Category Archives: relationships

More Power Questions for Smart Executives

Here are some more of my favorite power questions that executives can use to help motivate and influence their people. In Power Questions: Build Relationships, Win New Business, and Influence Others (Wiley, 2012), consultants Andrew Sobel and Jerold Panas present more than 200 significant questions, along with stories about how to use them. Out of [...]
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The Customer Experience:
Not What It Used to Be

Leaders seem to forget that their human assets make or break a customer’s experience. “Interpersonal interaction, though sometimes not the top reason for making a purchase, is almost always the reason for not repurchasing.” ~ Marshall Goldsmith, Don Brown and Bill Hawkins, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There in Sales!: How Successful Salespeople [...]
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Leadership Self-Confidence: Do You Dare Show Vulnerability?

After my last post on the study that shows that leadership self-confidence succeeds better when it’s lowered, one reader reacted strongly. Maybe others did too, but didn’t speak up through the comments section. Let’s talk more about this issue of leadership self-confidence and executive presence. The real issue is vulnerability, for example, when you show [...]
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The Pervasive Nature of Leadership Self-Deception

The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes. ~ George Orwell As much as we’d like to believe that we’re rational human beings, we can all too easily mislead ourselves. Self-deception is a process that encourages us to justify our false and [...]
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Meetings: Can We Really Thin Slice Accurately in Two Seconds?

Forming first impressions accurately can be essential in business meetings, especially in sales. But making poor snap judgments because of unconscious biases can be disastrous. The idea of “thin slicing” — sizing someone or an event up in the first two seconds — became popular with the publication of Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink: The Power [...]
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Customers “Like” Social Marketing

Most CEOs hope a stronger focus on customers will protect them from eroding profit margins and commoditization. When companies concentrate on customer relationships, they usually devote most of their  attention to CRM technology that monitors customer satisfaction. But getting closer to customers is not a matter of installing better CRM systems or simply measuring satisfaction [...]
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Social Media: Sink or Swim with Customers?

If your company hasn’t jumped on the social media bandwagon yet, It’s probably missing opportunities to connect with customers in new ways. Information technology is reshaping the company/consumer relationship, often bringing benefits to both. The misuse of technology, however, can erode customer care. In the work I do with organizations, I’ve heard more than a [...]
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Empathy: When Leaders Lose Touch with Customers

What happens to companies when they focus on the numbers, instead of what customers want? Lack of empathy can lead to a company’s demise. Some business executives dismiss the need for empathy, favoring the more concrete and defensible virtues of rational analysis. They have a point. So did Blockbuster executives when faced with Netflix’s debut. [...]
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What Do Your Customers Need Next?

Do you ever wonder how we managed before smart phones and tablets? Everywhere you go people are texting, talking, and web searching with a mobile device.  Or listening to music on a miniature MP3 player. (Photo: Freedigitalphotos.net) It’s worth noting that Sony cofounder Akio Morita and Apple’s Steve Jobs never commissioned market research. Instead, they’d [...]
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The Case for Emotional Intelligence in Leaders

Should we be concerned about how a leader’s emotional intelligence shows up (or not)? After reading the Steve Job biography, I’ve become curious about the impact of a leader’s style on business results. I’ve been hearing about EI/EQ for a long time, and my assessment partner has a set of EQ instruments that I’ve investigated. [...]
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