Posts Tagged ‘leadership’

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Leaders or Doers?

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

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

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It’s All About the “W”!

Monday, November 10th, 2008

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

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The Achilles Heel of Leadership

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008

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

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What Conference Call Leaders Can Learn from Michael Phelps #1

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

Congratulations to Michael Phelps for his amazing success at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. As millions watched this young man redefine both the sport of swimming and what it means to be an Olympic Athlete, trends and strategies emerged that would benefit conference call leaders. Here are two strategies to help you go for the gold when leading your conference calls, webinars, and virtual meetings.

• Intention matched with Singular Focus.
Eat, sleep, and swim was the routine. Pure focus. Oh, and he came to win.

As a conference call leader, what is your intention for your call? Move the team forward? Accomplish your agenda items? Ignite the passion of your department? Exercise control over your dominion?

Where is your focus? Scattered on other projects or fully on the call? One definite outcome for the call or many possible outcomes?

• Visualization is not enough – you have to execute.
Interviews with a number of USA athletes highlighted how they spent four years seeing themselves win the gold. Interestingly, many did not succeed. I don’t recall Michael ever talk about winning the gold. He talked a lot about training, focus, and having lots of gratitude for the people in his life. And about giving 110% throughout the race until his fingers touched the wall. An extra half stroke gave him a 1/100th of a second lead to win one gold medal.

As a conference call leader, how often does the call match your visualization? Sales professionals will often picture the flow of a conference call. Yet what makes their calls successful is the high intention (close the sale) matched with flexibility to accomplishing this outcome. Visualizing a successful outcome is important as long as you are flexible, persistent, and focused.

Your ability to execute during a conference call, webinar, or virtual meeting is directly based on your intention, focus, and visualization. Oh yea, don’t forget to eat and sleep as well!

Posted by Byron Van Arsdale
Author – 6 Principles of Learner Driven Teleclasses
ConferenceCallTraining.com

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How to Use Conference Calls for Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service

Thursday, August 21st, 2008

At noon today, I’ll be part of a small business panel presentation titled “Sales, Marketing and Customer Service: Strategies for Profits, Growth and Results”. This event is being hosted by the Austin Chamber of Commerce and my role is to talk about using conference calls effectively when conducting sales, marketing, and customer service. Here are the tips and strategies I’ll discuss today.

As preparation, each of the three panelists came up with five tips and two questions. Here are five plus one bonus tips, three questions, and two of my favorite quotes by Peter Drucker.

Three questions:
1. What is the key to an effective conference call?
Answer: Connection

2. What is one secret all conference call leaders must know?
Answer: You are a unique leader.

3. If you could only give one tip for leading a great conference call, what would it be? Answer: Have everyone say their name first during the call.

Five plus one bonus action steps/tips:
1. Communicate/confirm/confirm/confirm: teleconference number, PIN #, date, time/time zone, and duration of the call.

2. W.A.I.T.? – Why Am I Talking? Place this on a Post-it note at eye level.

3. Arrive 3 minutes early for a conference call, 10 minutes early for a webinar.

4. Have everyone say his/her name first before speaking on every conference call and webinar you lead.

5. Always use a landline for conducting your call. Avoid speaker phones, cell phones, and VoIP like the plague!

Bonus: Completely clear your desk before each call!

Two quotes by Peter Drucker:

“The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.”

“Because its purpose is to create a customer, your business has two purposes and two purposes only: Marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation make you money, generate sales, produce profit. Everything else is an expense…”

Special thanks to my co-panelists: Casey Leaman, Partner at OneAccord (Sales), and Amy Stevens, Managing Partner at Marketing Edge Ventures (Marketing); our emcee Thom Singer, Business Development at vcfo, inc.; and the driving force behind the event, Dustin Woodhead, Small Business Manager at Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce.
Posted by Byron Van Arsdale
Author – 16 Secrets to a Great Conference Call
ConferenceCallTraining.com

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