repeat a scene a few times.

Here’s how the exercise works. First, pick a movie (it can be one you’ve seen before, but it’s more fun with a film you’ve never seen) that includes a scene with two or three people interacting. Avoid big action movies, as we’re looking for strong dialogue between human beings. You’re going to watch this scene where people are interacting twice: once with the sound off, and then a second time with the sound on.

The first viewing, with the sound off, you just want to observe. What are the people on screen doing? Without any sound to help you out, try and key into what is happening with these characters. Check out their facial expressions: are they smiling, staring, frowning, eyebrows raised, blinking rapidly? Are they breaking eye contact or are they holding eye contact? What’s happening to the color of their faces? Is one person’s face suddenly getting red? Who has tight lips or relaxed lips? Is someone wetting their lips?

Next look at gestures: maybe someone is nodding, or shaking, or covering their mouth or eyes, scratching their face. Where are everyone’s hands? Maybe a character is cracking his knuckles.  What about their bodies? What are the angles of everyone’s heads? Are the characters close to each other or far apart? Are they slumping? Are they leaning forward? Are they shrugging? Doing this without sound removes all other distractions and just lets you observe. Then, with the sound still off, start to make some interpretations. Assess which emotions you think are present just by watching body language, facial expressions, etc.

Now watch the same scene with the sound on. And again, you want to key into the gestures, facial expressions, etc. while now also listening to the words and assessing what emotions you think are present. How do your silent observations compare to the observations you made when you had audio cues to help? How observant are you?

Now take this exercise back to the workplace

Meetings are a great place to do this, so the next meeting you are in, observe all the facial expressions, the gestures and the body display, and start to mentally note what emotions you think are present. What’s neat about doing this at work is you can test some of your hypotheses.

So after you’ve made your observations and started to figure out the emotions you think are present; come up with three possible explanations for those observed behaviors; three hypotheses. Maybe hypothesis #1 is: I’m watching Jane and maybe she’s feeling sick, and #2 is: Maybe Jane’s upset because we’re talking about her new assignment and she’s confused by the directions, and hypothesis #3 is: Maybe Jane’s tired. What we want to do is come up with various hypotheses for the behaviors we see because when we develop alternative and multiple hypotheses, it prevents us from getting fixated on just one type of solution. Once we get fixated, it’s very hard to keep an open mind about anything. But when we have multiple hypotheses for things, that is, by definition, having a much more open mind, it automatically amps up our listening abilities.

Next consider the likelihood of each of your three hypotheses by observing some more. See if you can find additional evidence, for example, in the “Jane is tired” hypothesis, you might observe: “Jane has two cups of coffee on her desk and she doesn’t usually drink coffee. She has been working late the last few nights, maybe she is tired.” If possible, you can even go to the person and say, “Listen, just curious, but I noticed you’re staring off in the sky, your arms were closed off, etc. Since we’re friends here, I wonder if I can ask you what’s going through your mind, what were you feeling right then?” That way you can find out which of your hypotheses were correct.

The goal of this exercise is to teach you how to be a more effective observer of human behavior and more effective at correlating those observations to your assessment of what emotions other people are feeling. This allows you to develop a more effective sense of the causality of those behaviors and those emotions. Because the more aware of yourself and others you become, the more effective you will be at distilling everything you hear so you can get right to the nugget of the information you need.

For more tips on improving your listening skills, including a 7-part checklist that tests whether you’ve truly heard all the information you need, attend our webinar Lead by Listening.

An expert in aligning goals and people to create thriving organizations, Mark leads one of the world’s largest studies on leadership and employee engagement.

Mark’s award-winning work has been featured numerous times in publications including The Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Washington Post. His media appearances include CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News and NPR. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, University of Rochester and University of Florida. Mark is the author of five books including the McGraw-Hill international bestsellers, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More and Hard Goals. Mark’s most recent book, Hiring for Attitude, reflects the team’s latest research and insight into how hiring decisions can align with engagement goals and culture characteristics.

Leadership IQ’s turnaround, culture change, and performance enhancement through employee engagement work has been recognized in a diverse set of industries including healthcare, financial services, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and hospitality. From his roots as a turnaround specialist, Mark created Leadership IQ to address problems in performance before they hit the bottom line.

View the original article here

Motivate Employees at Review Time by Asking “What Are Your Proudest Moments?”

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AppId is over the quota

Employee performance reviews are notoriously painful, but they don’t have to be. Reviews can actually be useful, productive, meaningful conversations that do what they’re intended to do: improve employee performance. Some of the changes leaders need to make to have more effective reviews are pretty easy, like knowing which to talk about first: performance, goals or money. (It’s money). Another key tip is to start every review by asking “What are your proudest moments?”

Some of you may be wondering: how does asking for their proudest moments differ from a self-appraisal? When you ask for a self-appraisal you ask for the proudest moments, but you also ask for the biggest failures. And while it might not be a bad thing for your low performers to have to bring you an honest evaluation of their biggest failures, it’s actually quite harmful to your top performers.

Psychological dynamic different for high and low performers

There’s a different psychological dynamic that happens when high and low performers experience failure. Low performers might not know about the failure, they might not care, or they may have even intended for the failure to happen. High performers, on the other hand, have a high degree of critical self-awareness. This is wonderful, because most of the time these valuable employees already know they messed up—even before you tell them. And they get right to work on fixing the problem and making self-corrections so they never mess up like that again. However, most high performers are also prone to beating themselves up pretty hard when they mess up. And that can quickly turn the focus of the review back onto stuff they’ve already corrected and moved past. Plus you might get swayed listening to a high performer beat himself up and give lower marks than are deserved.

Proudest moments also ensures you don’t miss the greatest thing your employees did that year

Keeping things focused and balanced for high performers is only one reason to ask about proudest moments. Starting reviews with this simple question also helps leaders avoid the biggest employee de-motivator: missing the greatest things your people did that year. What you learn by asking this question gives you great information to work from during the review. Let’s face it, it’s nearly impossible to remember what every one of your employees did 12 months ago, so have your people make the list and tell you their proudest moments. It makes a big difference to them if the two great things they did get remembered and talked about a bit.

Another benefit is that by asking about proudest moments, you get clued in to the kind of meeting you’re in for. If an employee tells you, “I am just so proud of myself because I made it on time for work 70% of the time this past year which is a huge improvement over the 50% I managed the year before,” it tells you what kind of conversation you’re in for.

So before your next performance review period starts, simply ask your people to make a list of their proudest moments. If your organization conducts 12-month reviews, ask employees for their proudest moments from the past year. Or if you do six-month reviews, have them look back on the past six months and answer the question in writing. And just like self-appraisals, always do your own evaluation of the employee before you read their proudest moments. This allows you to avoid neurological biases that can skew your evaluation and make the review less objective.

Learn more about how to make employee reviews less painful including why talking about money should be done in a separate conversation by attending our webinar Taking the Pain Out of Performance Reviews.

An expert in aligning goals and people to create thriving organizations, Mark leads one of the world’s largest studies on leadership and employee engagement.

Mark’s award-winning work has been featured numerous times in publications including The Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Washington Post. His media appearances include CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News and NPR. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, University of Rochester and University of Florida. Mark is the author of five books including the McGraw-Hill international bestsellers, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More and Hard Goals. Mark’s most recent book, Hiring for Attitude, reflects the team’s latest research and insight into how hiring decisions can align with engagement goals and culture characteristics.

Leadership IQ’s turnaround, culture change, and performance enhancement through employee engagement work has been recognized in a diverse set of industries including healthcare, financial services, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and hospitality. From his roots as a turnaround specialist, Mark created Leadership IQ to address problems in performance before they hit the bottom line.

View the original article here

Use the “Frustration Technique” to Help Employees Understand Change

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AppId is over the quota

One factor that regularly gets in the way of successful change initiatives is when organizations fail to provide employees with any real reason as to “why” a change is happening in the first place. This is especially prevalent in companies operating from a top-down organizational structure, and it can result in employees that catastrophize the message of change they hear, jumping to conclusions and making irrational interpretations about the impact the change will have on them.

When it comes to communicating the “why” of change, we need to create a deep sense of understanding so everyone involved is clear on: “why the status quo is no longer acceptable and we have no choice but to leave it behind.” This means not only do we need to give our people a legitimate reason why the change is happening, we also need to clearly communicate that we didn’t just come up with this change initiative because we didn’t have anything better to do. And especially if the organization has a history of stalled or abandoned change efforts, we have to let employees know that this time it’s not some “new flavor of the month” syndrome; that there is a good reason for this change and that it absolutely is going to happen.

To further add to the challenge, grasping the “why” is the hardest part of change. The good news is that it’s a message you can get employees to help self-deliver, which is a big plus because people tend to react better to ideas they come up with on their own versus ideas that are forced on them. That’s why we teach the “Frustration Technique” that gets people to set their own platform on fire and create their own sense of why there is no other choice but to make the leap to change.

Here’s how the “Frustration Technique” works

Before you pitch a change, start asking people, “Hey, is there anything frustrating you about where we’re at right now? They might answer, “Well, the process takes too long. It’s sort of irritating. And these things are getting in my way.” And the minute that light bulb comes on, you are in a much better position to turn around and say, “You know what, that’s wonderful insight. Based on that let me throw something out to you. This is a change, a solution to the ideas you just came up with.”

The Frustration Technique works because it highly eliminates the nostalgia that can set in when employees hear the announcement “We’re leaving this safe place you already know, and going someplace new.” Once you’ve pitched where you’re going, and you’ve said, “Folks, here it is. We’re going over here and we’re leaving that. Forget about it. It’s never coming back” people start to eulogize the past. They’ll say, “Do you remember back when? Remember before we had computers how great it used to be? How easy life was? We didn’t have these systems that were always crashing and it wasn’t so complicated?” Even if they didn’t like the paper systems, even if it took too long and was painful and arduous, the minute you insist that folks leave it, they turn back around and eulogize the “good old days” or “the way it used to be.” Once that happens it is very difficult to undo. So, if you can, catch it before it even starts.

Change is always going to be hard, but with techniques like this that invite employees to take an active role in finding their own acceptance and willingness to embrace the change, it gets much easier.

For more tips on managing change, join us for our webinar “Change Management that Lasts“.

An expert in aligning goals and people to create thriving organizations, Mark leads one of the world’s largest studies on leadership and employee engagement.

Mark’s award-winning work has been featured numerous times in publications including The Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Washington Post. His media appearances include CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News and NPR. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, University of Rochester and University of Florida. Mark is the author of five books including the McGraw-Hill international bestsellers, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More and Hard Goals. Mark’s most recent book, Hiring for Attitude, reflects the team’s latest research and insight into how hiring decisions can align with engagement goals and culture characteristics.

Leadership IQ’s turnaround, culture change, and performance enhancement through employee engagement work has been recognized in a diverse set of industries including healthcare, financial services, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and hospitality. From his roots as a turnaround specialist, Mark created Leadership IQ to address problems in performance before they hit the bottom line.

View the original article here

How Can Leaders Successfully Communicate and Implement Change?

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AppId is over the quota

A Q&A with CEO Mark Murphy

Q: You cite a Harvard Business School study that found 70% of change efforts fail. Were these big or small changes?

MM: The study wasn’t specific to big, mammoth change efforts like reinventing a business model. These were small change efforts. But big or small, most change efforts seem to run into the same brick walls over and over again, and leaders reacted predictably badly 70% of the time.

And it’s actually more serious than that, because not only did the majority of change efforts fail, the failures also threatened to take down the leaders that tried to lead them. A Leadership IQ study found that mismanaging change is actually the number one reason why CEOs get fired; it far outpaced financial performance. Every leader understands the risks are high. Change is hard and when it doesn’t work, there are dire consequences. All that said, we don’t have to let change fail. We can almost guarantee its success if we understand the basic phases and nature of change.

Q: What’s at the core of creating a successful change effort?

MM: There are three questions that have to be answered for a change effort to be successful. If these questions can’t be answered, the change effort is going to fail:

Why do we need to change?Where are we going?How are we going to get there?

The interesting thing is that most successful changes don’t answer just one of these questions; they answer all three. We can, with almost certainty, predict the success or failure of a change effort simply by asking, “Do you understand why we need to change?” and “Do you understand where we are trying to get to?” and “Do you think we can actually pull it off; do you know how we are going to make it happen?” If you can’t get answers to these three questions, the Why, Where and How of change, then your change effort is almost certainly doomed to failure.

And perhaps more importantly, the 30% of change efforts that succeed (according to the Harvard study) tend to pull all three levers simultaneously. They tend to work on the Why, the Where, and the How all at the same time. The problem is that most leaders have a favorite. They work on either the Why, or the Where, or the How. The overwhelming majority of folks do not work on all three simultaneously. Of course, depending on the environment of the organization, some of these are going to be easier or harder than others to pull off.

Q: What’s the most effective way to communicate change?

MM: Letting folks know about change is a pretty tough message to deliver. And the worst way to communicate that message is the yelling-and-screaming approach. Yes, you have to deliver a message that is sufficiently tough so that you can get people to leave a place they like. But the more emotional you make your message; the more likely people are to put their guard up. Emotional content will only make them feel attacked; they’ll box themselves in and they’ll tune out your message.

Instead you have to take a much more low-key approach. Focus on data – the less emotional the message the better. Make the message factual without hyperbole or exaggeration. Let the message be what the message is going to be. Communicate the message in as calm and rational a manner as possible. The more objective your data, the better. Language like “I think” or “My gut tells me” is not convincing.

You’re much better off getting some objective evidence in order to justify why it is we need to leave our present state. Get evidence from third parties: financial, operational, strategic, market, benchmarks. With the objective third-party facts delivered in a calm, rational way you will have the best chance of actually moving people off of the status quo. Get additional evidence from your audience (self-report surveys, focus groups, etc.) as well as from your customers. To the extent that you can get information from really credible sources, not just third party sources, but from people like your customers, patients, etc. you will be giving people a sense that your sources are believable. Doing so will deliver the message that it’s not about you, the CEO/manager, but it is about the customers, patients or shareholders.

And give people some time to process it all. Remember, it may be the first time your people are hearing this message (or at least the first time they’ve needed to pay attention to it). The more educated you can make your people, the more access to can grant them to a similar level of information that you have access to as a leader, the easier your change effort will be. The broader the horizon they can see, the more likely they are to come to the same conclusion that you’ve come to – that change is necessary.

Who is the best person to deliver the communication?

Employees are more likely to listen to their middle managers than their CEO. The employees will look at whatever the CEO puts out in a memo with skepticism until they ask the middle manager, “What do you think? Is that for real? Is this really going to work or is it just going to be like all of the other times?” Employees may turn to some of the more powerful employees to see what they think. CEOs can write memos until they are blue in the face, but at the end of the day it is how managers and key performing employees react to the change effort that is critical.

To learn more about communicating and implementing change in your organization, attend our webinar “Change Management That Lasts.“

A professional corporate writer with over 20-years’ experience crafting just the right words for executives to use in challenging situations, Lyn is a passionate and adept qualitative researcher. Her seasoned skills as an interviewer make her quick to identify the unique attitudes and behaviors that define an organization. Lyn’s extensive expertise in public relations and persuasive communications translates strongly in her contributions to Leadership IQ’s custom-training programs.

View the original article here

What makes great listening so difficult?

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AppId is over the quota

A Q&A with CEO Mark Murphy

Q: Listening seems like it should be so simple, yet the average person retains only 10% of what they hear. What makes great listening so hard?

MM: Great listening requires a lot more than nodding your head and going “Uh huh. Wow, that’s interesting.” There’s actually a whole way of thinking we need to embrace about the information that’s coming at us. And that involves how we can parse it all out, dissect it into its component parts and then probe for more information. Also, we need to make sure we’re not getting fixated on unimportant information; that we’re not letting our emotional buttons get pushed such that we can’t hear the real kernel of the message that is coming at us.

In the world of management and work, not everything we hear has equal importance, so we need to know what we are listening for. Because there are some things we hear, certain words, for example, that can set us off and cause us to miss some of the really important stuff that we do need to hear.

The challenges of great listening are plenty. But if we gain the skills, and a deeper understanding of how it all works, so we can then identify and key into what is absolutely important and relevant for us to hear, great listening is absolutely possible. Anyone can do it, but you have to want to do it.

Q: What do you mean when you say we need to key into the important parts of a conversation?

MM: Here’s one example of how it works. Let’s say we’re in a situation where an employee is uncorking on us a little bit. Maybe they want to talk about a project we assigned them that’s not going well and maybe they are little (or a lot) upset. They are using emotional language and it’s subjective, and even a little negative. Other than letting them unload, we think there’s not a ton of value in listening to what’s being said. But the thing is, as difficult as that may be to listen to, there may be a really important nugget of information that we really do need to hear. Something that is going to clue us in to what this person needs so they can go fix the error, or avoid having it happen again. And yet, we’re not hearing it because we’re fixated on all of the other stuff; the distraction. So we need to have a listening model that allows us to separate the stuff we do need to hear from all the rest. We need a way to remove the emotional element and just get to the facts in order to help this person find the right solution.

At Leadership IQ we teach the FIRE model which allows us to separate the Facts from the Interpretations, Reactions and Ends. Because it’s in the facts that we are going to find that one nugget of really good information we need. The FIRE model allows us to compartmentalize all these other pieces and say, “I just got some tough feedback, but there are some good facts here. There are things I need to listen to, so I need to compartmentalize some of this other stuff I’m hearing so what I am really focusing in on is the facts.” And until we have a listening model that lets us separate it all appropriately, great listening is very hard to do.

Q: How can we know if we got all the facts?

MM: First we need to know how to probe deep to get past all the superficial stuff so we are only focused on the facts we need. And there different kinds of probes, like factual and direct probes or emotional and indirect probes. The situation and the comfort level that’s present basically directs the kind of probe you use.

For example, indirect probes are best in helping circumvent defenses when you think someone’s guard is up. But once you probe down to the facts, and you are no longer dealing with interpretations, reactions and ends, there’s actually a very simple checklist you can mentally run through to make sure you are collecting adequate facts. It’s the same basic checklist used for all information gathering: Who, What, When, Where, Why and How.

The first step is to get the conversation focused on just the facts and you can do this by doing the “Who, What, When, Where, Why and How” assessment in your mind where you say:  “Okay, well, first, who: do I know who was involved. Okay, yup. I got that. Do I know what they were talking about? What actually happened? Okay, got that. Do I know when it happened? Do I know where it happened? And then, am I making assumptions based on these things or do I actually know why it happened? Do I know what precipitated this? And do I know how it happened?” It takes a bit of practice, but after a while it just happens naturally so you are always thinking about the Who, What, When, Where, Why and How of your conversations and that alone will make you a much better listener.

To learn how to keep your own emotions in check when listening to someone is making you agitated, attend our webinar Lead by Listening.

A professional corporate writer with over 20-years’ experience crafting just the right words for executives to use in challenging situations, Lyn is a passionate and adept qualitative researcher. Her seasoned skills as an interviewer make her quick to identify the unique attitudes and behaviors that define an organization. Lyn’s extensive expertise in public relations and persuasive communications translates strongly in her contributions to Leadership IQ’s custom-training programs.

View the original article here

Asking “Why?” Often Implies Judgment

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AppId is over the quota

One of the most harmful things you as a leader can do to compromise good listening is to impose judgment on the person you are communicating with.  And when you ask “why” somebody did something, one thing to bear in mind is that the word “why” often implies a judgment. Even if you don’t intend to do this, the word “why” is often used as a “Why did you do that?” and it has a snarky “Boy that was stupid” implication.  Even if your intentions are innocent and you really just want to know why someone made a decision a certain way, the recipient of your question is likely to react defensively if you use the word “why” as a question.

Instead, try taking a slightly circuitous route and instead of saying “Well, why (did you do that)?” which implies “What are you dumb? That was a bad thing,” say something like “Tell me more about what made you choose that action.” This is a much less judgmental way of asking “Why?” and it encourages the recipient to open up and share their reasoning. Then, listen to what they have to say. Collect the facts.

Knowing how to identify the facts and separate them from interpretations and reactions is key to effective listening. Attend our webinar Lead by Listening and uncover the psychological secrets of great listening.

An expert in aligning goals and people to create thriving organizations, Mark leads one of the world’s largest studies on leadership and employee engagement.

Mark’s award-winning work has been featured numerous times in publications including The Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Washington Post. His media appearances include CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News and NPR. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, University of Rochester and University of Florida. Mark is the author of five books including the McGraw-Hill international bestsellers, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More and Hard Goals. Mark’s most recent book, Hiring for Attitude, reflects the team’s latest research and insight into how hiring decisions can align with engagement goals and culture characteristics.

Leadership IQ’s turnaround, culture change, and performance enhancement through employee engagement work has been recognized in a diverse set of industries including healthcare, financial services, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and hospitality. From his roots as a turnaround specialist, Mark created Leadership IQ to address problems in performance before they hit the bottom line.

View the original article here

No typical hero roles for Ayushmann Khurrana

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AppId is over the quota
Ayushmann Khurrana in 'Vicky Donor'

With the success of his debut film ‘Vicky Donor’ (2012), actor Ayushmann Khurrana has expressed his desire to play more realistic roles, rather than the typical heroic roles, and it looks like that’s exactly what’s happening.

Having impressed many filmmakers with his debut performance, Khurranna has a number of roles already lined up, such as his upcoming role playing a ‘nautanki walla’ in Rohan Sippy’s ‘Nautanki Sala’, One India Entertainment report the actor explaining “The best part is all the roles that I am playing are real or close to reality. I have done theatre so I could relate to the character in ‘Nautanki Saala’.”

Also signed opposite Sonam Kapoor in a Yash Raj Films production, Khurrana’s other release written by ‘Ishaqzaade’ (2012) writer Habib Faisal, will see him playing a man struggling through a recession, “It is a love story in the times of recession and I play a guy who is hit by recession. It is a Habib Faisal kind of film, very real.”

From TV to the big screen, Khurrana sure has done well for himself, where he goes onto say, “Things have changed for me as an actor. We are living in an era where transition from TV to films is easy. I have made it quite successfully. I was around for four years, anchoring shows, taking interviews, watching the industry as an outsider. It is a nice shift, it is ironical.”

View the original article here

Ranveer Singh snubbed by Ranbir Kapoor?

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AppId is over the quota

Friendships, rivalry and new meets are the order when award season is happening. Rumour has it that at a recent awards event, Bollywood’s golden boy Ranbir Kapoor snubbed Ranveer Singh.

According to Mid-Day, an insider said, “Ranbir was waiting backstage to go on the stage. Later, he was joined by Ranveer and Arjun Kapoor. Ranveer smiled at Ranbir but the latter didn’t bother to react.”

It is thought Singh wishes Kapoor luck as he was nominated in the Best Actor category for ‘Barfi!’. However, when the two posed for a photo, Kapoor seemed less than pleased to have to do so.

One wonders whether a certain Ms Padukone may be the cause of discomfort between the two! Stay with BizAsia for more!

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Saif Ali Khan reluctant to work with wife Kareena Kapoor

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Saif-Kareena not to work together in films

Having just got married less than three months ago, one would assume that Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor would be lined up for films together. However, rumour has it that the actor doesn’t want to work in the same films as his wife.

As Times of India report, both actors have decided to stay away from each others professional lives. The report also read that Khan had instigated the way in which scenes that are meant to portray, a sense of playfulness, end up turning dull.

With this said, nobody can really blame Khan after the failure of many of their films together such as ‘Tashan’ (2008), ‘Kurban’ (2009) and most recently, ‘Agent Vinod’ (2012) not doing so well. Undoubtedly Khan and Kapoor Khan are both outstanding actors in their own right, however it looks like they have both made a smart move with this decision.

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Veena Malik in search for a hero

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Veena Malik in search of a hero in new film

Pakistani actress from ‘Bigg Boss’ fame Veena Malik is now on the lookout for a new hero to star opposite her in her next film ‘The City That Never Sleeps’. Malik plans to search for the new face through a contest.

“In this contest, I will choose a boy opposite me who will be my hero in this film. I am very excited and I believe that new talent should get a chance,” Malik said at a press conference held for the film.
At the press conference Malik also clarified that her version of the Swayamwar show (Veena Ka Vivah) will no longer be happening.

“The Swayamvar was happening but something happened and Swwayamvar didn’t happen. Right now I am concentrating on my career…so now is not the right time. If it would have been, the swayamvar would have happened,” Malik explained.

Malik is currently shooting with her ex-flame and fellow ‘Bigg Boss’ contestant Ashmit Patel for “Supermodel” and Kannada film that was initially named ‘Dirty Picture: Silk Sakkath Maga’.

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Sridevi to receive Padma Shri award

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Sridevi at the 'English Vinglish' premiere in Mumbai

Not been able to win anything at the recent award ceremonies for her outstanding acting in comeback movie ‘English Vinglish’ (2012), Sridevi will be delighted to learn that she is in line for a Padma Shri honour.

While this is still yet to be confirmed, reports say that Sridevi has been lined up for the award alongside Rajesh Khanna and Sharmila Tagore. NDTV reports, Khanna and Tagore, who starred together in movies like ‘Aradhana’ (1969) and Amar Prem (1971), will reportedly receive the Padma Bhushan, India’s third highest civilian award. Rajesh Khanna died in July last year and will receive the award posthumously.

Actress Sridevi will reportedly receive the Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award.

The official list of honours will be announced later today.

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Ghaziabad Ki Rani – ‘Zila Ghaziabad’

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Ghaziabad Ki Rani – ‘Zila Ghaziabad’

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Meethi Boliyan – ‘Kai Po Che’

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Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.

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Box Office: ‘Race 2′ to exceed first day collections of ‘Race’ & ‘Cocktail’?

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'Race 2' to break records set by prequel?

This week sees the release of action thriller ‘Race 2' which is said to have opened in no less than 50 countries worldwide. Early indications show that as far as first day collections go, it may just do better at the all important box office than it’s 2008 prequel ‘Race’ and also 2012 Saif Ali Khan and Deepika Padukone starrer ‘Cocktail’.

This is particularly prevalent at the Indian box office where ‘Race 2' seems to be doing well, achieving 70-80% occupancy, as per One India Entertainment. So much so is the film’s popularity that trade analysts are predicting a whopper of a first weekend collection for the Abbas-Mustan film. In contrast, it is thought that ‘Akaashvani’ which also released in India today is receiving a very poor response.

The reviews of ‘Race 2' approve a very classy and stylish exterior but not many are praising the story too much. Look out for our review at BizAsia very soon.

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Juhi Chawla to don villain’s hat in ‘Gulaab Gang’

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Juhi-Madhuri will star together in 'Gulaab Gang'

The forthcoming ‘Gulaab Gang’ which will see Madhuri Dixit and Juhi Chawla share the screen for the first time already promises to be one not to be missed. BizAsia has learnt that Chawla will be playing antagonist in the movie.

Dixit and Chawla’s rivalry has always been talked about when they were both leading heroines in the industry a two decades back. Chawla has said that the scenes that the two will share have already been shot. She added that there was no pressure at this time, unlike before.

The two actresses will create history of sorts and no doubt seeing them on screen together will be a treat for every Bollywood fan. The film is expected to release in March.

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IIFA 2013 not to be held in Vancouver

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IIFA 2013 not to be held in Vancouver

The International Indian Film Academy (IIFA) has confirmed that it will not be holding this year’s ceremony in Vancouver after it rejected a bid from the British Columbia government.

The need for the clarification was necessary following thousands of fans inquiring about the IIFA celebrations following rumors of a few copycat efforts being attempted in international markets.

Recently, IIFA received a copious number of emails and inquiries from fans in Canada and around the world for tickets to the Awards. But Wizcraft International, the organisers of the extravaganza, confirmed that the city is out of the running for June 2013. The bidding process for the Awards is currently on with a number of countries from the Middle East, South America, Europe and Africa vying for the biggest extravaganza of Indian Cinema to come to their city.

In 2011, IIFA successfully forayed into North America, marking its premiere in Canada, in the city of Toronto. There has since been keen interest from the country to play host once more in 2013, with Christy Clark, the Premier of British Columbia formally extending an invitation to Wizcraft International Entertainment, the initiators of the unique IIFA Celebrations, to hold its 14th edition in Vancouver.

Embarking on its 14th year, Sabbas Joseph, Director, IIFA & Wizcraft International said, “We are truly excited about the bids we have received from various countries. The decision is subject to many contributing factors that are required of a host destination in terms of support-initiatives for Hindi cinema production, funding and distribution; event-funding, support, facilitation, and infrastructure. We are committed to the film Industry and hosting an IIFA in any destination must meet the larger interests of Indian Cinema and a spectacular-staging of the annual celebration.”

Incidentally, it was The Times Of India who announced that their Film Awards will be taking place in Vancouver in April.

IIFA 2013 takes place in June this year with dates and venue to be confirmed shortly.

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easier to cook american food? comparing asian food

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merican Chocolate Cake recipe:

Ingredients

1 (18.25 ounce) package devil's food cake mix

3 eggs

1/2 cup butter

1 cup semisweet chocolate chips

1 cup chopped pecans

4 cups confectioners' sugar

1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese

Compared with this recipe:

Ingredients

For the cake

225g/8oz plain flour

350g/12½oz caster sugar

85g/3oz cocoa powder

1½ tsp baking powder

1½ tsp bicarbonate of soda

2 free-range eggs

250ml/9fl oz milk

125ml/4½fl oz vegetable oil

2 tsp vanilla extract

250ml/9fl oz boiling water

For the chocolate icing

200g/7oz plain chocolate

200ml/7fl oz double cream

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Would you marry him/her if you would know he/she is dying?

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Posted 17 January 2013 - 08:04 PM

Would you marry him/her if you would know he/she is dying? I saw this and was thinking hospital would be a good place to find someone (not that I would need to change now) but generally.. Is that only way when it lasts forever even to another one? Would you spend money to this? People can die any day after weddings even they are healthy.. But if you knew he or she is dying.. Would you marry that person?

Posted 17 January 2013 - 08:10 PM

Yup I would. I would stick by my man untill the day he pass, even if I found out that he is dying.

Posted 19 January 2013 - 08:31 AM

Of course. That's what love is all about.

Posted 19 January 2013 - 05:06 PM

Quote

I saw this and was thinking hospital would be a good place to find someone
WHAT??????????????????

Posted 20 January 2013 - 08:42 AM

Posted 20 January 2013 - 12:42 PM

Yes. Life is too short anyway. Theres no telling that a healthy person will be with you longer than a dying person. Cos you don't know what the future holds! I mean and for example *touch wood* he could just walk out now and gets stabbed to death.

I rather spend time with the one I love, no matter how long he has, and when hes gone, the sweet loving precious memories will forever remain in my heart

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Reply to quoted posts     Clear     AsianFanatics Forum? Once Upon a Lifetime? Relationships

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Good friend and boyfriend

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Guests Posted Today, 07:54 AM

I just want to let this out and have it stops bothering me. And sorry for poor grammar and unorganized thoughts.

I will start off with how I met this close friend of mine. We met each other for quick a long time now. When we first met, I remembered him telling me that he had a crush on me. But because I had some family and relationship issues back then, I ended up rejecting him. Coincidence or fate, I don't know - we met again randomly in the street. From then, we talked again and became really good friend. Over the years, he has a few girls in and out of his life. It is the same for me. We know our borderline and never consider each other as best friends; we are friends that are just there for each other when we have serious problems in our life.
But until lately, he told me that he, along with his family, is moving the country in 6 months and possibly will not come back for quite a long period of time. He told me that he has always like me from the beginning. He does not hope that I can accept him in my life, he only requested that he can see me more often and spend more time with me.
I was mad and speechless. I am mad because he plans for the departure for two years and is hiding it from me. And I am not sure how to response to his request. I am sure I will miss him as a friend. I get very use him being there for me when I need something. I would love spending more time with him if I don't have a boyfriend. But I do. I don't want to lie to my boyfriend either and sneaking behind him and spend time with my guy friend. At the same time - I don't want to totally ignore him because I know I will regret later if I choose to not talking to him or even see him now. How should I respond to this situation?

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how to melt a girl's heart

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When my boyfriend is good with my family, like he does things to assist them and do things for them, I am really touched.

Or when my boyfriend springs up surprises, like a trip down to see me, or drives me to work, I get really touched.

It's not really about the presents or the gifts or the money he has (frankly he has none...at least not yet), but the effort he puts in that touches me the most.

Although truthfully, all the effort he puts in has a bit of money factor in it, like gas costs money and stuff.

But you can always do things for her like cook for her, clean up her room/house, fix things for her, make yourself useful, etc., that are priceless yet free.

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Facebook envy leaves people lonely and frustrated

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Facebook envy leaves people lonely and frustrated

Witnessing friends' vacations, love lives and work successes on Facebook can cause envy and trigger feelings of misery and loneliness, according to German researchers.

"We were surprised by how many people have a negative experience from Facebook with envy leaving them feeling lonely, frustrated or angry,"

They found people aged in their mid-30s were most likely to envy family happiness while women were more likely to envy physical attractiveness.

These feelings of envy were found to prompt some users to boast more about their achievements on the site run by Facebook Inc. to portray themselves in a better light.

Men were shown to post more self-promotional content on Facebook to let people know about their accomplishments while women stressed their good looks and social lives.

The researchers based their findings on two studies involving 600 people with the results to be presented at a conference on information systems in Germany in February.

"From a provider's perspective, our findings signal that users frequently perceive Facebook as a stressful environment, which may, in the long-run, endanger platform sustainability," the researchers concluded.

http://tvnz.co.nz/te...strated-5324243

How about you? Do you feel like this because of facebook or forums? Where you see something about other peoples life? Do you envy someone? Do you envy someones life? Are you sad or frustrated? Would you wish to be someone else? In someones life? Edited by SnowQueenOfDarkness, 22 January 2013 - 09:33 PM.

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