Coaching Tip: The Leadership Blog

Creating Loyalty

Every executive who supervises others must be prepared to motivate, requiring you to create loyal customers and workers who link themselves to your higher cause.

External incentives or benefits are insufficient.  True leaders create followers who are inspired—not simply swayed by marketing or hype. Their willingness to act is rooted in a deeply personal cause that is greater than themselves—even if it means making a personal sacrifice.

The leaders who helped create the iPhone, iPod and iPad don’t inspire employees with money, gym facilities or company picnics.  They inspire their employees to care about why.

As for customers, never mistake repeat business for loyalty.  Repeat business means people do business with you multiple times.  Loyalty means people are willing to turn down a better offer to continue doing business with you.

Creating Dream Jobs

Studies have shown that more than  80 percent of U.S. employees don’t believe they’re working in their dream jobs.  What if leaders could change this?

People who love going to work are more creative and productive.  They go home feeling satisfied and have happier families.  They treat their colleagues and customers better. Inspired people are the glue that holds strong companies together, while also increasing bottom lines.

Inspired employees care because you care.  You know you’ve succeeded when employees’ beliefs resonate with your own, when they demonstrate their loyalty and when they’re willing to turn down better offers or other options.

 Simon Sinek: Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

 

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The Why of Apple

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak teamed up in their 20s to challenge a computer industry designed for large corporations. Wozniak saw the personal computer as a way to provide tools to the “little guy.”

Steve Jobs had originally sold surplus electronic parts, but he was much more than a salesman. Jobs wanted to make his mark on the world, and he envisioned building a company as the best way to start a revolution.

In Apple’s first year, with only one product, Wozniak and Jobs brought home a million dollars in revenues. Year 2 produced $10 million in sales; year 4, $100 million. Within six years, Apple Computer was a billion-dollar company with more than 3,000 employees.

Jobs and Wozniak were not alone in their technological quest, nor were they the smartest or  most experienced of the bunch.  They actually had no leadership development training or executive coaches.

What made Apple remarkable was not its fast growth, nor its unique ideas about personal computers.  Apple has repeated a pattern of success over and over again.  Unlike any of its competitors, the company has challenged conventional thinking within numerous industries: computers, small electronics, music, mobile phones and broader entertainment categories.

With only a 6 percent market share in the United States and about 3 percent worldwide, Apple is not a leading manufacturer of home computers. But the company nonetheless leads the computer industry in innovation and technological advancements, while becoming a force to be reckoned with in other industries, as well.

Apple’s success lies in its leaders’ ability to inspire, challenge the status quo and empower its workers.

Apple inspires because it starts with why, according to Sinek. Company leaders communicate the reasons Apple exists, as well as their heartfelt motivation for creating new products that give customers new levels of freedom and power.

Apple has access to the same talent pool shared by every other computer company. Its leaders hire those who can eloquently verbalize their desire to be great. Those selected to join the company can achieve this goal because their leaders communicate passion and their “why.”

 Simon Sinek: Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

Leading with Why

Think about the inspirational leaders of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Southwest Airlines. You can probably name them: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Herb Kelleher.

Next, try to name the leaders of General Motors, TiVo and AOL during the same period. Some were good, but very few left a leadership legacy that was strong enough to ensure future success.

Most candidates for senior leadership positions are highly qualified, experienced and deeply engaged in their work. Lousy bosses are commonly weeded out in the long run, and competent bosses are usually promoted.

Why, then, do so many good managers lack the requisite leadership skills?

Leading with Why

Leaders who want to succeed should clearly communicate what they believe and why they’re so passionate about their cause, according to business consultant Simon Sinek, author of Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (Portfolio, 2010).

Most people know what they do and how they do it, Sinek says, but few communicate why they do what they do.

“People don’t buy what you do; they buy into why you do it,” he writes.

Great leaders inspire us when they connect with our hearts and emotions, says Sinek, who presents his ideas on TED TV.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Walt Disney always communicated their “why”—the reasons they acted, why they cared and their future hopes. Great business leaders follow suit:

• Herb Kelleher, founder of Southwest Airlines, believes air travel should be fun and accessible to everyone.
• Apple’s Steve Wozniak and Microsoft's Bill Gates believed everyone should have a computer.  Gates and Wozniak with Steve Jobs set out to challenge established corporations’ status quo.
• Walmart’s Sam Walton believed people should have access to low-cost goods.
• Starbucks’ Howard Schultz wanted to create social experiences in cafés resembling those in Italy.

Three years ago, a female executive coach in Canada and I discovered that we both were coaching a large number of career women who had similar life challenges.  In our discussions, we decided to share with other women our unique knowledge of how these women we coached overcame their challenges and prospered.  We began by providing coaching tips and conducting women-only teleseminars that reflected the truths our clients faced and conquered.  Then we began writing a soon-to-be-released woman's guidebook based on our work experience coaching women to succeed in life and at work. 

Simon Sinek: Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

 

80% Off - End of Year Sale. Subscribe to one year of daily coaching tips delivered to your desktop, laptop or smart phone for only $3.95.

More information at: www.CoachedtoSuccess.info

Five Traits that Define Clutch Performers

Athletes regularly face win-lose situations, but so do business leaders, soldiers, litigators and even people making critical decisions about their lives.  Many of us crumble under extreme pressure.  But a few not only succeed, they thrive.  These people are "clutch performers." 

Clutch performers learn and practice the necessary skills by being focused and disciplined.  They train themselves to react in high-stress environments as they would in ordinary situations. 

For example, being a clutch performer in a personal financial crisis means embracing thriftiness to keep yourself out of such crises in the first place.  If that fails, you need to dispassionately sell off assets to keep from losing everything.  People should live within their means, but they should also plan for the possibility that the present will not continue.  Do this and you may avoid being in a pressure situation where you will have to make clutch decisions.  In other words, if the ship starts to take on water, don't wait for it to start sinking before jumping off.

Forgiveness: Good for You & Your Business

Odds are your mother taught you that it's important to apologize if you've done something wrong—and to graciously accept an apology when one is offered.  The act of making amends is crucial to maintaining harmony in both our personal relationships and the world at large.

Apologies are so important that many hospitals train their staffs to say they are sorry to patients and their families following a medical mistake because they've found it deters malpractice lawsuits.  Economists have shown that companies offering a mea culpa to disgruntled customers fare better than ones offering financial compensation.

But apologies can be complicated. They're not always forthcoming, or even sincere.  Making matters worse, there's a gender "apology gap": Men and women have different approaches and different expectations when it comes to acts of contrition.

According to new research from Canadian psychologists, people apologize about four times a week.  But, on average, they offer up these apologies much more often to strangers (22% of the time) than to romantic partners (11%) or family members (7%). The only folks we apologize to more? Friends (46%).

Two small studies at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, published last month by the journal Psychological Science, indicate men are just as willing as women to apologize if they think they've done something wrong. Men just have a different idea of what defines "something wrong."

In the first study, 66 men and women kept daily diaries and recorded each time they committed—or were on the receiving end—of an offense. They also noted whether an apology was issued.  The outcome: Women were offended more often, and they offered more apologies for their own behavior.  Yet men were just as likely as women to apologize if they believed they'd done something wrong.

A 'comprehensive' apology is more likely to win forgiveness, researchers say.  There are eight elements:

• Remorse
• Acceptance of responsibility
• Admission of wrongdoing
• Acknowledgment of harm
• Promise to behave better
• Request for forgiveness
• Offer of repair
• Explanation

Source: University of Waterloo

In the second study, 120 subjects imagined committing offenses, from being rude to a friend to inconveniencing someone they live with. The men said they would apologize less frequently. The researchers concluded the men had a higher threshold for what they found offensive. "We don't think that women are too sensitive or that men are insensitive," says Karina Schumann, one of the study's authors. "We just know that women are more sensitive."

Forgiveness takes a lot of Faith

That faith comes more easily if we are not fully buying into the system of separation.  But it also has to do with the heart.

Often it is an intuitive flash that tells us that not forgiving, but holding vengeful, hateful thoughts, is actually more damaging to our own system.  This poison of hate and resentment will also affect the person we are projecting those thoughts onto, but in the end it is going to hurt us more.

So forgiveness is the willingness to let go--of our self-importance, our pride, our hurt, our resentment, and the feeling that we have to get our pound of flesh.

Deep inside us we do know the truth, that we are not separate and that we are love.  When we awaken to the truth, about our real self and thus to love, we do not proudly and self-importantly pamper and cherish ourselves.  We love ourselves in a much more respectful way, all the while knowing that our and others' baggage does not matter.  It does not have to be important.  That is true nobility of soul. 

As Alexander Pope said, 'To err is human, to forgive divine.'   Learning to forgive is the very real awakening of our divine nature.

October 30th is National Forgiveness Day  

The Center Of Unconditional Love (COUL) is dedicated to creating as awareness and understanding of the power of love and the joy of forgiveness in producing good health, happiness, and stress-free living in the lives of individuals and in our home, work, and

worship environments.

 

With this mission in sight, we celebrate October as Forgiveness Month, the week of Oct. 24-31 as Forgiveness Week, and Saturday, Oct. 30, on the 5th annual National Forgiveness Day.

Volunteers and organizations such as yours will celebrate the joy of forgiveness by publishing/printing/distributing/sharing forgiveness information and copies of the "Power Of Love Joy Of Forgiveness Health & Wellness Plan" with as many people as possible by email, newsletters, publications, worship center bulletin inserts, flyers, word-of-mouth, etc.  Please enjoy  www.unconditionallovelive.com.   The goal is to reach 5 million people this year. 

Sources:  The Wall Street Journal, October 19, 2010, Returning to Oneness, by Leslie Temple-Thurston with Brad Laughlin (CoreLight Publishing, 2002) and Robert Moyers ( [email protected] ) The Center of Unconditional Love,  www.unconditionallovelive.com

Preparing for a Decade of Deflation.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, and Japan fell into a slow but relentless decline that neither enormous budget deficits nor a flood of easy money has reversed.  For nearly a generation now, the nation has been trapped in low growth and a corrosive downward spiral of prices, known as deflation, in the process shriveling from an economic Godzilla to little more than an afterthought in the global economy.

Now, as the United States and other Western nations struggle to recover from a debt and property bubble of their own, a growing number of economists are pointing to Japan as a dark vision of the future.  There are growing fears that the United States and many European economies could face a prolonged period of slow growth or even, in the worst case, deflation, something not seen on a sustained basis outside Japan since the Great Depression.

Japanese leaders at first denied the severity of their nation’s problems and then spent heavily on job-creating public works projects that only postponed painful but necessary structural changes, economists say.

Economists are now warning of “Japanification” — of falling into the same deflationary trap of collapsed demand that occurs when consumers refuse to consume, corporations hold back on investments and banks sit on cash.  It becomes a vicious, self-reinforcing cycle: as prices fall further and jobs disappear, consumers tighten their purse strings even more and companies cut back on spending and delay expansion plans.

“The U.S., the U.K., Spain, Ireland, they all are going through what Japan went through a decade or so ago,” said Richard Koo, chief economist at Nomura Securities who recently wrote a book about Japan’s lessons for the world.  “Millions of individuals and companies see their balance sheets going underwater, so they are using their cash to pay down debt instead of borrowing and spending.”

Just as inflation scarred a generation of Americans, deflation has left a deep imprint on the Japanese, breeding generational tensions and a culture of pessimism, fatalism and reduced expectations.  While Japan remains in many ways a prosperous society, it faces an increasingly grim situation, particularly outside the relative economic vibrancy of Tokyo, and its situation provides a possible glimpse into the future for the United States and Europe, should the most dire forecasts come to pass.

Source: The New York Times, October 17, 2010

For more information on the effects of deflation, go to: www.Ask-Know-Do.com  and read the book below:

  

 Robert R. Prechter Jr.: Conquer the Crash: You Can Survive and Prosper in a Deflationary Depression

 

How the U.S. priced itself outside the global marketplace

There was a time, not very long ago, when people at the very top of their profession—the “talent”—did not make a lot of money.

In the postwar years, corporate lawyers, Wall Street investment bankers, Fortune 500 executives, all-star professional athletes, and the like made a fraction of what they earn today.  That era was an upside-down version of our own: when society gazed upon captains of industry and commerce, it marveled at how ordinary their lives were. The truly rich in the nineteen-fifties and sixties were people who had inherited money.  On income above two hundred thousand dollars a year, the marginal tax rate was as high as ninety-one percent.

And then, suddenly, the world changed.  Taxes began to fall.  The salaries paid to high-level professionals—“talent”—started to rise.

How to become a Social Capitalist

Talking on the phone replaced face-to-face meetings. Now texting is taking the place of many phone conversations.

Facebook is the best distancing tool since the creation of the Christmas card.  Sending holiday greeting cards began in the 1850s in England and spread quickly as a way to stay in touch with far-flung friends and relatives.  The cards kept the people in your social network at a distance, while maintaining ties to them.

Facebook, which tries to replicate our real-world relationships online, now helps me maintain those connections. But it does cards one better. It preserves the weak ties in my social network without creating obligations.

Despite its ability to conveniently hold friends at a distance, Facebook can also bestow benefits to those users who make a little effort to keep track of what their friends are saying there. Cameron Marlow, a research scientist who has been described as Facebook’s in-house sociologist, says it relates to social capital: Your friends on Facebook have resources — a guest room or a job, for instance. You may want to know that information, but finding it depends in no small amount on serendipity and your ability to pay attention to their posts. But you also have to be willing to ask for those resources.

Today, while enjoying kayaking on the river during a warm Fall day, I recall one of my 1,000+ Facebook friends requesting to buy a used kayak about a year ago.  At that time, I was considering buying a new kayak that weighed less than the one I had.  This request was satisfied when the Facebook friend reviewed a photo of the kayak that I offered her and decided to buy it.  She got a kayak at the price she was offering and I got to buy a new kayak that better fit my needs.  That's how social networking creates win-win results.

Mr. Marlow says that more in-bound communication increases one’s social capital.  “The more they have communication with me, the lower the cost of me reaching out to them,” he said.

Practicing the Law of Reciprocity 

 

Perhaps, we can by being selective as to who we let into our networks while retaining the ability of instantly collaborating with many people across time zones and borders.  The foundation of network technology is how the people we connect with think about the collaboration process.  Social networks that are built on the "law of reciprocity" flourish.  Those networks that violate the law of reciprocity die.  So what is the law of reciprocity and how can you use it in your personal and business lives?

"One of the most potent of the weapons of influence around us is the rule for reciprocation. The rule says that we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us."  Robert B. Cialdini, author of The Psychology of Persuasion (William Morrow, 1993)

Reciprocity flows from the law of love which is "the gift of giving" without the "hope of reward or pay," or serving others. This 'law of love' is identified in many different ways--for example, in Wayne Baker's business bestseller, "Achieving Success Through Social Capital" (Jossey-Bass), this law of love in the workplace is described as the "law of reciprocity."

The law of reciprocity is not what can best be described as "transactional reciprocity."

Baker says that, "Many people conceive of their business dealings as spot market exchanges--value given for value received, period. Nothing more, nothing less.  This tit-for-tat mode of operation can produce success, but it doesn't invoke the power of reciprocity and so fails to yield extraordinary success."

Baker explains, "The lesson is that we cannot pursue the power of reciprocity.  When we try to invoke reciprocity directly, we lose sight of the reason for it: helping others.  Paradoxically, it is in helping others without expecting reciprocity in return that we invoke the power of reciprocity. The path to reciprocity is indirect: reciprocity ensues from the social capital built by making contributions to others.

The deliberate pursuit of reciprocity fails, just like the pursuit of happiness.   Acts of contribution, big and small, build your fund of social capital, creating a vast network of reciprocity. And so those who help you may not be those you help.  The help you receive may come from distant corners of your network."

And a little reciprocity increases the amount of information we receive. The new feature, Facebook groups, allows like-minded friends to more easily share information.

Source: The New York Times, October 10, 2010

Investing in Extreme Markets

Video (Part 3): Prechter - Investing in Extreme Markets

(Note: This interview was originally recorded on September 20, 2010)

In the video below, Robert Prechter talks to Yahoo! Finance Tech Ticker host Aaron Task and Henry Blodget about a technical pattern he sees forming in the Dow.

Get Up to Speed on Robert Prechter's Latest Perspective — Download this Special FREE Report Now.

  Robert R. Prechter Jr.: Conquer the Crash: You Can Survive and Prosper in a Deflationary Depression

For parts one & two of this video, go to: www.Ask-Know-Do.com