Dynamic Communication Book

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Communication is more than words. Successful, DYNAMIC COMMUNICATION is measured by the actions and results that you generate—not the messages you produce.

GROW Your Business

Get 27 actionable strategies that you can implement to grow your business. Each chapter can be read independent of others, so in as little as 10 minutes you get an idea that can change your business.

Lead Your Business

Contributions from top entrepreneurs like Grant Cardone, John Lee Dumas, Jay Baer, Kat Loterzo, Robin Koval, Ekaterina Walter and 20+ more, give you real advice from real success stories.

Manage Your Business

Feedback is the motor oil that keeps your business engine running. Learn how to manage your teams and keep your people innovating with proven communication and engagement strategies.

Strategies to Accelerate Your Business

8 Parts. 27 Strategies. 100% Action.

The Bare Basics

Things you need to understand about communication

Sales Machine/Ninja/Badass

Providing service and growing sales

Marketing that Educates

Creating value-filled, magnetic marketing

Oh the Humanity!

Public communication strategies that help you connect

Speak Out, Speak Up

Giving presentations that inspire action

Inner Workings

How to manage teams, meetings, and get buy-in

Like a Boss

Leading and managing so people want to work for and with you

Retain, Innovate, or Die

Strategies for employee retention and development

The Second-Handshake: How Relationship Building Equals Business Success

If you want to be successful in business, you need to surround yourself with the right people.  But finding the right people to surround yourself with is not an easy task.  Yes, I realize I was a bit repetitive there.  Hear me out.

When we think about surrounding ourselves with the right people, we often think in the perspective of what people can do for us.  However, that’s a short-term outlook.  The real question you should be asking is: “What value can I bring to people?”

If you approach networking and relationship building in this manner, you’re bound to get a second handshake.

What is a second handshake?  I’m glad you asked.

Picture this scenario: You walk into a networking event.  Fresh meat.  Someone immediately approaches you, reaches out to shake your hand, and says (in one breath), “Hi, my name is Jill, I’m the owner of Impromptu Guru, I do public speaking and communication coaching and consulting. What’s your name and what do you do?”  You spurt your scripted answer back. You exchange cards. And you walk away.  There is no second handshake.

Now, picture this scenario: You walk into a networking event.  You go up to someone who looks interesting.  You shake hands and introduce yourselves by name.  You say, “Phil, I’m curious, how did you get into doing what you do?”  And a conversation ensues—the foundation of a relationship is laid.  After about five minutes you’ve learned that you both left corporate jobs to go it on your own.  You have something in common.  And you both genuinely enjoyed the conversation to the point that when you start to walk away, he extends his hand and gives you a second handshake.  Success!

It’s these conversations—these second handshakes—that are the foundation of relationships that can be mutually beneficial.  The relationships that allow you to surround yourself with the right people.  The relationships that lead to business success.

Learn more about the second handshake, and the two other keys for relationship building by listening to “Communication and Relationship Building” on “Communication Nation” http://www.voiceamerica.com/episode/68213/communication-and-relationship-building

Note: In a previous life (way back in 2013) I had a radio show on Voice America’s Talk Radio Network. You can now get all of the Communication Nation with Jill Schiefelbein show episodes on iTunes.

Masterminding Tips: Creating Your Own Advisory Board

Forming a mastermind is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my business. This collection of five people, who are now my informal board of advisors (and, quite frankly, the business family that I choose for myself), helps me examine, create, and process opportunities. After a two-day intensive retreat I decided to put down the secrets to our success in an article. In this article on Entrepreneur.com I give you A No-BS Framework to Having an Effective Mastermind Group, including eleven steps that you can use to run a group of your own.

When done well, a mastermind is a valuable investment of time and energy. A mastermind serves as an advisory board, and provides different perspectives for solving business challenges. A mastermind group becomes the first call when questions arise, when you want to celebrate a success, or when you flat out have a crap day.

Published October 21, 2015 on Entrepreneur.com https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/251845

How Andy Warhol’s Sketch Inspires My Business

In 1962 Andy Warhol did a pencil and paper sketch of his now-famous Campbell’s soup can rendering. He then went onto duplicate key elements of this sketch onto 32 canvases which are now prominently displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In this exhibit, the pieces are displayed along a single shelf lining four walls of a room–which is meant to mimic the cans’ placement on what could be a grocery store shelf.

But the canvases are not always displayed in the way they were originally intended.

Typically, when these pieces are on display at MoMA they are arranged as you see in the image on the right–in four rows of eight cans.

Regardless of how they are displayed, these cans hold a sort of fascination for me. Many debate whether or not to call these works “art” or if they are rather just visual transmissions of information. To me it matters not.

To me, it’s about the experience of how you can take a single object–in this case a soup can–and translate it into many different forms. For Warhol, it was all about how he interpreted the soup can and decided how to manifest his interpretation into something tangible.

And it all started with a sketch.

Often sketches are blue prints for great things to come. They’re created in a medium that is easily malleable, erasable, and disposable. Discarding these sketches, though, can be a costly mistake.

As I’m staring at this 1962 sketch my mind wanders: What are the sketches in my business? What ideas did I map out but discard because they didn’t immediately turn a profit? Are there key elements in my sketches that can be duplicated, rearranged, or re-purposed?

If you go back and look at all of the sketches that you’ve done for your business, there are likely key elements in there that are, like Warhol’s soup cans, worthy of replication.

The challenge is to find those elements, put them on your own canvas, and display them in a way that makes people want to engage with you and your work.

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Creating Positive Customer Experiences: The Little Things Matter

A popular saying goes, people may not remember what you said, but they will remember how you made them feel. A positive customer or employee experience can go a long way to your reputation and brand as a business, and as a manager or leader. It can also have a magnetizing effect, attracting people to you. This article, published on Entrepreneur.com, provides ten questions to ask yourself on how to create positive customer and employee experiences. Here’s a quick context:

If you want your customers to keep coming back, and your employees to keep performing at a high level, you have to create these positive experiences.

What do you do for your customers that moves you away from being a mere service or merchandise provider to a business that delivers a service or product experience?

How do you create positive experiences for your employees that enable them to see their role in the larger company vision and leave a feeling of belonging that sticks with them long after work is done?

Published August 31, 2015 on Entrepreneur.com https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/250043

Developing Employees on Different Paths: The Principle of Equifinality

The idea of equifinality means that there are many paths to the same end—there are multiple ways to reach a final goal.

Think of navigating in New York City from Times Square to Lincoln Center. There are many different ways you can get from point A to point B, and many different methods of transportation to get you between points. Depending on traffic, subway schedules, weather, and other assorted factors, one way is likely faster than the others.

By choosing to take one way over the other—say on this given day it’s a taxi—you’re missing out on many other possible discoveries and observations that walking or taking a bus or subway would have presented.

If you’re focusing on cultivating a culture of innovation and developing your employees, those potential discoveries and observations are key to growth.

A fatal flaw that many managers make is assuming that their ideas or processes are always the best—the most efficient—and therefore need to be continually executed. This assumption (and acting on it) kicks any type intrapreneurial thinking to the curb. In doing so, you’re likely to lose top talent and have trouble retaining employees, especially millennials.

In organizations there are many ways to accomplish a single task. The concept of equifinality is alive and well. Yes, some processes may be more efficient than others, but often times in allowing employees the freedom to chart their own path, new efficiencies emerge.

An employee’s learning process in accomplishing a task is just as important as the task itself.

Here’s an example that applies to sales teams in almost any industry.

Think of a speech, or sales-script, written out word-for-word. If you give this document to ten different employees and tell them they must recite this pitch to-the-letter during all sales conversations, you’d ensure that the words coming out of their mouths were exact. But in doing so you’d be missing out on significant opportunities to develop individual delivery skills, provide employees ownership over their scripts, cater to a customer’s unique needs, and cultivate sustainable relationships between your sales force and potential clients.

How can you use the principle of equifinality to develop your employees? If you’re not sure, let’s have a conversation.

Note: In a previous blog I talked about three phrases that leaders should never use if they want to encourage innovation and participation. One of these phrases, “That’s now how we do things around here,” is very applicable to this post.

Making a Wireframe for Your Team to Maximize Talent Conversion: What Managers Can Learn from UX

User Experience.

In consumer businesses, UX is traditionally viewed as a way to analyze and produce experiences that drive consumers toward an end goal. The focus of UX is largely external. The motivation for investing in UX is conversion, and, ultimately, the bottom line.

Let’s flip UX on its traditional head. I believe that managers can significantly benefit by viewing UX as an internal measure.

Today at Internet Week New York (#IWNY) I attended a presentation by Sarah Blecher of Digital Pulp who presented a more advanced definition (based on crowdsourcing) of UX:

It’s the moment when content, design, and interaction come together and how the user feels about it.

Imagine that—users have feelings, and businesses need to pay attention to them.

The same is true for your employees.

Here’s how you can use the three core principles of UX—content, design, and interaction—to transform your team’s experience in the workplace to achieve higher productivity, enhanced morale, and accelerated conversion of talent to profit.

Content

In UX, content typically refers to the text, image and video elements on a site. When you’re dealing with the experience of your organizational teams, the content pieces are the task at hand and the available resources.

If you want to set your teams up to optimize employees’ creative capital, you need to make sure their experience is as seamless as possible. When charging a team with a task, make sure that all of the information members need to complete the task is in a central location.

Communicate the output expectations clearly, and present, up front, the resources available.

If you’re not sure what resources are available, provide parameters. Creativity thrives in the face of constraint.

Design

When most think of UX, they think immediately of design. Design, however, is only a part of the equation. In organizations, employee design is all about the environment—physical, social and emotional.

If you want to maximize human capital, provide an environment that is conducive to the needs and personalities of your team members. This is where a high amount of EQ (emotional intelligence) comes into play.

As a manager, you need to know the fears, stresses, and motivations of your team members so that you may design environments where human experience is valued over productivity.

By paying attention to the feelings of your employees, and recognizing individual and collective needs, productivity rises organically in a way that is sustainable and not forced.

When employees feel valued, empowered, and comfortable (not fearful of) presenting ideas that could fail, you’ve set up an environment to maximize talent conversion.

Interaction

The last piece of the UX equation is interaction—how the user interacts or engages with your content, within your design. When developers study patterns of interaction, they get feedback that they use to modify or solidify content and design.

Managing others and leading teams involves recognizing how each individual works, and providing the necessary feedback so the employee can develop the necessary skills to perform at a higher level. Especially with the growing millennial workforce, feedback—and the frequency of providing feedback—is increasingly important.

In looking at how people learn, studies show that one of the key factors in performance and knowledge retention is the interaction between the student and the instructor. The same parallel is true for the workplace.

Employees who have better relationships—better interactions—with their managers have higher rates of productivity, workplace satisfaction, and an increased desire to perform well.

Analyzing UX should not just be viewed as a consideration when it comes to analyzing consumer behavior. Retaining top talent IS based on “user” experience.

Make sure your leaders are creating experiences that will keep these key players on your team.

Due Diligence: The Most Obvious Sales Tip in the World

I won’t make you wait for it: Know your audience.

It’s simple.

Know your audience. This is the first step for any communicative episode. And selling requires effective communication.

A little bit of due diligence research can go a long way. And communicating in a way that demonstrates your knowledge can yield opportunities that a single-track sales mind (meaning push product, push product, push product) tends to miss.

Here’s an example.

Last week I received an email from a textbook representative from one of the top five academic publishers in the United States asking me if he could stop by my office and bring me desk copies of this publisher’s business communication imprint for use in my classes.

I’m a faculty member in business communication at the largest university in the country. I’m used to getting solicitation emails from publishers asking me to review books in the field or asking me to consult on digital products. So hearing from a publishing representative isn’t new.

But here’s the kicker.

I’m one of three authors on the textbook that is used at this university, and others throughout the country: Business and Professional Communication in the Global Workplace. I don’t say this to toot my proverbial horn (especially since each book that sells earns me barely enough money to buy a Starbucks coffee), but to illustrate a gross neglect of due diligence.

After shaking my head, I responded to the man, sent a direct link to the public syllabus listed on the department website, and told him that replacing my own book and rewriting the course content was not likely to happen.

Does this mean he shouldn’t have contacted me at all? No!

Does this mean that sales people shouldn’t contact people who already have a solution in place? No!

It does mean that if you do your due diligence, you can use a different approach, build a relationship, and made inroads for future opportunities and referrals.

Had he written, expressing knowledge of the book utilized and asked if we had plans to create another edition (this one was released in 2010), he would’ve gained valuable information. He would’ve learned that, no, we aren’t renewing for another edition with our publisher. With that information he could have (a) asked if we would be interested in talking to an editor at the company he represents–demonstrating his value to the editorial team in finding potential authors, or (b) asked if I would mind if he dropped off some books for consideration at a later date, should we decide to switch to a newer version, or to review updated chapters on technology for potential adoption, since that changes so rapidly.

Either of these would’ve furthered the relationship, and who knows what might have happened in the long run.

Know your audience. It’s simple. But often overlooked.

Acknowledging Feedback: What are Your Moving Bus Stops?

This year a particularly amusing phenomenon is occurring in China—the case of the moving bus stop. The latest victim to this menace, Xiaozuo, China—a village of 3,000—made the headlines in today’s Wall Street Journal in an article by Te-Ping Chen, In China, the Bus Stops Sometimes Take a Walk.

Villagers, not happy with the current bus stops, have begun digging up the signage and digging new holes (complete with pouring cement) in order to favor their location. Be it an aging community who feels the current stop is too far to walk or an advantageous business owner trying to shift customers in his favor, “walking” bus stops are causing havoc in transportation routes.

Transportation authorities are directing operators to continue to use the old locations, and have replaced signage in many instances. This works for village residents, who know where the original stops are. But for those who visit the area, you’re likely to end up flagging down a passing bus to no avail, because you’re at the wrong stop.

This is clearly a communication breakdown.

An obvious, and quick, solution would be to put stickers over the “moved” bus stops to communicate that buses will not stop there, and point patrons to the original location.

This is just a bandage on the wound.

Unfortunately this happens in businesses all the time.

Underneath the phenomenon of the walking bus signs is a systemic problem to be addressed—listening to feedback. Is there legitimate reasoning behind these moving bus stops? Should the transit authorities be paying attention? Would simply acknowledging the move help the situation? Or is this just the case of multiple pranksters trying to pull one over?

There’s always some truth behind every joke.

In some areas, the government put out advertisements in publications to encourage people to stop moving the bus stops, expecting the problem to slow—but it hasn’t.

Organizations are guilty of this, and often at the cost of profitability. When something goes wrong, we often seek the nearest bandage to stop the hemorrhaging. But what we fail to do is find out how the bleeding began in the first place. We fail to get feedback. And in the cases when we do receive feedback, we often fail to listen.

Asking for feedback means nothing to your employees or your consumers if you aren’t recognizing, or in some cases implementing, shared thoughts. In the same way having an “open door policy” is a waste of time, and a statement of hypocrisy, if you aren’t going to encourage challenges to the status quo and contrary opinions without repercussion.

I challenge you to recognize the feedback from your employees and customers. And not just with a thank-you. Respond, legitimately, to the feedback. If you don’t agree, let them know that you understand their desire to move the bus stop, but then show them how it is not feasible and explain why. This communication lets people know that they, and their opinions are valued. When you take time to have a conversation, they feel respected. And even if you don’t change the direction of your bus to accommodate their requests, you’ll have riders who better understand the system.

Back to Basics—Building Value, Achieving Buy-In, and Cultivating Community

Recently J.C. Penny Co. named a new CEO to lead it out of its sales decline. Marvin Ellison, formerly of Home Depot Inc. and Target Corp affiliation, will take over the role and plans to build a solid operations base moving into the next fiscal year, diversifying from the company’s previous three-year focus on making the chain more “hip” to instead focusing on the “nuts and bolts of retailing rather than flashy merchandising.”

Companies that chase trends that vastly differ from their roots often find themselves in this regressive, rebuilding situation.

Getting back to basics is something that leaders need to regularly consider. It’s easy to get caught up in the flashy objects, the newest marketing trend, or the latest technology.

When you get back to basics—back to the foundations of what makes your company, department or office unique—you reinforce the mission, support the vision, and build community.

Think of what you have done lately to get back to basics. Can your employees reference your mission statement? Does your team know the company’s vision? Do your customers feel like they are a part of your community?

These business basics aren’t going away.

The principles of building a solid value base, getting buy-in from your employees, and cultivating a community of advocates around your products and services are what sustain businesses over time. While they may manifest in flashy merchandising techniques or the latest snap-pin-book-twit-agrams, it’s not the manifestation that matters—it’s the core message behind the company and the people who support it that have the staying power.