Networking: Business Talk for "Getting on with People"

Looking for meaningful networking opportunities? It is essential to focus on on in-person networking events, rather than social networking sites, as sites such as LinkedIn are simply a step or conduit to securing a face-to-face meeting.

Furthermore, sales representatives are warned to not be fooled into thinking that just because they are “connected” to hundreds of people online that they have a real relationship with those people, let alone a relationship that would lead to any sort of actual business. Alternatively, actual in-person networking with strangers can be a very worthwhile endeavor.

Not only does it pay to practice conversational skills and the ability to empathize with total strangers, but by showing genuine interest in other people, an opportunity for locating a new target or lead may materialize organically in conversation. More often than not, however, networking events are formal, structured events.

Salespeople should avoid general networking affairs and instead focus on events that include members of a specific target market. For example, Person A has a company whose services benefit lawyers. Therefore, he attends those meetings where lawyers or those who do training at law firms are sure to be in attendance.

One of the biggest benefits to networking only within target markets is that with each attendance a person can raise their profile and be noticed. Getting noticed is also why it is suggested that it is important to not just attend, but also speak, at these events. Standing up in front of one’s target market is the best way to stand out and be remembered.

This article is based on the book "How to Be Great at the Stuff You Hate." The book summary is available online at Business Book Summaries.

Create a Culture of Learning

When something goes wrong within an organization, there is a tendency to focus on identifying who dropped the ball. While discovering the source of the problem is a logical starting point to prevent a reoccurrence, it can also demoralize employees.

Focusing on blame creates a culture of fear in which creativity is stifled and employees concentrate on avoiding punishment--whether public embarrassment, disciplinary action, or dismissal--at any cost. There are several examples of this type of culture, including doctors who are fearful of being sued for a missed diagnosis so they classify healthy patients as sickly.

On the other hand, creating a culture that embraces learning sends the signal that mistakes are an inevitable part of growth and success. For example, Children's Hospitals and Clinics in Minneapolis created a culture of learning by implementing an anonymous reporting system that allows any of the hospital's employees to report medical errors without revealing their identity.

Also, the organization has adopted an open communication policy that admits liability to patients for medical errors. Ironically, research involving drug-administration errors reveals that high-performing medical institutions and teams are more likely to admit errors, and these disclosures provide opportunities to learn from and avoid repeating the same mistakes.

However, the institutions that reported the least amount of errors were not rated as highly in performance and reputation. Their failure to acknowledge mistakes impedes opportunities for growth and improvement.

Leaders can create a culture of learning by rewarding responsibility over denying or shifting blame, and by creating a system of open and honest feedback. They can also shape a learning-based culture by admitting their own vulnerability to make mistakes.

Both leaders and employees can help to create a better environment by taking a rational approach to blame and credit. Most people are inclined to expect and accept praise while rejecting accountability and criticism.

Realizing the historical, cultural, and situational dynamics of credit and blame can help individuals to better understand themselves and others. Armed with this knowledge, companies can sidestep blame game triggers and focus on learning from the past while forging a successful future.

This article is based on the book "The Blame Game." The book summary is available online at Business Book Summaries.

Fire, Flow, and Future

Today's business managers benefit from an unprecedented number of quality improvement tools, such as lean manufacturing, re-engineering, Total Quality Management, and Six Sigma. Yet despite substantial investments, many companies continue to see slow improvement in the quality of their products, services, and processes.

Management is routinely troubled by questions such as "Why are my sales dropping off?"; "What can I do about excessive scrap?" and "How do I reduce high turnover?" How they decide to answer those questions has a measurable impact on both quality and the bottom line.

LEO can help organizations find ideal solutions to these questions not because it is a better management tool than the likes of Six Sigma, but because it causes a shift in every person's frame of mind, affecting how they approach problems and how they decide which actions to take. LEO is a broad methodology that transforms how existing management tools are used, and it operates best when used by people at all levels in an organization.

While designing LEO, there are three scenarios with the most room for quality improvement: Fire, Flow, and Future. In a Fire deployment, LEO is used to solve an isolated, often unexpected problem that needs immediate attention and an accompanying change in quality -- for example, when a food manufacturer's product is suddenly and inexplicably underweight.

A Flow deployment seeks to improve quality in the operational processes of an organization--for example, a hospital's procedure for hiring nurses or a manufacturer's process for creating an RFQ (a request for quote). In a Future deployment, quality is built into the process of innovation.

All three of these scenarios are focused on improving an existing product or service or developing an entirely new one. Regardless of the type of deployment, a LEO team should be appointed to follow same three-step process of Listen, Enrich, and Optimize.

While the composition of the team will vary by deployment, in general it should be led by someone from management, and team members should be chosen based on who the scenario effects and requires input from. No deployment can succeed unless the executive cadre is actively supporting it each and every day.

This article is based on the book "Power of LEO." The book summary is available online at Business Book Summaries.

The Science of Personal Success

The findings concerning personal change are based on research focused on "Changers." Changers are people who were able to overcome significant personal challenges and successfully changed their behaviors and habits for at least three years. 

Research conducted by the Change Anything Labs found that a major barrier to successfully changing behavior is not a lack of willpower, but the false belief that willpower is essential for change. In reality, skills can be learned that improve a person's ability to successfully change behavior.

Many sources of influence prevent people from altering their habits. Individuals who use tools to control those influences, however, tend to be much more successful at changing behaviors.

For example, Change Anything researchers discovered that after learning a few simple skills to control influences, 50 percent of experimental subjects were able to resist temptations. There are identified six sources of influence that affect people as they try to change their habits. They are also identified change tactics that can help counteract each of these influences.

People who follow these steps and align sources of influence in their favor are more likely to achieve personal success.

1. Personal motivation. Although personal impulses can be compelling, it is possible to interrupt these impulses by connecting with personal goals during crucial moments.

2. Personal ability. A proven way to change habits is to enhance personal ability and to learn new skills.

3. Social motivation. There is a clear social component to bad habits. When friends encourage bad behavior and also engage in it, this is very difficult to resist. If individuals can transform "accomplices" into "friends" who encourage good behavior, they are more likely to change their habits.

4. Social ability. To change longstanding habits, people usually need support from other people. Individuals who get a life coach or mentor are often more successful at changing behaviors.

5. Structural motivation. People who connect short-term rewards or punishments to new habits are usually more likely to adopt those new habits.

6. Structural ability. Researchers have found that minor environmental changes can have a significant effect on a person's choices. Individuals experience faster behavior changes when they add visual cues to help them focus on their goals.


By understanding these influences, it is possible for people to consciously design change plans that address them. Individuals who incorporate the six sources of influence into their change plans are ten times more likely to succeed than people who do not take this approach.

This article is based on the book "Change Anything." The book summary is available online at Business Book Summaries.

Meaningful Workplaces: Sense of Self

The key concept of the sense of self is the recognition that people bring their "whole selves" to work. Workers bring emotions and spiritual concerns to the job just as much as they bring their bodies and minds.

However, most workers are not fully aware of how much of themselves they bring, or how much more they can bring. Before anyone can bring their whole selves to work, people need to become more aware of who they are, of their values and beliefs, and what their sense of purpose in life is.

It is impossible to realize an individual's potential without first knowing what values and beliefs can be reached. This sense of self gets to the heart of a person, as opposed to what work a person does.

What people do is simply the label of a job that provides for their basic needs. Meaningful work that people identify with, however, is more than just a job.

It is the culmination of education, training, practice, development and emotional investment into a way of life that is, in effect, the performance of the worker's values, beliefs, moral philosophy, and personality. One way to integrate more of the self into work is find ways to include workers' spirituality.

This is not necessarily a sacred spirituality, although for many people, that is an important level of spirituality. Of more significance is "psychological spirituality" that is a kind of faith in the human spirit, one that unites all humans together and to the earth itself.

It is a mindset that promotes deep ethical and social awareness that "we are all in this together." Cultivating this psychological or secular spirituality at work helps workers identify their purpose because purpose depends on awareness of personal values, of which people usually only become aware through some sort of spiritual life.

Purpose can be identified through the overlapping of personal values, individual strengths, and interests. Often, workers might know that they are good at a particular kind of work, but if that work conflicts with their values or is not the kind of thing they enjoy, the work is unfulfilling and may even be detrimental at the psychological level.

In today's workforce, most people seem to find their purpose through helping others, and meaningful work seeks to instill the sense that the work of a company is helpful to society at large. In short, workers want to know that their own lives matter, and that their work matters to others.

In addition to workplace spiritual development and identifying work that cultivates purpose, sense of self involves self-actualization and self-efficacy. The former is a process where the worker's capacities are fully and creatively used.

It is a process of making choices for growth and of continually living, working, and relating to the world, rather than to individual accomplishments or meeting goals set by managers and leaders. The latter term, self-efficacy, is an attitude that recognizes that people's actions will produce the outcomes they desire, and provides the mental fortitude to withstand obstacles that impede those outcomes.

Meaningful work allows workers to make their own decisions to cope with various roadblocks and dilemmas in such a way that promotes the knowledge that workers will get past the roadblocks and to learn from them. The most important component of the sense of self to meaningful work is the need for continuous learning that moves beyond the old "outcome paradigm," which is concerned with minimal competence, avoiding failure, single-answer solutions and acceptable results, to one that is driven by understanding and wisdom.

Such a model would be based on continual personal and professional improvement, informed risk-taking, team and collective performance, cooperation and collaboration, coaching, support, multiple answers, conversation, and processes. Meaningful work depends on meaningful learning as a critical intrinsic motivator.

This article is based on the book "Meaningful Workplaces." The book summary is available online at Business Book Summaries.

UNDERSTANDING DIVERSIFIED MENTORING RELATIONSHIPS: DEFINITIONS, CHALLENGES AND STRATEGIES

Diversified mentoring relationships describe mentor and protégé relationships with members who vary by "race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, religion, disability or other group memberships associated with power in organizations." Diversified mentoring relationships face many challenges.

Researchers need to consider the shared group associations of mentors and mentees. Importantly, different branches of diversity should not be gathered under the title of minority.

Each shared group faces different challenges depending on their specific experiences and the context of the mentoring relationship. Every organization has different "micro-climates" that non-visible, stigmatized groups must navigate.

Having a mentor who can better understand these micro-climates can greatly benefit the protégé. Diversity in a mentoring relationship can change over its lifespan.

While group membership differences may initially create barriers, these differences may become less of an obstacle over time. In fact diversified mentoring relationships can lead to members relating on more individualized and deeper levels.

These individualized similarities are what cement a strong and meaningful mentoring relationship. Members of a diversified mentoring relationship must accept the role of privilege in their organization.

Privilege refers to the benefits that certain shared group members enjoy. On the other hand the numerical minority group members experience higher expectations and greater visibility.

Whereas pretending that these differences in privilege do not exist may increase comfort in a diversified mentoring relationship, ignoring differences in privilege means that members cannot learn from one another as effectively. Discussing diversity differences in great depths does allow members of the mentoring relationship to learn from one another and better understand diversity, but over discussing diversity does not allow members to appreciate one another on an individual and deep level.

Ideally, diversified mentoring relationships address diversity but do not allow it to dominate their conversations and mentoring relationship. In order to encourage diversified mentoring relationships, the environment in which they exist must accept and encourage diversity.

Therefore change from inside an organization is the optimal tool for encouraging diverse and meaningful mentoring relationships. In order to achieve this, leaders of the organization need to appreciate the importance of diversity in the workplace and the challenges workers face as a result of discrimination.

Similarly, the organization needs rid itself of the glass ceiling that prevents diversity from being represented on a senior level. Formal mentoring may be an essential tool in the future for advancing the careers of numerical minority groups in the workplace.

Currently, formal mentoring programs are not any more effective than having no mentor at all. Employees with informal mentors are more likely to advance in their careers than those with formal mentors.

In order for formal mentoring programs to create a supportive environment around diversity, it is important that employees have access to both formal and informal mentors. However, the quality of a mentor is more important than a mentoring relationship being formal or informal.

Mentoring programs not only provide numerical minorities with access to mentors, but they also increase the number of future, diverse mentors. A mentoring program that encourages diversity can create a more positive work environment with an inclusive culture.

This article is based on the book "Mentoring and Diversity." The book summary is available online at Business Book Summaries.