Fear is Running Your Career and Your Company

by | For Business Owners, For Salespeople, Leadership Development

 

 

Your efforts to lead, manage, and sell often fail because of people’s fears. The fear may be disguised as resistance, indecision, lack of creativity, poor communication or reluctance to take responsibility. You can work on the symptoms forever, but the big rewards come from dealing with the fundamental fears we all share.

We promise according to our hopes and
perform according to our fears.

— La Rochefoucauld

I painted a lot of houses when I was a teenager. Each season, when school let out, I had to force myself up the ladder again. I didn’t look down, I maintained a white knuckle grip, I kept as much of my body in contact with the ladder as possible. The occasional trips across a plank between ladders were performed sitting down with one hand on the wall. Every sway and breeze was a stomach churning calamity. Some say acrophobia isn’t a fear of heights but a fear of falling and hitting, but that wasn’t true for me. I didn’t think about falling. My body just hated being up there. Over the course of a few days I got more accustomed to being on the ladder and by the end of the summer I even made a few trips across the plank standing up. The fear never went away. I just managed it better. The next season it would be back, full force.

Why would anyone do that to themselves? Why did I tolerate so much discomfort? Why would I place myself in situations which brought up so much fear? The reason, ironically, was (more…)

The Courage to Create Community

by | Communication, Conversation, & Confrontation, For Business Owners, Team Manager Skills

Expanded 2nd Edition Now on Sale!

Tony’s short book on building community is now available
with an extra chapter and a guide to additional resources.

The Courage to Be in Community Expanded 2nd Edition

The new chapter is a simple, practical guide to building better relationships at work and at home. The focus of the book is the importance of compassion and authenticity, while this new section is all about implementation, with specific advice on how to be compassionate and authentic in your day-to-day life.

This expanded edition also includes links to recommended books and articles for further study and practice.

Click here to “Look Inside” & see a sample on Amazon.

➤ Paperback , hardcover, and Kindle available on Amazon!

➤ Paperback and hard cover available on Barnes and Noble!

 

iTunes Spoken word version available on Audible

Audio version read by Tony Mayo also available.

 To hear a sample click here for Audible or iTunes.

 

 

(more…)

Evolving from Management to Leadership

by | For Business Owners, Leadership Development

 

 

This summary note, based on recent conversations with coaching clients, is useful for any business owner who has grown beyond finding and fixing and is ready for the next stage of development.

 Strategic Leadership

Developing people is your primary work product.

  1. Empowering others by holding a space that calls forth excellent performance
  2. Being open to & on the lookout for ways the strategic leader is limiting other people’s development, e.g. rescuing and intervening.
  3. Remember to share credit and responsibility.

Expecting relevant, actionable reports rather than chasing answers

  1. Training and then trusting your people to report also supports their development, i.e., learning which events, changes, and data matter to leadership
  2. Makes visible who is up for responsibility–or not

Standing in the future

  1. Vision.
  2. Strategy
  3. Opportunities.
  4. Structures.
  5. Positioning.

The key is, more and more, stepping out of operations, perhaps by putting someone else in charge of day-to-day, even month-to-month operations.

 

Study: Treadmill Desks Improve Job Performance

by | For Business Owners

 

 

A yearlong study …found that … within four to six months, all three measures of performance—quality and quantity of work, and quality of interactions with colleagues—rose steadily, according to weekly surveys of participants.

…

Performance ratings given by their supervisors, who filled out weekly surveys rating both treadmill users and non-users, rose for walkers by a full point [on scale of ten] by the end of the year.

—Walk This Way
Treadmill Desks May Improve Job Performance
Wall Street Journal

 

 

Read about my treadmill desk and download free construction plans by clicking here.

 

 

Jeffrey Pfeffer

by | For Business Owners, Quotes and Aphorisms, Team Manager Skills

 

This was a guy in one of their [Men’s Wearhouse] stores in the Northwest who was an exceptional salesperson. But the company’s managers believe in the concept of team selling — they believe in this idea of human development that you always succeed when your colleagues around you succeed, and that you ought to participate in all this training. And this guy said, “I’m not going to do any of this stuff.”

 

The company’s big measures are the number of transactions and the dollars of sales per transaction. This guy was way above on the number of transactions but not doing very well on dollars per transaction. What that meant was that people would come in the store and he would steal them. Finally, they said to this guy, “We want you to get with the program,” and he wouldn’t.

 

So they fired him — and guess what? Sales in the store went up 30 percent. His replacement, of course, did not sell as much as he did. But everybody else in the store sold more. In other words, he was bringing everybody else down. And you see this in other organizations where there is one star.

 

—Jeffrey Pfeffer
Strategy & Business

 

Tony Mayo
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