Category: Leadership + Management

How HR Professionals Can Benefit from Learning the Sales Pitch

Over the past several years, HR’s role has steadily risen in stature, with more and more leaders recognizing the critical nature of HR functions and their impact on business growth and the bottom line. And HR has risen to the occasion by finding solutions to the chaos caused by the pandemic, driving vital culture changes to improve equality within the workplace, prioritizing diversity and inclusion, and developing new solutions to improve the employee experience.

But despite this upward trend, the task of pitching new ideas, plans, or strategies to the C-Suite isn’t without difficulty. While you may understand how the solution you’ve worked hard to develop is right for the business, it’s not exactly easy to convey this—especially when money is on the line.

As more solutions become available and the market for HR solutions grows, HR professionals need to prepare themselves for the inevitable fight for the “right one”. But this can’t be done in a power-play.

As you prepare for your next conversation about an HR solution you’d like to implement, consider approaching it like a “pitch.”

Understand your audience

While you may understand why the solution you’re pitching is the right one, that doesn’t mean it’s clear to the CEO or CFO of the company. As you work to frame the information you’ve gathered, consider each of your audience’s perspectives, and try framing your pitch to fit their specific lens:

  • A CEO generally keeps the grand vision for the organization front of mind. They want to know how any solution will help them reach their ultimate goals. They want to be reassured that each section of the company will engage successfully with the solution. And they’ll want to know why this solution is better than others.
  • A CFO is a different story. They want to know how this solution will affect the bottom line. They may be more interested in hard numbers, data, research, and comparative data between similar solutions.

As you approach these conversations, consider how you might frame the information you have to fit your audience’s specific questions before sitting down with them. Preparing yourself for the decision-makers’ inevitable questions and worries will help you develop confidence and build their confidence and trust in you as your conversation progresses.

Start with small steps

Instead of expecting a decision to be made right out the gate, consider setting up a series of meetings in which you approach your ultimate goal of implementing the solution over time, creating stepping stones that gradually bring the decision-makers to the finish line. Set clear goals for each meeting so they’ll know what to expect. Consider breaking down the conversation into a series of small steps:

  1. Set a preliminary meeting to talk about the current solution (or lack of solution) the organization has. Review how it’s going and identify what issues have arisen. Then take a look at the overall goals of the organization and identify areas that need attention. This meeting is an opportunity for you to uncover their concerns and goals, which will inform how you approach your second presentation.
  2. In your second meeting, frame your solution around the main points and concerns highlighted in the first discussion. This is your chance to explain why you think it’s the best fit. Don’t leave your expert opinion out, but don’t forget to address your audience’s concerns. Before asking them to make the final decision, propose bringing in someone from the company offering the solution or from a similar organization as yours that has implemented it.

By approaching the pitch as a series of small steps that lead to a bigger decision, you’ll remove the anxiety around making the final purchase and help build trust as they learn about the solution.

Practice

As you prepare, don’t forget to practice these conversations. Try roleplaying and writing a list of questions you might expect. While you may think you know everything about this solution, you don’t want to risk giving a sloppy, confusing answer when the moment strikes. Run through your presentation at least three times, and identify areas that can be clarified, simplified, or left out.

Remember, you are the expert in this situation. If you believe your solution will make a difference for your organization, you owe it to your team to be as prepared and knowledgeable as possible. You got this!

 

Content provided by Q4iNetwork and partners

Photo by Cathy Yeulet

Move Past the Buzzwords: How to Lead Intentionally

In the world of business, buzzwords seem to rule the headlines. Optimize, disrupt, engage, drive—they pop up in headlines about leadership, HR, employee engagement, productivity, and the bottom line of your business.

What ties these ideas together? They all allude to the possibility of gaining something, of getting the upper hand—of winning. Yet, after all the articles you’ve read, how much time have you really spent ‘winning’?

This article isn’t about the next new leadership strategy or the latest piece of tech you should be implementing. It’s about you, your vision, and how not to lose sight of it amidst all the noise.

Filter for the vision

Fresh ideas can be a great motivator to take action, but without vetting them against the vision, they turn into a distraction. Here’s an example of how distraction can play out. A manager was called into a meeting with the upper management team to hear about their exciting new idea: they wanted to partner with another organization to share resources and expand their reach. They were excited, urging the manager to get to work immediately on a communication plan. Her first response instead was to ask questions:

  • How does this fit into the visions for the two organizations?
  • What resources are we sharing?
  • What benefits will we each receive, financial or otherwise?
  • How will we manage the combined financials?
  • What are the expectations of each team?

The room was silent. They hadn’t taken the time to think it through. They had no answers, and the idea was dropped just as soon as it was picked up.

If you’re not looking at new ideas through the intentional lens of your vision, it’s easy to get pulled off track. Leaders and their team members should know this vision lens well enough to filter ideas for ones that fit and ones that are a distraction.

Theme over numbers

To avoid the same story happening at your organization, try implementing an annual or bi-annual theme. While setting goals and hard numbers is a great way to hold yourself and your team accountable, that shouldn’t be the first place you go when you develop your organizational strategy.

A theme is an idea you intentionally want to take hold in the behaviors of your team. The most powerful themes are often the most simple, such as “be intentional” or “simplify” or “progress over perfection.” And a theme has a longer lifespan than numbers-driven goals, and the newly developed behaviors won’t disappear if you fail to meet any specific goal.

A theme will work as a guide and a reference for all the major (and minor) activities within your organization and can help weed out initiatives that sound great but aren’t aligned with your vision. Pick an idea for your theme that reinforces your company vision and acts as a reference point to keeping your ideas and intentions in alignment with your vision.

Proactive planning

Creating a theme can help you think ahead in a logical, intentional way. One way that organizations get sidetracked or find themselves stumped by a complicated, poorly planned initiative is reactive planning. As your business grows, it will inevitably hit roadblocks. Problems aren’t avoidable. But often, leadership gets stuck in a loop of reactive planning, responding to each problem as it arises, only thinking one step ahead or one step behind each challenge.

Reactive leadership doesn’t allow for intentional growth and can suck an entire organization’s energy down the drain. So the next time your organization comes up against a roadblock, step back and consider your options. Don’t run with the first idea that comes to you without thinking things through:

  • Does the plan align with your theme?
  • Does it make sense long-term?
  • Does your team have the capacity to execute the plan?
  • Why are you choosing this plan over others, how will it help, and what does your team need to do to make it happen?

Change your mind (set)

If your team tends to complain when asked to do the hard work associated with getting a new initiative up and going, it’s likely that leadership hasn’t explained the initiative in proper context. It’s difficult to accept tactical chores when there is no obvious and immediate benefit.

If you want your business to win and your vision to be realized, you must take time to allow your team see how new initiatives help fulfill the vision. Once understood, the detailed, often frustrating work of laying down the pavement toward functionality and success, can be met with much more acceptance.

For example, if you’re paying for a robust tech platform to track sales, marketing efforts, and prospecting, but you’re frustrated by the results, ask yourself if you’ve equipped your staff with the right training. Do they know why they’re going to use it? Do they know how to use it?

If they don’t have a clear understanding, you haven’t implemented the technology with a solid strategy, and you need to reverse your steps and start over. If they do have a clear understanding, ask yourself why they aren’t using it correctly (or at all).

Organizations waste massive amounts of money on tech they hardly use, not because they don’t see its value, but because they don’t make the time commitment to 1) train their employees, or 2) take accountability for its success.

Your job as a leader isn’t just to hold people accountable or set the direction of your organizational growth—it’s to take responsibility for the details, the strategy, and the planning. Your vision = your responsibility. Sure, you get to ask for help, but the ultimate success or failure falls on you.

Where to start

To get your organization, or even your brain, back on track, retreat to your vision. Start there and move forward. Always ask:

  • “Does this idea align with our vision?”
  • “Am I willing to put in the work to develop a strategy?”
  • “How will I communicate this to my team?”

In the end, businesses get off and on track repeatedly as they grow and change. Remember to recenter your focus on your vision, even as it evolves, and resolve never to be above the “busy work” of strategy. After all, any idea looks like a good idea without a plan.

 

 

Photo by Ian Iankovskii

Content provided by Q4iNetwork and partners 

 

 

Wellness and Productivity: A Holistic Approach

For much of the country, winter can be a challenging time. Decreased light, more time spent indoors, the horrible experience of waking up in the dark and ending work in the dark—it can be tough. This winter may be especially challenging, with the pandemic forcing us into isolation and away from our favorite cozy coffee shops and bookstores.

As humans, our energy naturally ebbs and flows throughout our lives and throughout the seasons. This can be difficult for those of us with high expectations. We don’t like to accept that sometimes, we need sleep, time alone, or support. But these things are inevitable, pandemic or not, and fighting against them isn’t an effective use of our energy. We need to learn to roll with our energy cycles, not against them.

Here are four tips to help you stay on track with your goals while not falling out of tune with your needs.

Make short term commitments 

At the start of every week, make a list of all the things you want to accomplish. Then break each item out into categories:

  • Start with “the one thing”—the task you commit to complete above all others.
  • Then, break it into time-intensive tasks that you know will take a while.
  • Next, think about your quick wins, the things you know you can get done quickly.
  • Finally, think about the items that can wait till later and put them in your backlog.

This will help you stay on top of the stuff that matters most while also keeping things from slipping through the cracks. It’ll provide you with a sense of accomplishment and enable you to make clear decisions around how you spend your time each day. In short, it’ll help your days stay clear of busywork and give you direction to aim your energy most effectively and efficiently.

Keep small promises

Each of us has different needs, challenges, and sticking points. Try making some small, easily accomplishable promises to yourself. Pick something that can have a high impact on your mood but doesn’t take too much time. A ten-minute walk in the middle of the day, for instance. Or fifteen minutes to journal in the morning before work.

Keeping small promises to yourself helps you gain a sense of control and emotional wellbeing. It will help you remove opportunities to berate yourself for not being perfect by providing you something to point to and say, “At least I did this for myself today.”

Redefine what productivity means

In our society, we often put more value on “productivity” than wellbeing. We get down on ourselves for not doing enough, working hard enough, or growing fast enough. But the reality is that like our energy, our productivity ebbs and flows over time. We may have times of intense growth followed by quieter, more restful periods. That’s normal.

However, we get into trouble when we place greater value on the “more productive” periods than the restful ones. If we measure our success against those times in our lives that we have been the most productive, we’ll always fall short of our expectations. Growth spurts and times of increased productivity are great, but they aren’t necessarily what leads to success.

Approach your life holistically

Allowing yourself the grace to move between these stages in your life and placing value on all of them is the key to both happiness and productivity. To have growth, you need to have rest. Remember, your success, whether it’s emotional, financial, or occupational, is your responsibility. Take the steps you need, big or small, to ensure you’re supporting yourself as you expand and contract within your life.

 

Photo by Alexandr Ivanov

Content provided by Q4iNetwork and partners 

How to Get More Out of Every Conversation

The art of leading a productive and enlightening conversation is at the essence of success. Whether you’re conducting a job interview, talking to a client, or working with your team, you need the power to get as much out of every conversation as you can.

You need to inspire, to be purposeful and clear, to obtain and share quality information, and to connect on a human level—all of which needs to happen naturally and in as few words (of yours) as possible.

Here are a few key points you can apply to nearly every conversation you have, amplifying your impact, takeaway, and position.

Who’s at the center?

Leading a quality conversation doesn’t mean you become the focal point. Most of the time, if you position the other person at the center, you can make a greater impact. You can make the other person think you’re the most interesting person in the world, or they can leave the conversation feeling they are the most interesting person in the world.

Which would you prefer? Be honest with yourself.

While you might impress some people by espousing your thoughts, experiences, and opinions, it will do little to help you connect with and learn from them. This brings us to a critical point: setting your intention. If you want to lead a conversation where everyone goes away with your opinions and ideas swirling around in their heads, then sure, get on your soapbox and talk away.

BUT, if you intend to get information from someone while also connecting with them personally, then your focus should be on them.

Listening to hear, not to speak

Imagine a microphone: the only thing that comes out of it is what is said into it. Having a conversation with someone who spends their time waiting to speak is like becoming a microphone for the other person. It’s not fun. Or rewarding. Or engaging.

It’s just exasperating.

So how do you avoid being the person who only listens long enough to find an opportunity to speak? The first step is slowing down. Remind yourself why you are having the conversation. Ask yourself what it is you’re hoping to gain. Then ask yourself how you’re going to get there. I promise you, the answer isn’t by talking.

Learn how to ask questions

While you’ve known how to ask questions since you first learned to talk, it doesn’t mean you know how to ask the right questions.

Let’s look at two similar questions and see how they evoke wildly different responses:

  • Did you feel happy when you got the new job?
  • What was it like to get the new job?

One quick way to stop a conversation in its tracks is to ask leading or closed-ended questions. These are questions that push the response in a specific direction and simply require a yes or no answer.

What would you say if someone asked you the first question? Probably something like, “Yes, I did feel happy!” While that isn’t a bad answer, it doesn’t leave room for you to add anything else. The answer sits within the original question: “Happy,” prompting no additional thought or introspection

Now think about answering the second, open-ended question. There’s no obvious response. Your answer could go in many different directions, allowing richness and depth to develop within the discussion. Those are the types of questions you want to be asking if you’re looking for value.

Don’t resist the awkward pause

While no one loves to sit in silence, learning to do so comfortably can create something amazing. Think about the landscape of your conversation as a jumble of marbles on a mattress. You go from one marble to the next in a sometimes straight, sometimes meandering line. But there will always be marbles that don’t get picked up. 

Now, think about silence as a bowling ball put down in the center of the mattress. The ball’s weight creates a physical pull on the outlying marbles, coaxing them to roll into the dent left by the bowling ball and into the center of the conversation.

Give your conversation some intentional bowling balls. Make way for those stray thoughts or shy opinions to be pulled to the center and realized.

Move with purpose

As you practice leading conversations that produce real value, help you authentically connect, and make progress, take the time to reflect. After an especially frustrating or exciting conversation, stop and go over what made it successful or not. This process takes self-awareness, intention, and purpose. Take your time, work at it, and watch as each interaction you have becomes more valuable, impactful, and satisfying.

 

Photo by rawpixel

Content provided by Q4iNetwork and partners 

Battling Ageism Continued: Protecting Senior Professionals

A few weeks ago, we published a blog that covered four ways you can work against ageist practices in your workplace. While it’s a good start to identifying the subtle ways ageism can sneak in, it’s essential to address some more concrete ways ageism takes place.

The numbers behind ageism

Ageism is, without a doubt, a heavy burden on the American people and our country as a whole. Last year, the AARP released a study that calculated the U.S. lost $850 billion in GDP due to ageist practices against older workers in 2018. The same study projects that by 2050, the losses resulting from age discrimination could reach up to $3.9 trillion.

These ageist practices keep older workers out of the job market, impact any dependents they have, and force family members to pick up the slack. The study found 57% of GDP revenue lost was caused by workers forced into involuntary retirement.

Rejecting the practices of ageism

Although the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) protects workers 40 and over from being denied work and put at a disadvantage due to their age, a Supreme Court 2009 ruling made it more difficult for plaintiffs to win cases. The new ruling requires plaintiffs to prove their age was the deciding factor in their employer’s decision, removing what’s commonly called “mixed motive” cases from the table.

Last year, in response to the study and following public outcry, a bill (The Protecting Older Workers Against Discrimination Act) was introduced to the Senate to amend the Supreme Court’s decision and to make it easier for plaintiffs to make their case. Although this bill is not yet law, it shows a strong push to reject ageism and protect older workers from its destructive impact.

What can you do to ensure your organization isn’t participating in ageist practices?

Empower your employees

A straightforward way to hold your organization accountable? Ensure your employees know their rights and what to do when they feel their rights have been infringed upon. Educate your managers, hiring managers, and leadership team on:

  • Good defining traits to inform their decisions (experience, skills, compatibility)
  • What needs to be left out of the equation (age, ethnicity, gender, etc.)
  • What age discrimination looks like in the workplace (subtleties of language, hiring decisions)

Make sure your employees know they have a right to protect themselves from discrimination, and create the expectation that neither you nor they should tolerate any form of it. Create internal channels for employees to address issues and make sure they know what they can do to protect themselves.

Review your practices

When was the last time you looked at your internal practices to uncover malpractice, out of date approaches, and possible employee rights violations? Does anyone in your organization have this responsibility, or do you cross your fingers and hope nothing comes up?

Or did you do it at the start of your business but haven’t reviewed your practices in years?

Commit to continually reviewing your internal processes for hiring, promoting, and wage and hour decisions. If you have no system to examine these areas, you will be much more likely to find your business in hot water. The key concept here is to be proactive, not reactive.

Take action

There are ways to support older employees and increase their long-term impact and contributions to your organization. Also, keep in mind there are ways to make different roles more accessible to senior professionals. Consider:

  • Offering flexible hours
  • Offering part-time positions
  • Offering skills training

Making quarterly meetings to review benchmarks, wins, and growth areas will help your employees quantify their value to you and provide a record of their contribution and progress within your organization, protecting both their rights and yours.

Take on the responsibility 

In the end, organizations must shoulder the responsibility and duty to ensure they are providing just, equitable, and responsible treatment to their employees. Diversifying your workforce in any direction will allow you to grow and allow your community to grow with you. What’s right for your employees, is good for you, and what’s right for your industry, is good for your country. It’s time to step up to the plate and bat ageism out of the park.

 

Photo by piksel

Content provided by Q4iNetwork and partners