Eric Jacobson

Archive for the ‘Listening Skills’ Category

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Non-typical Questions To Ask Your Customers

In Company Culture, Customer Service, Effective Communications, Eric Jacobson On Corporate Culture, Eric Jacobson On Leadership, General Leadership Skills, Leadership Books, Leadership Skills, Listening Skills, Management, Thanking Customers on November 18, 2012 at 10:22 am

As you gear up for the busy holiday shopping season, consider this advice from author Paul R. Timm.  He recommends a different twist on asking your customers questions:

  • stop asking your customers the “typical” questions and instead ask them open-ended questions.

Here’s specifically what Timm recommends:

Don’t Ask:

  • How was everything?
  • Can I get you something else?
  • Did you find everything you need?
  • Will that be all?
  • Was everything satisfactory?

Instead Ask:

  • What else can I do for you?
  • What else can I get for you?
  • What else can I help you with?
  • What else could we do to better serve you?
  • How else can we be of help?

These open-ended questions will let your customers really express their ideas, opinions and needs.  Timm is the author of, 50 Powerful Ideas You Can Use To Keep Your Customers.


Leadership Insights From Top Business Women

In Company Culture, Corporate Culture, Effective Communications, Employee Engagement, Employee Satisfaction, Engaging Employees, Leadership, Leadership Quotes, Leadership Skills, Leadership Training, Leading By Example, Listening Skills, Management, Mentoring, Team Building on September 6, 2012 at 5:22 pm

Every year, the Kansas City Business Journal honors 25 women business leaders in the Kansas City metro in its “Women Who Mean Business” awards competition.

The winners are identified as those women in the community who:

  • are outstanding in their business accomplishments
  • have growth plans for their companies
  • contribute to the community
  • improve the climate for women in business

Key insights from this year’s recently announced winners include these comments and observations:

  • “Listen to people who know the business.”
  • “I’ve learned when I’m angry to walk away, calm down.  Never, ever, ever react in anger to anybody.”
  • “Loyalty is not something you can spot right away; attitude is.  Attitude is something you can’t teach.”
  • “Mentoring is opening doors for younger people.”
  • “Work hard, but enjoy what you do”
  • “If you don’t give back to the community, how can you be a whole person?”
  • “Our job as business leaders is to bring out the best efforts from the most people.  Give them something purposeful and meaningful, and great things will happen.”
  • “I try to find people that I respect not only professionally, but personally.”
  • “You have to be a good listener and a good problem-solver.”
  • Pay attention and enjoy where you are instead of worrying about what’s 10 steps ahead of you.”
  • “I’m always focusing on what is this decision going to look like five years from now.”
  • “I will not pretend I have all the answers.  I will seek input from others so I can develop the right answers.”


Book Review: Rapid Realignment

In Company Culture, Corporate Culture, Effective Communications, Employee Engagement, Engaging Employees, General Leadership Skills, Leadership, Leadership Books, Leadership Skills, Leadership Training, Listening Skills, Making Decisions on July 15, 2012 at 5:31 am

Spend some quality time with the new book, Rapid Realignment, and you’ll learn how to ensure that your strategy, customers, processes and people work seamlessly together in the service of customers and that those four elements continually realign in the face of constant change.

The authors, Dr. George H. Labovitz and Victor Rosansky, share throughout the book a series of case studies from Federal Express, Quest Diagnostics, Navy Hospital at Camp Pendleton, Farmington Savings Bank and a host of other organizations who have stepped up to the challenge of rapid realignment.

Key takeaways from the book include:

  • Vertical alignment describes a condition in which every employee can articulate the enterprise’s strategy and explain how his or her daily work activities support that strategy.
  • Each organization must have a Main Thing.  That Main Thing as a whole must be a common and unifying concept to which every unit can contribute.  Each department and team must be able to see a direct relationship between what it does and this overarching goal.  And, the Main Thing must be clear, easy to understand, consistent with the strategy of the organization, and actionable.
  • Growth and profits are surely the ultimate aim of every business organization, but they are outcomes of succeeding with the Main Thing.
  • Good bosses understand the value of giving subordinates a long leash.  In addition, best bosses listen, back up their employees, trust and respect their employees and provide feedback to employees.
  • Leaders foster engagement when they listen to their employees, create a common purpose, and give people greater ownership of their work.
  • Corporate culture is the product of four dynamically related components:  attitudes, beliefs, values, and behavior.
  • The fastest and most  effective way to change attitudes and beliefs is to change people’s behavior and show them the beneficial results of the new behavior.
  • Organizational culture is revealed in artifacts and symbols, the stories people  tell, relationships, and the rituals and rules that guide behavior.

You’ll appreciate the Key Points summaries and the Things To Do suggestions from the authors at the end of each of the nine chapters in the book.

And, particularly timely are the book sections where the authors teach readers how to:

  • bring the customer voice inside your company through social media
  • use social media and digital technology to quickly identify points of misalignment

Labovitz is the founder and CEO of IDI, an international management training and consulting company, and professor of management and organizational behavior at the Boston University Graduate School of Management.

Rosansky is co-founder and president of LHR International, Inc.  He has more than 25 years of experience as a consultant, helping Fortune 500 clients to drive rapid strategy deployment and alignment.

Thanks to the book publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.


7 Ways To Build An Effective Corporate Culture

In Company Culture, Corporate Culture, Effective Communications, Employee Engagement, General Leadership Skills, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Listening Skills, Management, Team Building on July 8, 2012 at 7:53 pm

Fortunately, most of my career I’ve worked in effective corporate cultures. If I put together the best of each, here is what made those environments effective:

•  Leaders led by example on a consistent basis and were willing to roll up their sleeves, particularly during tight deadlines or challenging times.

•  Employees clearly understood how what they did made a difference and how their contributions made the organization either more profitable or more effective.

•  The workforce included a blend of long-term employees with a rich company, product/service and customer history, employees who had been at the company for five to seven years, and then new hires with a fresh perspective and keen sense of new technologies and techniques. That blend worked best when the mix included virtually all A-players.

•  Top managers had a clear, realistic and strategic vision for how the company would grow and compete in the marketplace.

•  Employees were challenged and rewarded through growth opportunities, education and training and pay increases.

•  Leaders provided opportunities for the company and its employees to give back to the community. Sometimes it was through company organized volunteer projects. Other times it was by encouraging (and rewarding) employees to volunteer on their own.

•  A group of employees served on an activities committee with as little top management influence as possible, to plan at least monthly team-building, networking, education and charitable activities. This grass-roots approach helped ensure that the culture was shaped and influenced by employees and not only by top management. In this way, employees owned the culture as much as the management did.

What Your Employee Wants To Hear You Ask During A Performance Review

In Effective Communications, Employee Retention, General Leadership Skills, Leadership, Leadership Books, Leadership Education, Leadership Skills, Leadership Training, Listening Skills, Management, Motivating Employees, Performance Appraisals on May 12, 2012 at 1:31 pm

Here are five important questions you, as a manager and leader, should ask during employee performance reviews:

  1. What have I done to help – or hinder – your job performance?
  2. What can I do in the next review period to help you achieve/improve?
  3. What conditions here enable you – or make it hard – to do your best work?
  4. What do you want most from your job?
  5. How can I help you reach your career goals?

I speculate that most employees have never heard most of these questions from their supervisors on a consistent basis during performance reviews.

Thanks to Sharon Armstrong and Barbara Mitchell for these questions — just some of their great advice from their book, The Essential HR Handbook.


Leadership Tips From The Book, TouchPoints

In Effective Communications, General Leadership Skills, Leadership, Leadership Books, Leadership Education, Leadership Skills, Leadership Training, Listening Skills, Management on April 28, 2012 at 2:42 pm

Some of my favorite parts of Douglas Conant’s and Mette Norgaards’ 2011 book, TouchPoints, are these lessons for leaders:

  • You need to have dual vision.  You need to be able to address the most pressing need and do it in a way that makes your employees more capable and ready to take on the next issue.
  • No leader can succeed by being only tough-minded or only tender-hearted.  The perfect balance is to be both tough-minded on the issue and tender-hearted with people.
  • Leading with heart doesn’t mean you always decide in favor of the individual.  It just means that when you need to make a tough-minded decision, you are acutely aware of how it will affect the people involved.
  • The people who are the most committed to mastering their craft are often the most humble.  That is because, instead of comparing themselves to others, they are moved by an inner vision of what they might achieve.
  • Ask often, “How can I help?”  Doing so at the start of an interaction opens up space for people to voice their ideas, concerns and viewpoints.


How To Be A More Effective Listener

In Effective Communications, General Leadership Skills, Leadership, Leadership Books, Listening Skills, Management on April 2, 2012 at 8:56 pm

Here are some great tips from Michelle Tillis Lederman’s book, The 11 Laws of Likability.  They are all about:

  • what to do and what not to do to be a leader who’s an effective listener:

Do:

  • Maintain eye contact
  • Limit your talking
  • Focus on the speaker
  • Ask questions
  • Manage your emotions
  • Listen with your eyes and ears
  • Listen for ideas and opportunities
  • Remain open to the conversation
  • Confirm understanding, paraphrase
  • Give nonverbal messages that you are listening (nod, smile)
  • Ignore distractions

Don’t:

  • Interrupt
  • Show signs of impatience
  • Judge or argue mentally
  • Multitask during a conversation
  • Project your ideas
  • Think about what to say next
  • Have expectations or preconceived ideas
  • Become defensive or assume you are being attacked
  • Use condescending, aggressive, or closed body language
  • Listen with biases or closed to new ideas
  • Jump to conclusions or finish someone’s sentences

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25 Ways To Be A Better Leader

In Company Culture, Effective Communications, General Leadership Skills, Leadership, Leadership Education, Leadership Skills, Leadership Training, Leading By Example, Listening Skills, Management, Nonprofit Leadership on March 20, 2012 at 5:30 am

If you don’t have time to read a book about how to improve your leadership skills, tackle a handful of these tips, complied from the works of many authors:

  1. Don’t micromanage
  2. Don’t be a bottleneck
  3. Focus on outcomes, not minutiae
  4. Build trust with your colleagues before a crisis comes
  5. Assess your company’s strengths and weaknesses at all times
  6. Conduct annual risk reviews
  7. Talk about values more than rules
  8. Reward how a performance is achieved and not only the performance
  9. Constantly challenge your team to do better
  10. Celebrate your employees’ successes, not your own
  11. Err on the side of taking action
  12. Communicate clearly and often
  13. Be visible
  14. Eliminate the cause of a mistake
  15. View every problem as an opportunity to grow
  16. Summarize group consensus after each decision point during a meeting
  17. Praise when compliments are earned
  18. Be decisive
  19. Say “thank you” and sincerely mean it
  20. Send written thank you notes
  21. Listen carefully and don’t multi-task while listening
  22. Teach something new to your team
  23. Show respect for all team members
  24. Follow through when you promise to do something
  25. Be courageous, quick and fair


Book Review: The First-Time Manager, Sixth Edition

In Effective Communications, Employee Satisfaction, General Leadership Skills, Hiring, Leadership, Leadership Books, Leadership Education, Leadership Skills, Leadership Training, Leading By Example, Listening Skills, Management, Mentoring, Motivating Employees, Soliciting Feedback, Team Building on February 26, 2012 at 7:15 am

Amacom (of the American Management Association) has just released the sixth edition of the best-selling book, The First-Time Manager — originally published in 1981.

The book covers eight core responsibilities of a new manager, including:

  • Hiring
  • Communicating
  • Planning
  • Organizing
  • Training
  • Monitoring
  • Evaluating
  • Firing

Expert advice is additionally provided regarding:

  • Using Your New Authority
  • Managing Your Mood
  • Building Trust

One of my favorite sections of the book is the one about class in a manager:

  • Class is treating people with dignity.
  • Class does not have to be the center of attention.
  • Class does not lose its cool.
  • Class does not rationalize mistakes.
  • Class is good manners.
  • Class means loyalty to one’s staff.
  • Class recognizes the best way to build oneself is to first build others.
  • Class leads by example.
  • Class does not taken action when angry.
  • Class is authentic and works hard at making actions consistent with words.

The First-Time Manager is an excellent how-to guide for anyone new to managing people.

Other books for new managers include any from the Top 20 list of Leadership Books, as voted on by LinkedIn Linked 2 Leadership group members, who were asked the question:

  • What’s the first leadership book you would give to a new manager?


Tell A Story To Share Your Vision

In Company Culture, Effective Communications, Engaging Employees, General Leadership Skills, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leadership Training, Listening Skills, Management, Motivating Employees, Vision Statements on February 25, 2012 at 8:50 am

“Most leaders’ visions fail, not due to a leader’s inadequacies, but due to the leader’s lack of communication,” says Margaret Reynolds of Reynolds Consulting, LLC in Lee’s Summit, MO.

She adds that it’s not that leaders don’t communicate, but that they don’t beat the drum regularly enough. “Leaders need to communicate often, regularly and consistently,” she recommends.

“In terms of how to communicate so people get it, it is pretty widely accepted that story telling is the most effective,” explains Reynolds.  Leaders need to paint a vision where people see it often.  She recommends that leaders share their vision at least seven to 10 times with their employees, and to make it clear to everyone what specifically each person can do each day to help achieve the collective mission.

Reynolds’ other advice to leaders is to be one whom:

  • listens with respect
  • communicates effectively
  • removes obstacles
  • shoulders the blame
  • shares the glory
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