You may have been selected by your executive to initiate and see through some change program in your organization. Or you may have decided that the time has come to make your mark by dusting off the cobwebs in your workplace. However your change role came about, you have a challenging task ahead of you.

Consider this sobering thought. In spite of the importance of successfully implementing workplace change for maintaining your business’s competitiveness, most change initiatives fail to deliver the expected organizational benefits. This failure occurs for a number of reasons:

• absence of a change champion or one who is too junior in the organization
• poor executive sponsorship or senior management support
• poor project management skills
• hope rested on a one-dimensional solution
• political infighting and turf wars
• poorly defined organizational objectives
• change team diverted to other projects

Do you recognize one or more of these in your organization from previous initiatives? You have probably experienced already one major cost of such failure. The cynical and burned out employees left behind only make the next change objective even more difficult to accomplish. It should come as no surprise that the fear of managing change and its impacts is a leading cause of anxiety in managers.

Your first step in becoming a successful change leader is fully understanding your organization and matching the initiative to your organization’s real needs. This means not just adopting the latest management fad. Recognize that bringing about useful and meaningful change is fundamentally about changing people’s behavior in certain desired ways. It is not primarily about installing a new system or rearranging the organizational structure. If people in the end do not behave and work differently, then the money and time spent in “doing stuff” is wasted.

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Values are the parents of your chosen or unconscious behaviour. If someone at a meeting or a party rubs you the wrong way, chances are that you have picked up something about them that doesn’t fit your set of core values.

On my website, you’ve had an opportunity to glimpse my core values: Love& Compassion, Authenticity, Honesty & Integrity, Health & Vitality, Passion & Creativity. Without even realizing it, the way I interact at work and at home reflect these values. It is the beginning of any self-development work to take a closer look at your own driving values and even at those of your colleagues or direct reports.

In the field of Neuro Linguistic Programming, the study of how language affects behaviour, there’s an exercise called ‘The Parts Integration’. Its main premise is that all humans operate from their values. I found it fascinating that you can identify a feeling or an action as coming from a ‘part’ of your body. Amazingly, when you ask people to identify anger at a co-worker or sadness at a lost job opportunity and ask them to point to it, they can visualize it coming from somewhere in their body. The rest of the exercise takes a leap of faith and involves isolating and speaking to the part about what “it” wants for the person to whom it belongs. And the question that’s repeatedly asked is “even more than that, what does it want?” until the “part” reveals a deep core value. This value can be anything such as ‘happiness’, ‘love’, ‘truth’ or ‘peace’.

I remember one American woman in class standing up angrily and fighting with the instructor when she gave Osama Bin Laden as an example of a man whose core value was ‘security’ which explained his acts of heinous crime against his fellow man. But I understood the instructor’s point.

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I think I was born a mid level manager.  With the exception of my cemetery property telemarketing gigs as a student, from my first job in a developing country all the way to my current job as a Brand Manager at BIC, I’ve always been a mid-level manager.

Being a mid-level manager is akin to being the new kid in school. You want your teachers to approve of you but you also need your peers to think you’re cool. And to get in with the cool kids, you’ve got to speak their language.

Greg was a show boat of a man - he dressed to the nines and cared exceedingly about appearances. He was the operations manager for 10 years running. Being cost-conscious came naturally to Greg, and he got a lot of  encouragement to exploit his instinctive tightfisted skills; senior management constantly rewarded him for pinching the pennies out of a project, even if it looked like a mad science project gone wrong.  Because of this, Greg was often at odds with the marketing department over the issue of packaging costs.

Ironically, Greg’s pride and joy was his luxury car, everyone knew how it made him feel like he’d finally arrived.  His silver cufflinks flashed and winked at me as we sat talking about how new packaging should look. I knew that our brand equity was hurting, largely in part to the sub-standard pack materials and cheaper design.

As we spoke, Greg started to extol the virtues of cheaper packaging emphasizing - the hefty sum he had saved the company over the years. I stopped him out of the blue and asked him what kind of car he drove.  Stunned at the change of topic, he stammered “Who? Me?” 

“Yeah,” I replied “do you have a nice car?” 

“A Porsche!” he said beaming with pride.

I feigned pleasant surprise, eyes wide open, - “Wow, do you think a cheap import could compete with your Porsche?”

“Why not?” I asked.

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No matter what side you were on, here are a few observations, affirmations and truths, post-election, with respect to selling:

1. Strategy and tactics are equally important. The purpose of executing tactics in a sales campaign is to drive a well-founded strategy. Tactics without a strategy is like playing darts with your eyes closed.
2. Message! Not messages, messages, messages. Decide what you are going to count on to win based upon research - a focused, objective assessment of the sales opportunity.
3. You can successfully change the ground rules even if you temporarily lose ground.
4. The understanding and leverage of political influence is crucial.
5. Messages must be clear, concise and compelling and paint the vision of a better situation for the buyer. One fumbled message can dilute the impact of a hundred perfect ones.
6. Logic and the facts aren’t the only things buyers consider.
7. Discipline rules. Seat-of-the-pants doesn’t.
8. Knowledge of your opponent’s plan to win is vital for devising and refining your own plan.
9. Direct and blatant “bad-mouthing-the-competition” doesn’t generally work.
10. Never underestimate the underdog.
11. Want to win? Look the part.
12. Tell the truth before your opponent exaggerates it.
13. Choose the right team. The salesperson is CEO of their own virtual sales corporation. Whom they choose to stand next to them and to advise them can make a big difference.
14. Whomever has momentum at the time of close generally wins. Its very difficult to build momentum just at the right time without a plan.
15. Embrace technology. It permeates pretty much everything most of us do.
16. Go broad and deep into the customer’s organization as appropriate. (Ideally effective marketing will have blazed the trail in advance.

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Business is and always has been a man’s world. To some extent that is largely still true because more men are occupying Chief Executive roles within companies all over the world. This is not to say that there are not powerful women out there who could serve as a fantastic example for other women to follow. In fact, there are many powerful women running huge multinational companies and corporations.

The top 20 most powerful women in the world in 2008 are as follows:

1. Angela Merkel – The most powerful woman in the world in 2008 is the German Chancellor. Merkel has been at the helm of Germany since 2005. She is extremely well respected in her home country and is a key player in the European Union. As a result, her position as the most powerful woman in the world is well deserved.
2. Sheila C Blair – Blair is the highest ranked American on the list. The Chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. In simple terms, she runs the company that guarantees Americans a certain sum of money back should the bank they save with goes bust. As we are in a credit crunch at the moment, her ranking has increased.
3. Indra K Nooyi – The Chairman and Chief Executive of PepsiCo, which is the fourth largest food and drink company in the world. She is considered to be one of the best corporate leaders in the world and earns $14.7 million a year as a result.
4. Angela Braly – Braly is the Chief Executive and President of WellPoint and earns $14.9 million in salary.

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For me, the business term of the week is “big hairy audacious goal (BHAG),” coined originally by James Collins and Jerry Porras in their 1996 article entitled Building Your Company’s Vision. A BHAG is a form of vision statement “…an audacious 10-to-30-year goal to progress towards an envisioned future.”My stories (all true) all relate to alignment of the company BHAG to the individual employees’ BHAGs.

My first story is about a technology CEO who now heads a 55 person company with a full management team and complement of key staff. He’s bored. The product that he invented has been proven. His management team does all the work he does not like to do and more. Other key employees are smarter than he is so he lets them run the show. I affirm that this is all good and that he just needs a new BHAG - personally. “Can I do that (implying while not letting the company down)?” he asks. Yes. Go for it.

The next encounter is a middle manager in a construction company. She is sure that her company has no leadership and that failure is imminent. She has no response to my questions about what she is doing to build a leadership team, mentor leaders, manage her leader. I inquire, “what is your big hairy audacious goal – personally?” She responds, “none”..she accomplished her BHAG when she got this job.

Finally, I listened painfully to a manager describe an employee who only puts in 40 hours a week, cannot juggle more than one task at a time, never asks for more challenging work. I asked, “what is the employee’s big hairy audacious goal – personally?” The manager has never had that discussion.

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A major problem for business owners and employers today is getting the best employees and then keeping them. Sounds easy, but any employer will tell you that these activities take up the most time and have the biggest impact on business results. So how do you go about retaining the good people once you’ve found them?

Understanding what your employees want from a workplace sounds like a logical place to start. After all, if you know what your employees are after, you simply need to provide it and all will be well. This is a great theory, but research shows that employers are not that successful at identifying what their employees actually want. In fact there is a significant disconnect between the things that employees say are important to them, and how highly employers rank those same things.

This survey first came out in 1946 in Foreman Facts, from the Labor Relations Institute of NY and was produced again by Lawrence Lindahl in Personnel magazine, in 1949. This study has since been replicated with similar results by Ken Kovach (1980); Valerie Wilson, Achievers International (1988); Bob Nelson, Blanchard Training & Development (1991); and Sheryl & Don Grimme, GHR Training Solutions (1997-2001).

When asked to rank a list of ten criteria, the employees and managers/owners ranked them very differently: 

What Employees Want

1
Full appreciation for work done

2
Feeling “part” of things

3
Sympathetic help on personal issues

4
Job Security

5
Good wages

6
Interesting work

7
Promotion/growth opportunities

8
Personal loyalty to workers

9
Good working conditions

10
Tactful discipline

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Have you ever wondered why the people in your team don’t seem as motivated as you do? Or why some people do their jobs with enthusiasm and vigor, and others barely get through the day without taking the frown off their faces?

You are not alone. The topic of human motivation has been studied for hundreds of years. So it’s a topic we know a lot about. Unfortunately it’s not often taught to managers as part of their training.

There are things you can do to influence how much energy people are willing to put into their jobs. Below are 5 critical things to know about motivation.

1. We can’t motivate other people

Motivation is not something we ‘do’ to others. It has to come from within. All we can do is create an environment which encourages motivation. So to some extent we are let off the hook. Our responsibility as managers only goes so far –after that, it’s up to the individual to get on board.

2. Some people just won’t ever be motivated

I think we all know the truth of this. Some people are just in the wrong space, and have no interest in being part of a team, or working any harder than they absolutely have to. It can be very difficult to manage the performance of these individuals, particularly if they are doing just enough to get by. Usually the solution is to include behaviors and attitudes as part of required performance. Then their attitude becomes a tangible performance issue which can be coached and managed through the performance review system.

3. One size definitely does not fit all

The fun thing about motivation is that we are all different, so you need to employ multiple strategies and approaches. Different generations, different stages of life, different needs from a career – these are all things that will influence what people desire as a motivator during their lives.

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