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Influence – Light Touch Communications

These are quick and easy communications. They are sent within texting platforms, to help stakeholders, at all levels, know that you are still there and investing effort in them; not just asking (pressuring) them for something. This is an often overlooked aspect of leadership communication and effective with LOW effort!

Mitigate misunderstandings and improve mutual trust

Stakeholders can be prospect-customers, customers, your staff-members, peers, senior-staff and key supply-chain folks. Work is busy and some of them may be neglected by us, unless we use a CRM[1] with timed actions that we set-up. Light-touches are not heavy on your time, or theirs! The majority of timed actions, emails, calls and meetings are heavy on our management time and often are unnecessary. How do we know what is necessary to maintain great working relationships and where needed, meet our due diligence requirements for standards?

The answer to that, as with all and every single stakeholder, is to ask about their preferences in an upcoming conversation. These conversations may reduce the frequency of actual meetings and or the length of these meetings, saving us time to invest elsewhere. The conversations can help you to hone your messaging to meet their needs ensuring that there is openness and agreement; none of your contacts will feel neglected or over-pressured (by your executive action without agreeing with them what is best for effective co-working). Examples:

  • ‘When reaching out to you, what is your ideal channel for that and how frequently?’
  • ‘When I share information, am I getting the subjects/content about right or can I amend to suit you better?’

Organizing actions into distribution lists

You may end up with sixty or more of these ‘light touch contacts’ on your list of stakeholders. You can arrange them into lists, with timed actions for your reach-outs. The advantage of texts, Whatsapp included, is that you can produce quick distributions that fly-out individually to numerous people at the same moment. When you have time, you may revisit those messages and add another message, tailored for some of the contacts only:

  • ‘We’ve not connected directly for a while. Let me know if you do not want these messages or if a quick call would be useful?’

This same message may go out to just some of the contacts you just mailed out to. Quick copy and paste and the job of maintaining contact and stimulating response is done.

Another example is the sending out of quotations (below), but the action could be a timely up-date of useful information. In the case of these quotations, I send these out at three weekly intervals. Mine are mostly in text distribution lists that send out individual messages. Two quotation examples look like this:

One quotation will go out and some recipients will get a follow-up message too, inviting feedback. Here are three examples of my follow-up messages:

  • ‘Hi Mark, do you wish to continue getting these quotes; no problem either way!’
  • ‘Want to meet virtually in the coming weeks? I have spaces for you!’
  • ‘How are you doing?’

The feedback I receive back may result in another meeting, it may be a short message thanking and asking about my news, or it could be a request for information etcetera.

Conclusion

Light Touches keep us noticed. If we are brave enough to find out what our stakeholder preferences are, we can reduce the total time commitment that we spend on communication efforts. In some cases, an individual may need more time from you, but the investment will be fruitful, especially if reviewed to amend and meet their needs (while meeting your own needs or those that meet your business’ due diligence needs).


[1] Contact/Customer Relationship Management software.

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Leadership & Motivation – Video Tips

Manage Self and Others Smarter


How to Engage with your staff, gain trust and, help them develop

The next video #2 (and nine more; almost 2 hours in total) can be found here on YouTube

Video #Time/ mm:ssSubjects covered
28:30Stop dissatisfaction in people by preventing over-managing and under-managing from now on
38:46Get the number of allocated projects right; engaging to get the best from others; acknowledgement; linguistic tricks!
48:21Key setting/agreeing boundaries; communicate early when issues arise & prevent chaos; carrots & sticks for double motivation!
512:21Trust Building; Leadership Traits; Gap-managing your own traits; The Trust Factor traits that are essential, or crisis results
67:54Reliability/Consistency vs flexibility explained; Action cycles and fire-fighting and how to be more strategic at work
712:23Leveraging the 1-2-1 with staff: motivating, checking your effectiveness, mindsets for difficult-behaviors, using ‘I’, ‘We’, & ‘You’
814:16Mindsets for different required solutions; four types of meetings fit for purpose and more efficient
910:52Leveraging Emotional Intelligence and speedy EI improvement without having to just grow old!
1011:57Beating conflicts: Second positioning and the 51% Rule
1113:51Managing stress (self & others); Persistent stress syndrome and how to break it; self-inquiry and self-inventory.
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Emotional Intelligence Model

To Drive Self-Awareness to Self-Managing, to test from specific feedback and make deliberate change

Seek specific (contextualized) feedback like this:

When we were {place/time: in that meeting at 9am today} I made some comments about three key areas that help us win business and I noticed that Brenda did not contribute after that and I think was avoiding eye-contact with me. If there was ‘one thing[1]’ that I could have done better, what is that ‘one thing’?

To Drive Awareness of Others to Managing Others and to test new and more impactful approaches

Ask questions that invite your understanding of their values, sense of identity, beliefs, needs, wants, motivations and de-motivators:

Arun, I’m interested in how you approached success with the Comcast business. You seemed more highly engaged than usual… if there was one thing that drove your engagement like that, what is that one thing?


[1] The presupposition of there being one thing stimulates the brain and opens a neural pathway. The question ‘what is that one thing’ invites an answer in the present stimulating the same neural pathway. This tends to lead to a developmental answer/feedback and other questions and answers may follow once started.

More Self-Awareness questions

Frame the First question like the one above, including contextualization AND the ‘one thing’ format. After you have the first feedback, you can then ask more questions like, “and if there was another thing”?

I disturbed you {context} when you were very busy…. One thing?

I gave you developmental-feedback (context}… one thing?

I got stressed and did not communicate well, for which I apologize; one thing… how could I stop myself getting stressed?

It was very late and I took a bad action {context}; one thing: how could I have best informed you and when?

I tried to get my message across {context} but do not think I succeeded; one thing to be better at that?

When I get too busy, action notes get mislaid, what is a better way to prevent that happening?

Am I prioritizing to the right level and if not, how can I improve that?

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Emotional Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence (EI) leverages success. Many executives slowly gain EI over a life-time from learning whether pleasant or painful! But we can all learn faster – here are some insights for how to do just that, and stay ahead before the pain hits! Just SEVEN minutes!