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Communication Styles

The key to improving communication skills is style! Build a better understanding of personal communication styles, and you’ll be on your way to reaching your career goals.

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Butting Heads over Price

Posted by HRDQ-UCommunication Styles, Negotiation StylesNo Comments

written by Cary Silverstein

The latest Nationwide Insurance commercial shows a ram butting his head against his own reflection on a truck door. Well, negotiating price sometimes feels like you’re a ram and the other person is the truck door. The seller may have a preconceived idea of what the price should be, based on the market demand, his raw material, manufacturing costs and his target margins. The buyer on the other hand has shopped the market, and knows what he is willing to pay based on his budget guidelines.

Depending on who opens the negotiation, the history of the relationship, and the urgency of the need the head ramming begins. If the buyer goes first, he would set the tone by stating “this is the price I need” or “I can’t pay more than this price”. If the seller goes first, he may inquire as to the price the buyer is looking for. Sellers usually don’t like to anchor the price range by stating a price. They may also ask, how many units would you require and when would you expect delivery? If the unit price varies based on volume, he may be able to offer a lower price if you commit for more units. As you can see, this is a multi-variable negotiation. We are not just talking price, but volume, a delivery schedule and potential long-term agreements.

When I was a Director of Purchasing at a major New York department store, we tried to have as many annual agreements as possible to guard against price increases. In fact, our agreements stated that if there was a price increase, we could release one last shipment at the contracted price. This permitted a more accounting of expenses. Our largest annual agreement was for gift boxes. Almost ninety percent of the order was consumed in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It took our three vendors, all year to produce the quantity we required. Due to fashion trends and hot gift items, no doubt you would run out of a size and require a reorder. That was always a separate negotiation.

I learned from my vendors the keys to achieving the best price. Considering set-up time for each size, volume was the major driver of the lowest price. The longer the run, the less the set-up cost impacted the final price. Sizes were added over the years that were similar, so we combined sizes and extended the runs, thereby lowering the price per unit. We used the same strategy with merchandise bags, our second largest expense. Delivery was the next challenge; we always wanted to aim for a full truck load to each location to minimize freight costs. Lastly, our annual gift box requirements were sent out to a number of local manufacturers for bid, thus elevating the level of competition in the market. We also made it known that we were open to any suggestion that would maintain quality but reduce our costs.

Rather than being the ram in the commercial, we chose to work collaboratively with our suppliers to find ways to reduce their costs and ultimately our price. There was no butting of heads; we were determined to find win-win solutions, while maintaining strong business relationships.

Cary Silverstein MBA has extensive experience in business, vendor and labor negotiations. Cary earned his BA in Political Science and Industrial Psychology from CUNY’s Queens College. His MBAs in both Marketing and Organizational Behavior were awarded by The Arthur B. Roth School of Business at Long Island University. He attended Marquette University in Milwaukee and was awarded a Certificate in Labor Management Relations. Cary has also attended advanced negotiation training at Harvard’s Program on Negotiation (PON).

HRDQ-U and Cary Silverstein are hosting a free webinar on March 14th at 2 pm ET. Save your seat!

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Top Five Benefits for Leaders from Identifying Your Creative Talents

Posted by HRDQ-UCommunication Styles, HR TrainingNo Comments

By Lynne Levesque

Unfortunately, most popular definitions of creativity such as “brainstorming,” “generating big ideas,” or as being a “genius” or an “artist,” miss the incremental, but equally significant, contributions made by building on what others have done. They also don’t recognize that creativity is not just about coming up with ideas; it’s also about doing something with those ideas!

In order to help individuals be their creative best, I developed the Breakthrough Creativity Profile.

So how do this framework and knowledge about these Eight Creative Talents help leaders?  Here are my top five reasons:

  1. The Eight Creative Talents promote more self-awareness.  Leaders must be aware of their strengths and challenges in order to be truly effective. Since research has established that personality impacts a leader’s style and their effectiveness as a leader, the Breakthrough Creativity Profile provides double benefits to leaders: greater self-awareness and better appreciation of their creative talents.
  2. Understanding their preferences for certain creative talents can help leaders define gaps and possible blinders in their strategic thinking and decision making.  While the talents help leaders make more creative contributions and more creatively solve problems, they can also create blindspots around the data they see and don’t see and the criteria they use to make decisions.
  3. Knowledge of an individual’s creative strengths boosts self-confidence, self-esteem, flexibility, and resilience.  Stronger creative confidence brings an openness to new ideas, balanced risk taking, and the ability to re-invent a leadership style to engage with a new generation of employees and new types of partners and customers.
  4. Since the Breakthrough Creativity framework recognizes individual differences in creative endeavors, it helps leaders appreciate the different contributions from members of their team.
  5. Using the Eight Creative Talents and the newly developed Breakthrough Creativity Team Profile brings a new tool for a leader’s teambuilding efforts.  The Breakthrough Creativity Team Profile enhances a team’s creative performance through improved understanding of both the individual talents of team members and how the combination of talents impacts the team’s interactions and creative results.

HRDQ-U and Dr. Lynne Levesque are hosting a free webinar on the Breakthrough Creativity Profile on January 24th at 2pm ET. Save your seat here! 

 

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New Webinar! How Forward-Looking Leaders Adapt and Create Value

Posted by HRDQ-UCommunication Styles, HR Training, Human Resource TrainingNo Comments

We are excited to announce a new webinar!

Event Date: 10/11/2017 (2:00 pm EDT- 3:00 pm EDT)

Why do some companies triumph even when the rest of their competitors are struggling? In our work with some of the world’s best companies, we have found the greatest predictor of a company’s success is the strength of its leadership. The best leaders seem to have an almost supernatural ability to see into the future and adapt their behavior accordingly.

There’s a name for this superpower: Flexible Leadership.

Flexible Leadership defines effective leadership in today’s fast-changing and challenging environment. The Flexible Leadership model refers to the processes that determine the success of an organization- efficiency and reliability, agility, and talent management- and the ways leaders can directly and indirectly influence these processes. Leaders and managers can use it as a “mental map” to diagnose their situation and guide their short- and long-term choices. It’s also a useful framework for HR professionals to identify and develop future leaders.

This webinar will offer an in-depth look at the Flexible Leadership model and provide strategies leaders and other professionals can apply immediately to become more forward-thinking and adaptable stewards of their company.

Participants will learn 

  • Understand the leadership challenges that impact work performance and assess the importance of each one
  • Identify the leadership practices that are best suited to address each challenge and understand when and how to apply them
  • Help leaders increase their flexibility and be better able to deal with multiple challenges simultaneously while balancing the trade-offs among leadership practices
  • Use the Flexible Leadership model to enhance leadership development strategies

Save your seat! 

Rick Lepsinger is President of OnPoint Consulting. His career has focused on helping organizations and leaders identify and develop leaders, work better virtually, enhance cross functional team performance, and get from strategy to execution faster.  He conducts numerous seminars and workshops on succession management, leading from a distance, leading cross functional teams, and enhancing execution.  Rick has written numerous articles and is the author or co-author of several books. Click here for more information.

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New Webinar! How To Write It Right: Common Mistakes in Business Writing

Posted by HRDQ-UCommunication Styles, HR Training, UncategorizedNo Comments

We are excited to announce a new webinar!

Event Date: 09/13/2017 (2:00 pm EDT- 3:00 pm EDT)

What matters in business writing today? How can we present a consistent professional image, write clearly and concisely, and increase our response rate? And what should be avoided at all costs?

Join Natasha Terk, Owner and Managing Director of Write It Well and Adcom Designs will share her company’s dos and don’ts for writing effectively at work!

Participants will learn

  • Use contemporary formatting techniques. Don’t write long dense paragraphs!
  • Start with the most important message. Don’t bury the main point or request!
  • Edit your message to include only what’s necessary. Don’t give the reader info they don’t need or want!
  • Always keep your reader in mind. Don’t forget their role, interests, questions, communication style, and more!
  • Pay attention to the “old fashioned” parts of letter writing. Don’t be sloppy with grammar, punctuation, openings, closings, or subject lines!

Save your seat!

Natasha Terk is a recognized expert on business communication in the workplace and is the author of seven books in The Write It Well Series on Business Communication. She leads the firm’s business operations and strategy in the US and ran an affiliate company across Asia for five years.  Asia. Her job-relevant, outcomes-focused communication tools, training customization, efficiency, and customer service have grown Write It Well by 300 percent.

She has worked as an organization development consultant and trainer for over 15 years. She leads onsite and online trainings, team building, leadership development, strategic planning, and train-the-trainer processes with Fortune 500 companies, small and mid-sized businesses, and nonprofit and public-sector organizations.

She delivers technical writing programs for Sony Playstation, delivers a global management training program for McDonald’s, and leads workshops for Nestlé University. Her team also provides Hewlett Packard Enterprise and other clients with ongoing consulting services on communication strategy.

 

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4 Practices to Tap Your Superpower of Human Connection

Posted by HRDQ-UCommunication Styles, Corporate Team Building Games, Team Building ExercisesNo Comments

By Michael Lee Stallard

It’s encouraging to see more leaders identify human connection as a primary factor contributing to their organization’s sustained success.  Fortune magazine recently recognized Theo Epstein, President, Baseball Operations for the Chicago Cubs of Major League Baseball and the Cubs organization, as #1 on its world’s greatest leaders list. Last year the Cubs won the World Series and broke the franchise’s 108-year World Series title drought, the longest in professional sports.

According to Tom Verducci, Sports Illustrated writer and author of The Cubs Way:

“Theo Epstein, once known as the number-crunching wizard who broke the championship curse of the Boston Red Sox, built [the Cubs] with an emphasis on people who would create the right ethos. The story of the Cubs’ championship would not just be about 2016. It would be timeless. It would also be about the power of human connection—teammates to teammates, teammates to fans, generation to generation.”

Previously I’ve written about Cubs manager Joe Maddon and the Chicago Cubs’ culture of connection. In a future article I will present a detailed description of the Cubs’ culture based on Verducci’s observations in The Cubs Way.

For now I’d like to focus on a pattern I’m seeing. As I read through Fortune’s world’s greatest leaders list, it jumped out at me that a number of the top leaders recognized are intentional connectors who create cultures of connection.

For example, note that the #3 rated leader is Pope Francis who is well known for being intentional about connecting with people and, I believe, is working to create a culture of connection in the Catholic Church.

The #4 rated leader is Melinda Gates who is without doubt an intentional connector. I highly recommend watching Ms. Gates’ outstanding commencement speech at Duke University, her alma mater, in which she describes the importance of connection to thrive in life.

In many fields, leaders and thought leaders are discovering the superpower of connection.  Consider healthcare. Kate Otto, author of Everyday Ambassador and co-founder of the organization Everyday Ambassador, recently wrote an outstanding article published in Clinical Correlations: The New York University Langone Online Journal of Medicine. Ms. Otto makes the case that the scientific research shows how damaging chronic loneliness is to health so physicians should be looking for signs of it in their patients.  She recommends that physicians on the front lines of medicine inquire about a patient’s state of social connection by asking questions such as “Do you live alone? Who will visit you here in the hospital? With whom do you share your private worries and fears? How much of your week do you spend with other people?” She goes on to recommend developing therapeutic relationships that include empathizing with patients.

Are You Tapping Your Superpower?

I frequently note that Matthew Lieberman, the University of California at Los Angeles neuroscientist and author of Social, describes connection as a superpower that makes you smarter, happier and more productive. This raises the question: Are you tapping into your superpower of connection?

Research confirms that most people are not. The former U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, said the most common illness today is a lack of connection. This is unlikely to change, given current trends and the rise of social media and remote work. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health, recently wrote about research that showed social media was making us lonelier. The rise of remote work is contributing to loneliness too.

Is Your Team and Organization Tapping Its Superpower?

Connection is also a superpower for teams and organizations because it boosts employee engagement, strategic alignment, productivity and innovation. Most teams and organizations are not tapping into their superpower of connection. Gallup research shows two-thirds of American workers don’t feel connected at work.

In their Harvard Business Review article on creating a positive workplace culture, Stanford’s Emma Seppala and University of Michigan’s Kim Cameron recommend four connection-producing practices that boost performance of a team or organization:

  1. foster social connections
  2. show empathy
  3. go out of your way to help, and
  4. encourage people to talk to you, especially about their problems.

These are just a few ways to connect. My colleagues and I have previously recommended each of these plus many additional practices which are also described in our book, Connection Culture: The Competitive Advantage of Shared Identity, Empathy and Understanding at Work, and free e-book, 100 Ways to Connect.

About connection, professors Seppela and Cameron write:

“A large number of empirical studies confirm that positive social connections at work produce highly desirable results. For example, people get sick less often, recover twice as fast from surgery, experience less depression, learn faster and remember longer, tolerate pain and discomfort better, display more mental acuity, and perform better on the job. Conversely, research by Sarah Pressman at the University of California, Irvine, found that the probability of dying early is 20% higher for obese people, 30% higher for excessive drinkers, 50% higher for smokers, but a whopping 70% higher for people with poor social relationships. Toxic, stress-filled workplaces affect social relationships and, consequently, life expectancy.”

Your Mindset: Connection Is an Extraordinary Opportunity

Although the decline of connection in modern society may seem depressing to some, I want you to see it as an opportunity. By increasing connection in your life and the lives of your family, friends and colleagues, you will thrive and improve the lives of those around you. By promoting connection in your organization, you will be boosting its performance and contribution to society.

To get the conversation started on the importance of boosting connection in your organization and how to go about it, I invite you and your colleagues to join my colleague Todd Hall, chief scientist at E Pluribus Partners, and me on a webcast titled “Employee Engagement: Using Your Vision, Value and Voice,” on May 24 from 2:00-3:00 pm EDT.  You can find details and signup information here.

Mark this day, connect more with others and watch what happens.  I promise that over time, you will see that connection affects much more than the bottom line. As you experience greater peace, hope and joy that comes from having an abundance of connection in your life, you will have discover wealth of even greater value.

Michael Lee Stallard, Todd W. Hall, and HRDQ-U are hosting a webinar May 24th at 2pm ET. Save your seat here!

Michael Lee Stallard is President of E Pluribus Partners, a leadership training and consulting firm based in Greenwich, Connecticut, and a co-founder of ConnectionCulture.com. He speaks and teaches at a wide variety of organizations including Google, Johnson & Johnson, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, NASA, Qualcomm, Scotiabank, and the U.S. Treasury Department. Texas Christian University created the TCU Center for Connection Culture based on Michael’s work.

Todd W. Hall, Ph.D. is Chief Scientist for E Pluribus Partners, a leadership training and consulting firm based in Greenwich, Connecticut.  A research and clinical psychologist, Todd has 20+ years experience helping individuals and teams thrive.  He has been privileged to consult with start-ups, government agencies, non-profits, and for-profits, including the National Institute for Mental Health, the U.S. Army, the Salvation Army, VHA Corp., New York City Leadership Center, Moody Press, Pruvio, and numerous universities.

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