Wishing everyone a Happy Thanksgiving here in the United States! Belated Happy Thanksgiving to Canadians who celebrated on Monday, October 13th.
Thank you for reading, contributing, and telling others about this blog! We are grateful for your presence.
Sincerely, Byron
Posted by Byron Van Arsdale
Creator of 16 Secrets to a Great Conference Call
ConferenceCallTraining.com
Working with Web 2.0 tools like Twitter.com, LinkedIn.com, Facebook.com, Ning.com, and wikis has been both challenging and enlightening. Seth Godin’s new book Tribes proposes that everyone is a leader and that your leadership is needed. (Note: Read Hugh MacLeod’s “tribes” – 10 Questions for Seth Godin interview – it is amazing!) Social Networks live and breathe based upon active interaction of the participants. Phone, face-to-face, and virtual meetings are the same – actively engaged participants make the event come alive. This leads to an interesting question.
In Social Media – you either participate and contribute to the conversations going on around you or you sit back passively reading them. What ever your “intention” is, you either do or do not engage in the process through sharing your comments, ideas, pictures, podcasts, and videos. In other words, you “do” or “do not”. It is quickly obvious in the Social Media world that Leaders are Doers. Literally, “talk” is cheap. You have to record/capture your thoughts AND post them.
On conference calls (and other types of meetings), is the same true? Are leaders also doers? Yes. When a leader imposes control over the participants, it stops the flow of creativity and engagement. Leaders that actively share and encourage others to take active roles in various parts of a project find the group much more active.
Do, or do not. There is no ‘try.’ by Jedi Master Yoda.
Start looking at your meetings as opportunities to encourage participants taking a leadership role through active engagement.
Posted by Byron Van Arsdale
Author – 16 Secrets to a Great Conference Call
ConferenceCallTraining.com
In politics, it is about winning. In sports, it is about winning. And, in business (for the most part), it is about winning. While the preceding statements are generally true, they miss one important fact. It is the people engaged in politics, sports, and business that have the need to win. The desire to win can also prevent us from developing our skills as a leader.
Whereas winning is binary, few would argue that leadership is binary. Yet, how often do you categorize meetings as a waste of time (i.e. lose) or a success (i.e. win)?
To be fair, it is the desire to win that spurs us to develop our skills and do a better job. That is the positive side of winning. In politics and sports, you can easily tell when you win. In business meetings, can you accurately tell where your leadership performance is between the end points of lose and win?
In professional golf, you know exactly where you stand relative to others. What about when leading a meeting? Imagine how quickly you could identify the skills needed to improve your leadership if you walked out of a meeting and said, “nice job – I shot an 83% on that meeting!” Unlike professional golf or the Olympics, there is no clear measurement system for leading meetings.
The desire to win without some independent, unbiased method to accurately assess your progress is a recipe for frustration. While frustration can be a great catalyst for taking action, it is not sustainable. If you find yourself relying upon others to tell you how well you did in a meeting, ignore the need to categorize it in binary terms of win or lose. Instead, start asking participants for specific behaviors and actions that helped to make the meeting more productive. Utilize this approach long enough and you’ll be able to recognize what you did well during the meeting and what needs to improve. Keeping the need for a “W” in proper perspective will prevent you from driving yourself (and the people you lead) nuts in the process.
Posted by Byron Van Arsdale
Author – 16 Secrets to a Great Conference Call
ConferenceCallTraining.com
What is the biggest block to your self-development as a leader? It is time or energy? How about motivation or desire? Is it intention or commitment? Is it the lack of a clear goal or opportunity to practice your leadership? While important, it is doubtful that you chose any of these.
Accurate assessment (by self or others) is one of the biggest challenges a leader faces in the development of skills. Without accurate assessment, we focus our abundant energy and desire on improving the wrong thing(s) and then experience frustration at our lack of progress.
We all suffer from blind spots when self-assessing ourselves. The optimist will always see the best while the pessimist always finds the worst. In truth, we need both. Candid observations (by self or others) about your behavior and specific actions during your phone, face-to-face, or virtual meeting are essential to grow our skills.
A widely used strategy to improve your quality of assessment is to replace “right/wrong” with “works/doesn’t work”. Right/wrong feedback often includes a judgmental component and can feel like a personal attack. Works/doesn’t work feedback is an observation about behavior and specific actions.
After your next opportunity to lead, conduct a quick assessment to find out what you did well (i.e. repeat these things) and what did not work well (i.e. do not repeat these things with out some level of adaptation). If someone offers to give you feedback, request that the person deliver it using the works/doesn’t work strategy and remain focused only on your behavior and specific actions during the meeting.
Now comes the fun part – select one thing to work on during your next meeting to improve while continuing to employ those things you already know work.
See my next post for another self-imposed challenge (the need to win) we employ when developing our leadership skills.
Posted by Byron Van Arsdale
Author – Executive Conference Call Leadership
ConferenceCallTraining.com
We thought this was such a good post from last year that we decided to run it again. Enjoy!
Last night we celebrated Halloween and it was scary! I happen to come across a graveyard where a large group of ghosts were sitting around a conference table having a meeting. Not sure if I should run quickly away, I decided to stay and listen for any bits of wisdom that may be shared. It turns out that I made the right decision!
Apparently, if you lead bad conference calls, the scary looking guy with the big scythe and black hooded rob comes after you. They called him The Grim Repeater and it was his punishment to collect all the souls of bad conference call leaders and make them sit around a conference table having an eternal meeting where, of course, absolutely nothing is accomplished.
There was no way to catch the names of every ghost yet I did notice a pattern. Some of them shared common names, much like last names. For example, one family name was Perfection. Here are some of the names of the Perfection family I heard: Ms. I Love Perfection, Mr. & Mrs. We are Perfection, Iwanna B. Perfection, Ice Perfection, and In Your Face Perfection!
Other family names I heard were: Control, Manipulation, Intimidation, I’m Right, You’re Wrong, Fear, Historian, Contrarian, Rantколи под наем, Prankster, Weather Update, Sports Update, and Gossip. I would have caught more names except a bunch of people (apparently from the same family) just kept talking and talking and talking. Words kept coming out of their mouths yet they never got to any concrete point! Since I could not hear their family name, I referred to them as Verbal Processor.
After awhile, I decided to leave before they noticed my presence. As I walked home while all the young ghouls and goblins searched for candy, I reflected upon what I had learned. The biggest ah-ha was that leaders who rely heavily on one specific trait (i.e. manipulation, control, fear, etc.) end up eternally leading conference calls that accomplish nothing!
Of course, the best part of the evening was getting enough material to blog about for the rest of my life!
One word of caution: if you ever hear an echo or other strange noise during your conference call, quickly hang up and save yourself! It may be the Grim Repeater coming to claim you!
Posted by Byron Van Arsdale
Creator of 6 Principles of Powerful Conference Calls
http://www.ConferenceCallTraining.com
