Speak Successfully

How many times have you received a voicemail message that you needed to replay several times just to decipher the person’s name?

What about your own speech? Are you clear and articulate? Do you speak slowly and clearly enough for the person on the other end of the phone interview to understand your name and background?

Communication skills can mean the difference between not getting a call back for a second interview and landing the job. I am frequently told by managers at banks, financial institutions and large corporations that poor speech in and of itself may knock a candidate out of the running.

Why do people often speak like they have marbles in their mouth? Why is it that some people often need to be asked to repeat what they are saying? In a fast-paced business environment with so much on everybody’s plate people tend to speak quickly. They do not even pay attention to how and what they are saying because they are often doing more than one thing at a time. With so much competition for jobs, why not give your self a competitive edge and learn to improve your communication skills in order to stand out among your competition? Better communication skills will make the difference.

Statistics reveal that companies lose millions of dollars due to their employees’ miscommunications. If you are looking to advance your career within your current firm or outside of your present company, think about your own communication skills. Do colleagues frequently ask you to repeat what you have just said? Do they ask you to speak louder? Could your speaking style prevent you from getting that dream job?

Consider this: You are sitting at your desk, reading an email, thinking of a meeting in five minutes and the telephone rings. You are not completely paying attention to what and how you are speaking since you are busy reading the email. So, the person on the other end of the telephone asks you to repeat yourself, and only then do you realize that you need to stop typing on the computer and pay attention to the conversation. Sound familiar?

Remember these tips to help you improve your communication skills immediately:

1. Learn to listen. Listening skills are critical. Be sure to pay attention when you are receiving information about a potential job. Give your full attention to the person who is speaking. You may need to recall the information a few minutes later in order to ask intelligent questions based on what was said. Be sure not to let your mind wander. You cannot listen well if you are thinking of what to say next.

Stay focused. Sit up straight and look directly at the speaker if in-person, or in a mirror if on the phone. Now and then nod to let the speaker know you are actively listening. Be sure to let the speaker finish what they are saying. When you interrupt, it appears as if you are not listening.

2. Slow down your rate of speech. Simply slowing down your rate will significantly improve your speech quality. The average rate per minute varies from about 130-150 WPM. For suggestions on how to check your rate of speech send an email to info@corporatespeechsolutions.com.

3. Finish your words.Remember hearing the saying, “Don’t swallow your words”? People are in such a hurry to complete a task at hand that they forget to finish their words. Old becomes ‘ol; fishing becomes fishin’; business becomes busin’; you get the idea. In the course of a conversation, this doesn’t just cause “sloppy speech,” it forces the listener to work harder to understand you. In business, people don’t want to work harder. They want to get the information and move to the next item. Learn to finish your words.

4. Many words in English sound similar. Still versus steal? Hill versus heal? Cab versus cap? If you do not speak clearly, how will the listener be sure what you are saying. “Will you grab the cab?” Is your friend asking you to grab the cap that he left in the other room or the cab so you can head downtown together?

5. Learn to speak clearly and effectively on the telephone. Today, most of our daily business is conducted over the telephone. Often we have meetings with multiple people on the telephone. There are many high frequency sounds that can be lost if you do not learn to speak clearly your message can be misinterpreted.

Speaking clearly takes practice but is an integral part of effective business communication. So how would you rank yourself as a speaker?

Are You A Leader Quiz

When you look at your management style ask yourself these questions. If you can say yes to all of them then you are a leader in your organization:

• do you expect extraordinary performance? Yes___ No___
• do you lead towards high performance in your organization daily? Yes___ No___
• do you get below the surface? Yes___ No___
• do you manage individual and organizational change? Yes___ No___
• do you implement change from the middle (ie: think like a designer, a software engineer, a marketing manager)? Yes___ No___
• do you seize opportunities?  Yes___ No___
• do you influence to WIN? Yes___ No___

If you can answer yes to all of  these then you are a prime leader of change and HR management.. 

Have You Reassessed Your HR Teams Capabilities?

Over the past year I am sure you have seen reductions in the HR teams across many businesses. These reductions have been publicized in the media. Take a look at what has happened, 20% of HR staffs have been reduced in the past year. One could ask is this truly a cost reduction step or is it more deeply seeded in the ability of your staff to meet the business requirements of the day and/or have the capabilities to strategically solve managements business issues. Maybe you do not see the disconnect between what value your team adds or does not add but managers do.

So, as the head HR person for your group have you assessed your team lately and have you invested in their development of these very important things:

• strategic thinking and action from concept to execution to results
• strategic decision making
• managing conflict and creating universal consensus
• negotiating success and development of a learning laboratory for the business
• teamwork and collaboration, how to grow cross-functional teams
• becoming a strategic thinker with a CEO mind
• creating value for your internal and external customers

As you ask these questions, have you also invested time in your own development to stay ahead to this very fast moving curve we call business recessional action. If you have invested time have you used CCL, UVA, Stamford Learning, or HBS?

What are your thoughts on this development thought process and what have you done lately. Drop me an email at wgstevens2@gmail.com

Study Finds Reduction in Turnover by 1 Percent Saves Thousands of Dollars

By definition, high impact businesses are high growth businesses. A high degree of change is necessary in high impact businesses to respond to market pressures: demand for improved delivery of services, global influences, rapid changes in technologies and increased competitiveness. But a traditional employment model doesn’t allow businesses to be agile enough to adapt quickly to changing business needs and conditions.

Existing employees often lack the skill sets and competencies needed for new business, and training for new skills isn’t always an effective option in a fast-paced environment. High labor costs as a percentage of the cost of doing business makes it imperative that businesses maximize their return on investment in people. Added to these challenges, employers are losing their ability to respond to business issues as experienced employees retire and take with them the institutional wisdom that they bring to the conference table.

Not only are many high impact businesses caught in this “war for talent,” but turnover rates combined with rising retirement rates foretell future difficulties in having the talent on-hand to meet growing and changing business conditions.

Read more about how just for a one percent decrease in turnover, every company could realize annual savings between $400,000 and $4 million depending upon the size of the company. Even for a company with as few as 64 employees, savings averages approximately $8,000 by reducing employee turnover by 1 percentage point.

The Hidden Upside Of Downsizing

People are getting fired. Profits will never be the same. It's 1929 all over again. The guy on the corner tells you, "It's a recession. Times are tough."

So why is Stephen Covey , the best-selling author of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, feeling all upbeat? Because he believes that a positive cultural shift is occurring as we speak, and that firms that empower their employees are about to blossom (see my previous post dated 7/1/08, 5/28/08, and 5/23/08).

"We've never had such opportunity as we do today," he says. "People can create. They can adapt. They can make sacrifices. This is a really an opportunity for creative businesses to gain competitive advantage."

Covey has built a publishing and consulting empire teaching people how to be the masters of their own destinies. While the emphasis these days tends to be on all the pain the financial crisis is causing, he's much more interested in the change it is permitting. Agonizing about having to lay off workers or worrying that your own job may be on the block doesn't fly with him. "People are too much a product of their conditions, and not of their decisions," he says.

When profits dwindle, many organizations make the mistake of letting people know as little as possible, he says. "I find that people are very capable and resourceful when they're not in the dark. Open the books, show them what's happening. If you get them involved with the problem, they'll be a part of the solution. They may come up with ways to cut costs other than cutting people."

To get employees to trust management when mass firings are more common than rainstorms, leaders need to be open, authentic and real, Covey says. "If there is no real trust and genuine integrity, then it just becomes a kind of fake program of fake democracy, which will worsen it. People will say, 'We were manipulated again.' "

What are your comments?

When Right Is Right Where Others See It Wrong

I am sure each HR practitioner has experienced a situation where they made a decision and some senior management person did not agree. There are so many variables that I thought it would be appropriate to bring this up as a thought provoking question/issue. I do not like to make sports analogies but seeing last weeks playoff games in the NFL brought one to light. A play was called on the field in a snow storm that looked right from every camera angle shown. It was challenged and the play was reviewed in the booth and was called differently and it was a turning point in the game. Well, a player who was interviewed afterwords was asked about the play and his comment went like this; "the refs are here on the field feeling the game and the weather conditions how can someone in a heated booth feel the same tempo".

So many decisions are made based on the unique circumstances that reside at the time and those decisions are sometimes backed up by senior management and sometimes not. What senior management fails to realize is that those unique circumstances do not flow to instant replay or Monday morning quarterbacking. The decisions that are made are in good faith, have unique circumstances, critical interaction between employee and HR, understanding of state & federal regulations, one-on-one dynamics, and are not necessarily made by shoot from the hip decisions. Good quality thought goes into this at the time. Managers and senior managers need to consider this in their decision to back or not back the HR persons' decision. Unfortunately, many HR careers are set back, promotions denied, lost confidence, and even career ending terminations. Every senior manager needs to consider, in detail, the at-the-moment circumstances when calling the HR person into their office to review their decision.

What are your thoughts & have you been in this situation?

HR Work Is No Longer HR’s Work - From an HR Strategy Perspective

I attended a dinner function in the last week with a couple of colleagues. During the evening we got onto discussing my favorite subject .... HR strategy, and were having a debate about the usefulness of HR departments. The chap I was chatting to was in a typical mid-management line function and was complaining about the lack of HR support he was receiving and how much “HR work” he was doing.

I immediately said to him that this was a good thing, which took him by surprise. I continued to put my argument forward that it is not HR’s role to be managing his staff, and that the concept of HR being the department that deals with “People matters” is old and not contributing to organisational growth.

His counter argument was that he is there to make sure his business unit achieves its output goals and all this other HR mambo-jumbo is wasting his time. I did concede that if HR is dumping a lot onto him that is not value adding then he may have a point and should push back on doing stuff that fails to help him achieve his outputs. But, achieving his goals involves people, and he could not abdicate this role to HR or anyone else. Management of a business includes effective management of people. I asked him about his HR department in some more detail and how they had got to this point.

There are a number of interesting take aways from this discussion that took place:

1. this is not a unique situation and its been an ongoing debate for many years. What it does tell me is that the role of HR in that organisation in not understood or positioned properly. Even though HR is trying to do the right thing by getting line management to take accountability for their staff in a holistic manner, they are fighting an uphill battle and will continue to do so until the executive reposition the HR department correctly.
2. the HR department does not realise the long term damage they are creating when they execute an approach without the proper backing and strategy. It backfires like we have seen with this line manager. His view of the HR department is not positive and he sees them working against him. Correcting this is now going to be a bigger problem than before.
3. this does highlight a major concern with the level of strategy knowledge within HR departments. HR folk tend to be good at designing and executing activities inside the “HR space”, but can do with some support in executing programmes into the larger strategic realm. It points typically to the lack of business understanding and how to position HR strategically.
4. the forth point is about line managers themselves - I personally think that most of the push back to managing all aspects of their staff is related to fear and uncomfortableness with dealing with difficult people situations. This highlights the need to select management correctly, and not just appointing the good salesman into the sales manager role. Not all people are good and dealing with people matters, but it must be a requirementfor management and supervisory positions, and training and development in this space is a necessity.
5. finally it is also senior managers responsibility to measure people correctly to achieve particular behavior changes. If this line manager is rated on how he achieves his output goals, then that’s what will drive his behavior, however, if he is also measured on how he effectively manages people and gets the best out of them then that will drive another set of behaviours - but its all part of a well thought out HR strategy.
   
   Some of you may be thinking whether there is a need at all for an HR department if line management become super proficient in managing people. The answer is not as simple as a Yes/No, but I do think that you can get rid of the HR department as we know it today. Concepts such as HR shared services and other components that are administrative and transactional in nature can be owned by an inclusive services division. But HR strategy and expertise groups would still need to exist, but could be intertwined into the organisation in other ways than a separate department. Sounds like a good topic for a later discussion.
   
   Tell me your thoughts.

Finding Money for Innovation: Develop Those People Skills

Innovations typically involve trial, error and outright failure before turning into successful products or services. Thomas Edison, for example, conducted approximately 10,000 failed experiments before perfecting the incandescent light bulb. For decades, leading businesses have willingly shouldered the expense and the risk of innovating as the price of staying ahead of competitors.

But innovating has become a lot tougher lately, according to a panel of technology experts who recently spoke at the University of Pennsylvania's Executive Master's in Technology Management program. With R&D budgets shrinking and markets retrenching in a worldwide economic crisis, the panelists noted, technologists will need more than lab expertise to convince their employers to keep the research funding spigots open.

Indeed, the ability to communicate well and other "soft skills" are just as important as technological expertise when it comes to selling new ideas to investors or senior management, suggested several members of the panel, which was titled "Street-Smart Innovation to Align Emerging Technology and Business." In addition, future scientists, researchers and program managers should focus on aligning innovative projects with company goals. As panelist Nicholas D. Evans, vice president of the innovation division at Unisys, pointed out, it's much easier to justify budgets for speculative projects that show an obvious commercial benefit to the parent company.

That lesson became painfully obvious this past summer to employees of the storied Bell Labs research group, based in northern New Jersey. Alcatel-Lucent, owner of Bell Labs, all but gutted much of the non-commercial "basic research" performed by the lab. The product of a rocky 2006 merger, struggling Alcatel-Lucent sought to align Bell Labs' operations more closely with the parent's commercial interests in wireless, optics, networking and computer science.

So, how do organizational entrepreneurs keep innovation alive in companies looking to slash costs? And how do start-ups and growth companies attract investors when the rest of the economy is melting? That's another place where those soft skills come in handy. Several of the panelists suggested that while technical people are generally not known for soft skills, those individuals who desire funding to continue their work would do well to acquire them.

Anthony P. Green, a vice president with first-round funding group Ben Franklin Technology Partners, said he frequently sees entrepreneurs stumble because they lack such skills. All too often, entrepreneurs come across as rude, dismissive and disrespectful to audiences of potential investors, thereby "infuriating the investment community." Panelist Eric F. Bernstein, a laser surgeon, dermatologist and technology entrepreneur, echoed that point. "Business is all about relationships. They need to like your idea, but they also need to like you."

Suzanne Taylor, portfolio director of corporate operations for Unisys, pointed out that budget handlers are also more inclined to favor innovation if it can be shown to cut costs. Innovation department heads must become adept at "making the case for maximizing productivity and reducing waste," Taylor said. This requires excellent communication skills, she added, including the fine art of schmoozing. And the higher up the case is made, the better for the innovator, added Sanjoy Ray, director of global application engineering for pharmaceutical giant Merck. "Executive sponsorship is very powerful. It provides 'air cover.'"

Do you agree? Send me your comments and thoughts on this issue.

Sweat the Small Stuff

When it comes to company culture and having a reputation that attracts and retains quality people, the small stuff is the important stuff. If the boss adds a little to the expense account, maybe the CFO adds a little to the balance sheet. If the person in the cube next to you treats a vendor poorly, then maybe that vendor adds a little extra to the invoice next time - or tells 100 people not to do business with you. In November, CBS on line had an article entitled "Bad Behavior Contagious, Study Finds" - highlighting some of the research on this phenomena. For me and others I am sure, steeped in social psychology and the impact of the social norms - it's a no-brainer. But most folks blow off the effects of small behaviors.

Keeping your eye on the small stuff is probably the single biggest thing a company can do to influence culture.