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Turning the Spotlight on Others

Posted on July 30, 2013 by The Leadership Mints Guy

By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to help you reinforce management-employee relations. Reading time: 3:34.

The Chief Executive Officer is standing on a balcony overlooking the industry’s most comprehensive research facility. A photographer from The New York Times is setting up to take the CEO’s picture commemorating the $111 million facility’s official opening.

Setting up lighting for a photo

The company’s Public Relations guy is thrilled with the national exposure, thrilled to have interested a significant media outlet to come half way across the country to cover this event.

But suddenly there’s a snag. There’s technical issue with the photographer’s lighting. The photographer asks for time to fix the lighting.

The PR guy finds himself in an awkward situation: alone with the CEO with no particular meeting agenda, no proposal to be made or decision to be approved. The taciturn CEO was at ease in the silence. However, the PR guy felt the eerie silence as if it were weight on his shoulders.

But then the PR guy’s own chest began to swell with great pride, thrusting that weight off his shoulders and throwing himself head first into a few minutes of rare face time with the CEO.

Here was his chance to impress the CEO with some gambit of pithy conversation, some insight into his expertise as the company’s spokesperson, or at least some other side of his personality that would crack the CEO’s wall of silence. But instead the CEO unveiled a more revealing side of his own personality. And in the process Continue reading →

Filed under: Emotional Intelligence | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Throwing Your Wait Around

Posted on July 26, 2013 by The Leadership Mints Guy

By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to focus your thinking more clearly. Reading time: 1:45

Sitting Bull Close-upSloooowwwwww Down!

Historians tell us that Sitting Bull earned his name for his deliberative thinking style. Once the Sioux Indian Chief made up his mind- once he completed his “sitting”- he would ‘bull” ahead unwaveringly.

Indeed, sitting quietly –slowing down— enhances the precision of command. That’s why the most effective leaders throw their WAIT around. They slow down to counter-intuitively speed up their performance.

And they more directly engage followers With impact, insight and intensity. Their patience breeds precision in the leader as a thinker and a writer.

Yet patience is one of the toughest behaviors to modify in can-do, will-do, result-driven leaders a.k.a Get-er-Done Guardians.

Even three seconds is too long for nearly 90 percent of leaders to stand still. At least that’s the experience in one horse training exercise specifically developed to teach executive leaders to wait for others to fully grasp their intention. The ground exercise goes like this: Continue reading →

Filed under: Attitude | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Riding the SeeSaw of Trust Together

Posted on July 23, 2013 by The Leadership Mints Guy

By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to infuse added trust in your relationships. Reading time: 2:47

Balancing each other on the SeeSaw, the two elementary school girls personified a key leadership skill: trusting each other. Completely.

With that well-secured bond of trust, each can soar to new heights with the reciprocal action of the other.

But without that bond of trust linking these partners, one can come quickly crashing down when the other simply steps off the SeeSaw and walks away. At the wrong time.

And does the other wrong.

That’s why the most trusting leaders always FIRST discern the consequences of their own actions on another. Then they project those behaviors on to themselves with a greater sense of emotional intelligence. Indeed the most trusting leaders FIRST see themselves in the other person’s shoes.

After all, it takes two to dance the Tango of Trust. What you give, you get. What you sow, you reap.

No wonder the most trusting leaders focus on seeing EYE-to-EYE with their trusted partners. They see EYE as an insightful acrostic standing for the three-legged stool upon which all trust sits:

E for Experience

E for an Experience that is shared between the two trusting parties. Together they have been battle tested. Together they have been successful, safe and secure. Together they have both trusted and proven trustworthy.

Together they enjoy a high degree of predictability with each other and a strong sense of compatibility. Together they have proven their accountability and their availability. And together these two trusting partners have earned a reputation for being there for each other 24/7. Fully connected.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Trust | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Strengthening Your Q & A Punch

Posted on July 19, 2013 by The Leadership Mints Guy

By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here is the second of two posts on the design of a Q&A session. Reading time: 7:23.

Think of yourself as a boxer the next time you conduct a Q&A session after a speech.

You bob and weave, protecting yourself with one hand and powering yourself with the other. You look for key openings to land your ideas with impact, insight and intensity.

Like a boxer whose preparation begins long before stepping into the ring, a Speaker Leader’s preparation for his or her Q&A begins long before they step up to the lecturn.

In fact, their Q&A research and preparation forms the backbone of the Speaker Leader’s speech in much the same way a boxer’s roadwork and sparing sessions informs the strategic intent of his planned boxing match.

And the Speaker Leader’s preparation- much like the proficient boxer -anticipates the strengths and leverages the weakness of his or her opponent.

So too the prescient Speaker Leader senses what the audience’s knows and needs to know; what the audience needs to -and wants to -hear and most importantly what the audience is afraid of hearing.

No wonder with all that focus on preparation, the most effective Speaker Leaders anticipate and develop extensive FAQs -Frequently Asked Questions-and well-researched answers well in advance, sound answers in more ways that one written for the ear. Continue reading →

Filed under: Public Speaking | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Q & A: With a Cherry On Top

Posted on July 16, 2013 by The Leadership Mints Guy

By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to add impact to the closing of your speech. Reading time: 3:27.

The most competitive runners know their overall performance depends as much on their cool down as their workout.

ice sundae cherry So too, the most effective public speakers know their question and answer session -their Q&A preparation- is just as integral as their speech to the overall impact of their message.

One enhances the other. One primes the other. One complements the other. And most significantly one creates the other.

Unfortunately, too many wanna-be leaders confine most of their preparation to their main speech and little or none to their Q&A. And the results are predictably devastating.

You know drill. We’ve all been there. You ask for questions. No takers. The silence is deafening. The energy in the room collapses. Your message falls flat. And your audience scurries for the exits.

Sparking a Catalyst

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

In fact, the most effective leaders can and do conduct more proficient Q&A sessions when they think of their speech as a catalyst, a catalyst that stirs a reaction in the audience — a catalyst that steers the Q&A into acting as a stabilizing solution.

As a catalyst, your speech sparks more engagement in the audience to understand your message. And they dissect it in the Q&A portion of your presentation.

As a catalyst, your speech ignites more interaction in the audience to study and act on your message. And they more fully understand it in the Q&A portion of your presentation.

As a catalyst, your speech prompts more probing questions in the audience to amplify and clarify your message. And they own it more completely in the Q&A portion of your presentation.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Public Speaking | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Conflict Management: Disagree Agreeably

Posted on July 12, 2013 by The Leadership Mints Guy

By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to help you face an adversarial audience. Reading time: 2:46

It’s scary. You step up to the podium and all you hear are boos. All you see are sneers. And all you feel is tension.

You wonder if you just stepped on a guillotine. After all, this audience can’t stand to look at you much less listen to you.

That’s when the most effective leaders demonstrate how to disagree agreeably.

Mark Antony, literature’s conflict management poster boy, provides a template for taming a hostile audience in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

The backstory: Antony is mourning the death of his friend Julius Caesar. But the public is celebrating the death of what they perceived was an overly ambitions ruler. Antony addresses the public at the burial of Julius Caesar. In Act III Scene 2, Antony sizes up the crowd and finds a way to side with them right from the start:

‘Friends, Romans, countrymen,
lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar,
not to praise him. The evil that men do
lives after them. The good is oft interred
with their bones. So let it be with Caesar.’’

Antony skillfully disagrees so agreeably that he finds common ground. He’s one of them. Continue reading →

Filed under: Conflict Management | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a comment »

LEAVE IT To the BEAVER in You

Posted on July 9, 2013 by The Leadership Mints Guy

By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to help you cope with adverse circumstances. Reading time: 3:26.

You lost a big account. You were passed over for that big promotion. And now you feel like you’re being pushed down the proverbial Blame-and-Shame River, drowning in your sorrows and kicking in your despair.

Stop! Dam it. And beaver_looking_cameraleave it to the beaver in you.

Build a dam over those chaotic circumstances in your life, just like a beaver does naturally and systematically.

Take control like a beaver. Push back against that river. Prop yourself up against that stream. And create a new, more viable environment where grasses and water plants now flourish and where the brush and willows along the shore now attract deer.

That’s what leaders do: they create more viable working environments. Especially when the circumstances they find are lousy. Then these beavers leaders create their own circumstances as playwright George Bernard Shaw once observed:

“People are always blaming
their circumstances for what they are.
I don’t believe in circumstances.
The people who get on in this world
are the people who get up and look
for the circumstances they want and
if they can’t find them, make them.” Continue reading →

Filed under: Commitment | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

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