Tag Archives: persuading others

Leadership Mints Series Sampler On Penalizing Bad Behavior

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You’re running a daycare center. Your staff is already working a 12-hour day.

At 6 p.m. they are looking forward to calling it a day. However a few parents still have not picked up their children by the close of business.

Your staff is getting is frustrated. And no wonder.

The problem of late pickups has been festering for a long time.

The owner of the daycare center has the solution. “We will start fining parents for pick ups that are 15 minutes late on an escalating scale. Maybe that will change their behavior.”

But the fines failed to change the parent’s late pickups. Why?

The situation needed more leadership and less management.

Childcare is no ordinary pay-for-services rendered business model.

Customers (parents) chose a daycare facility for much more than as a baby-sitting service. The customers (parents) commissioned the daycare center as stand-in parents for their children, stewards of their children’s lives and well-being.

They sought virtual missionaries — not mercenaries — to protect Continue reading →

Set the Mood First Then Make Your Move

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By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to enhance your persuasive skills. Reading time: 2:44.

Lovers know it. Would-be leaders forget it. And too many wanna-bees ignore it.

It is foreplay of the business kind.

It is the kind of leadership behavior that establishes a mood, ignites a dynamic and mutually satisfies any negotiation: from gaining buy-in for a merger to reprimanding a staffer to pitching a new account to buying fruits and vegetables.

Yes. Even buying fruits and vegetables.

Walk into any grocery store and you’ll immediately get a leadership lesson up front and center.

The produce section—always positioned close to the entrance- is bathed in lights glistening in an array of orange, green and red colors. Spot lights beam everywhere like a Broadway production, shining on the oranges and grapefruits, cucumbers and tomatoes so intently you almost expect them to break out into a song and dance.

Luring You In

The lights lure you in closer and closer. Almost seductively. You feel the smooth skin of a cucumber. You smell the enticing aroma of a banana. You feel the round, breast-like shape of an orange. The lights draw you in closer and closer and closer — until you can’t resist any longer. Your hands seemed to be automatically squeezing. Your mouth involuntarily sucking. Your hands automatically caressing the fruits and vegetables. Then you find yourself giving those fruits and vegetables a ride in your grocery cart and finally home in your vehicle. Continue reading →

Breaking Through Dams on the River of Understanding

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By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to help you become even more influential. Reading time: 3:01.

You are the subject-matter expert in your company, the sharpest saw in the shed in your field. Yet every time you try saw through a concept with a customer, those BLOCKHEADS seem to get thicker and thicker. What can you do to help your audience’s soak up your message more fully?

Hoover Dam

Stop sawing. Start watering.

Turn your faucet of information on slowly, watering only when the customer says they are thirsty. Yet too often over-zealous experts are too quick to flood their audiences with information.

And audiences are even quicker to build a dam to protect them from those flood waters.

But a particular audience will open its dam if it believes the speaker’s water (i.e. message) will flow into its own stream.

Audiences will open their dams if they think your water will fill – and more significantly FULFILL—their own personal pipelines — without polluting their values, beliefs and concerns already flowing in their personal streams of consciousness.

You can influence your audience to soak up your message when you recognize that the meaning of the word “influence” stems from the the Latin to “flow into.”

When you influence others, you flow into their feelings so fully that they can be move to purposeful action, as James MacGregor Burns notes in his Pulitzer-Prize winning book on Leadership.

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