Author: sybil

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Engagement

People to People: Favorite Quotes on Collaboration

From important historical figures and contemporary business leaders, here are my favorite quotes on how working together makes a difference.

“The value in human interaction is greater collective wisdom as a result of improved communication and collaboration.” Michael Katz

“In speaking, we humanize ourselves. In listening, we bring our worlds together. In learning, we create understanding.” Yvonne DiVita

“More people would rather enjoy the camaraderie of smart collaboration than be lead, persuaded or managed.” Kare Anderson

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” Helen Keller

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead

“Never do anything about me without me.” David Zinger

Categories
Engagement

What Your Fundraising Efforts Tell Donors

A donor can only take so much.

That’s why I asked certain nonprofits to stop fundraising. The situation improved somewhat … until now. So far this year I have received monthly solicitations from one nonprofit, along with other fundraising mailers from a similar organization who either purchased or shared that nonprofit’s donor list.

I understand and respect nonprofits need to raise money on an ongoing basis to support their work. But when their fundraising continues on auto-pilot, it shows a lack of respect for donors.

Your organization may craft different mission-focused messages in multiple fundraising requests, but here’s how your constant solicitation can be perceived by a donor:

  • I feel like my contribution isn’t valued when you keep asking me for money all the time.
  • Maybe you should spend more effort on doing good work instead of continuously soliciting me for donations.
  • You might be earning additional revenue by selling your donor list, but I’m getting fed up with receiving requests from similar organizations.
  • I was happy to support your organization until you started treating me like an ATM.

Take a step back and view your fundraising efforts from a donor’s perspective. What message(s) are you sending to them in your ongoing solicitation?

 

 

 

 

 

Categories
Engagement

Foundation for a Decent Workplace

In my research on dysfunctional workplace cultures, a LinkedIn connection shared the following “Ten Commandments of the Workplace” that can be honored by both employees and employers. [Special thanks to James Dodds for bringing this to my attention.]

Ten Commandments of the Workplace

  1. You have the right to be treated with respect and the responsibility to respect others.
  2. You have the right to be treated fairly and the responsibility to treat others fairly.
  3. You have the responsibility to respect the rights and needs of others.
  4. You have the right to a work environment that is free of distractions.
  5. You acknowledge that change is difficult and necessary.
  6. You acknowledge that errors are often the symptoms of a larger problem, and not the problem itself, and work to find better solutions.
  7. You acknowledge that employees are part of the solution, not the problem.
  8. You acknowledge that while blame is easy, finding the right answer is hard.
  9. You acknowledge that finding the best answer often requires everyone being involved.
  10. You acknowledge that while customers come first, they may not always be right.

Source: The Three Legged Table: Why Every Employee Matters by Brian James.

If you find yourself needing to fix a dysfunctional work environment, this is a good place to start.

 

Categories
Engagement

Dysfunctional Workplace Cultures to Avoid

It’s true – there’s no such thing as a perfect workplace. Every organizational culture has its positives and negatives. But in my experience with employee engagement, there are two particular workplace environments to be avoided at all costs.

“Oppression by purpose” describes “companies whose mission to make a positive difference in the world, but essentially do so on the backs of their employees.”  [Source: When Employee Engagement Turns Into Employee Burnout by Tony Schwartz, March 13, 2105  NYTimes.com] Consider the company that prides itself on supporting a special cause (e.g., protecting the environment, enhancing educational opportunities, helping communities become healthier, etc.) with mandatory employee participation; i.e., employee involvement is “voluntold” not voluntary.  Just because an organization serves a worthwhile purpose does not ensure it is a great place to work.

Institutional disrespect is another organizational culture to avoid. This workplace is characterized by managers who bully employees without repercussion, including those who ignore or dismiss company protocol to assert their perceived power. An environment in which managers continually undermine employee efforts is not healthy,

Both cultures share characteristics of a toxic workplace that suck the life out of employee enthusiasm where doing meaningful work is not enough to sustain their engagement.

Seriously, it’s no fun to work in a dysfunctional organization.

 

Categories
Engagement

Enlightenment for Those Entering the Workforce

Whether you’re starting a new job or career, here is sage advice to keep in mind.

“Do work with your whole heart and you will succeed — there is so little competition.” – Elbert Hubbard

“Your mindset will be one of the most important predictors of success, not the career or leadership path you’ve chosen.” – Gayle Lantz, excerpt from Graduation Advice for Leaders

“If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.” – Betty Reese

“You can earn an MBA and go on to become a CEO, but it doesn’t prepare you for the life choices you’ll have to make. And, no amount of schooling can really prepare you for dealing with clients, customers, vendors, family, etc. People being unpredictable, and all. Instead, it helps to figure out what your “personal core purpose” is — to give you some solid ground to stand on.” – Yvonne DiVita

“Q: Is there a more important decision in life than the choice of a career or the choice of a spouse? A: Yes. The choice of which one is going to come first.” – Marilyn vos Savant

 

Categories
Marketing

What Marketing is Missing

Marketing may do a great job of communicating brand value to consumers, yet it doesn’t necessarily do the same for communicating its own value within an organization. Far too often I hear marketing staff commiserate about how they struggle to get respect and buy-in for their programs, including from the areas they support such as Sales and Product Development. It’s a serious concern as all departments – individually and collectively – impact brand delivery, thus impacting Marketing’s effectiveness.

What’s missing is marketing Marketing itself — not for its own glory or credit, but for strengthening its relationship with everyone in the organization. It’s not that we don’t know what to do to market our function; it’s that we’re so busy taking care of everyone else’s marketing needs that we neglect our own.

Marketing is all fun and games … or is it?

It’s hard to be taken seriously when people associate you primarily with “fluff,” but that’s what a lot of people think about Marketing. Just because the Marketing Department occupies a place on the organizational chart doesn’t mean people know who we are or what we do.

To get other departments to better understand and support Marketing’s efforts, we need to intentionally get out of our silos and strategically market Marketing within our companies. It’s not that difficult or complicated. It’s a matter of investing the time to educate employees about marketing’s critical role within the organization — as brand steward and promoter … customer advocate  … collector and interpreter of market insight … etc. There are numerous internal marketing tools of engagement that can be used for marketing outreach and getting buy-in in for marketing initiatives.

Just like consumer or business-to-business marketing, internal marketing is not a once-and-done effort. It’s a long-term strategy that’s needed to build mutual trust, respect, and ongoing relationships between Marketing and the organization. Unless, of course, you want to be known as the “Department of Fluff.”

 

Categories
Customer service Engagement Marketing Training & Development

Best Quotes on Customers

Customers – love ’em or sometimes hate ’em – if you’re in business, you can’t live without them. True customer-focus means understanding, respecting, and serving customers as the basis of your business rather than considering them a necessary evil.

Following are several of my favorite quotes about customers and their importance. Think of them as customer-focused words to live by. You can also incorporate them in your customer service training.

“Consumers are statistics. Customers are people.” Stanley Marcus

“If you respect the customer as a human being, and truly honor their right to be treated fairly and honestly, everything else is much easier.” Doug Smith

“You can forget about an over-satisfied customer, but an unsatisfied customer is one of the most expensive problems you can have.” Jan Carlzon

“Anyone who thinks the customer is not important should try doing without him [or her].” Unknown

“It’s very easy to think that you are the expert on your own product. But in many ways, that’s a myth. The true experts are your customers.” Jamie Wong

“Customer feedback is free until you don’t listen, then it gets very expensive in the form of lawsuits, poor word-of-mouth advertising, and adverse publicity.” John O’Malley

“Isn’t it really ‘customer helping’ rather than customer service? And wouldn’t you deliver better service if you thought of it that way?” Jeffrey Gitomer

And when it comes to hiring and training the employees who serve customers:

“The customer-facing organization with the fewest assholes wins.” Olivier Blanchard

 

 

Categories
Engagement Training & Development

Management Communication Basics: Engaging Employees in Staff Briefings

With company e-mail dominating internal communications, staff meetings are becoming an endangered organizational activity. Yet managers and employees still need to get together to stay informed on what’s happening in the organization and how it impacts their work, including the opportunity to voice their concerns.

Why a staff briefing?

The purpose of  periodic staff briefings is to keep employees connected and get them “on the same page.” It is not intended to focus on problem-solving or detailed planning. Here’s a sample meeting template that helps engage employees and minimize passive participation.

  1. An aerial view of what’s going on – share new top-down information such as organizational strategies, operational updates, policy changes, etc., including the rationale behind any changes or direction. Employees need to understand the “why” as well as the “what” of executive decisions in the context of the company’s mission and goals. Allow time to address employee questions and concerns.
  2. New business/project/program development – overview of any new initiatives that support and/or impact departmental goals, including who is involved so staff know who to contact with questions.
  3. Current projects/programs – employee share progress updates, results.
  4. Teachable moments – employees can take turns reporting on business topics of interest to the group or share lessons learned from a recent work-related situation.
  5. Wrap up/next steps – acknowledge employee participation; agree on any follow-up action items.

Food and face time

In a positive work environment, face-to-face staff briefings serve employees’ needs for information-sharing, learning, and connecting with each other.  Consider providing food and/or beverage depending on what time the meeting is held. Refreshments can be a strong draw and serve to create a hospitable meeting environment, but they should not be the main attraction.

Email and other forms of digital communication are expedient and timely in keeping employees informed. However, face-to-face is better for periodic staff briefings because:

  • people are wholly present (for the most part)
  • there are fewer distractions in a focused meeting setting
  • actual body language and tone of voice minimize misinterpretations
  • feedback and clarification are immediate.

“Nothing replaces being in the same room, face-to-face, breathing the same air and reading and feeling each other’s micro-expressions.” Peter Guber

[Source: Peter Guber. BrainyQuote.com, Xplore Inc, 2015. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/p/peter_guber.html, accessed April 7, 2015.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/citation/quotes/authors/p/peter_guber.html#Ksbj93R6pceeLx7o.99]

Categories
Engagement

Preventing Burnout for Non-Profit Workers

Given the importance of nonprofit engagement, I’m happy to share this post by Andrew Littlefield that appeared on the WeDidIt blog. It is reprinted with permission.

Keeping Your Team Fueled: Preventing Burnout for Non-Profit Workers
by Andrew Littlefield

Non-profit work is often romanticized. Well … at least by people who haven’t actually worked there before …

Students often pine about wanting to work for a non-profit, to pursue a career with meaning that will make the world a better place. 9-to-5ers in the business world will mention to NPO workers they meet that they would “love” to do that kind of work and feel like they’re making the world a better place.

How many times have you heard the tale of the corporate businessman or woman who left their corner office to go pursue an altruistic passion?

Then reality hits. You enter the non-profit world, and after just a few short years, you feel completely drained.

Non-profit work is tough. We love to get poetic about meaning in our work (which is undoubtedly important), but in doing so we often overlook other factors of workplace happiness that leave us feeling discouraged and defeated. Worse yet, the relentless pursuit of helping other often leaves NPO workers neglecting their own needs.

It’s a vicious cycle that has resulted in far too many talented non-profit workers falling out of the ranks.

So how do you keep this from happening to your team? You want to aggressively chase your organization’s mission, but is it worth high turnover among your ranks?

It’s not (all) about the money

It’s no secret that salaries in the not-for-profit world are often lower than what we’d like to see, and that certainly can contribute to burnout. However, it’s been widely proven that higher salaries don’t automatically result in higher levels of happiness. In fact, there’s a tipping point for financial happiness that is lower than you might think.

Strengths and Weaknesses

The good news is that non-profit work is perfectly suited for several well-researched variables to burnout prevention and job satisfaction.

The bad news is non-profit work is also very poorly suited for several of these well-researched variables of job satisfaction.

In his book Outliers (highly recommended reading), Malcolm Gladwell identifies three major factors of career happiness:

  • Complexity
  • Autonomy
  • Connection between effort and reward1

It’s within these factors that we’ll find clues to successfully leading a team away from burnout and discouragement. Let’s break them down.

Complexity

Non-profits win this factor by a long shot; if your organization’s mission were simple, there would be no need for a non-profit dedicated to solving that problem. NPO work is by nature complex! They tackle big problems that require big, creative solutions.

The complexity of an individual job within a non-profit organization varies, but the overall mission as a whole is complex and challenging. That’s why your team is there in the first place!

Autonomy

Unfortunately, autonomy in the non-profit world can be a bit harder to come by. Even the most cutting-edge, forward thinking NPO often receives funding from government sources that require strict oversight and little flexibility. This in turn can stifle the level of autonomy a certain position on your team might have. Workers may not feel they’re empowered to make the decisions they feel are best for the organization and the cause. This is a burnout danger zone.

Connection between effort and reward

At first glance, this one might seem like an obvious win for non-profit work, but I would argue it’s actually a wash. Non-profit work certainly serves a greater good, which is one of the biggest draws for many (particularly young) workers. Seeing your work in the office pay off in a veteran getting a job, a homeless child being fed, or a bill passed into law can be extremely rewarding.

The problem is, many times these payoffs are a long way away from materializing. You can work towards a cause for years, even decades, before the fruits of your labor are finally realized. There may be many micro-wins along the way, and all those micro-wins added together can be significant, but it’s often hard to recognize them in the heat of battle. That can make the effort/reward connection tough.

Your team often needs what your donors need

Even though they’re behind the scenes, your team members often crave the same kind of feedback your donors do: they want to know the details of the problem they’re solving, and they want to know specifically how their contribution has helped.

Make that connection tangible for them. Even if the payoff is a long way off, help them understand the importance of micro-wins. Do more than just tell them what a big deal it is, show them! Take them face-to-face with the people they’ve helped. Get creative and illustrate what their efforts have done.

Additionally, never stop communicating the details of the cause; the intricacies and difficulties associated with pursuing your mission. Don’t do this in a way that makes the problem seem insurmountable and discourages them, but keep them informed of how complex their job is, and pride will follow.

Finally, even though many of the factors that control the fate of your organization may be out of your hands (there goes your autonomy), actively seek out opportunities to hand over control to your team members. From big to small, give them a chance to take the reigns. That might mean they screw something up, but there’s value in mistakes.

  1. Gladwell, M. (2008). The Three Lessons of Joe Flom. In Gladwell, M., Outliers (149-150). Back Bay Books: New York, NY

 

 

Categories
Training & Development

What Do a Business Training Professional and Zumba Fitness Instructor Have in Common?

Quite a bit actually.

Several years ago, I decided to ramp up my exercise and tried Zumba. It took me quite a while to get with the program, so to speak, as participants are not “taught” the dance moves – you just follow the instructor’s moves. I was WAY out of my comfort zone with this, despite the fact that the instructors don’t expect you to follow along perfectly; they just want you to have fun and get fit in the process.

Eventually I became more comfortable with the challenge of following the different dance moves and routines offered by various Zumba instructors. It’s great to get away from my office and enjoy the loud music, the camaraderie in class, and exercising my body as well as my brain.

I take an average of three  Zumba classes a week. Observing different instructors and listening to feedback from attendees, I began to analyze the instructors’ approaches to teaching Zumba and rapport with their classes. The best and most popular instructors share these characteristics:

  • A passion for doing and teaching  Zumba.
  • Smiling and making lots of eye contact.
  • “Connecting” with attendees by facing the class as much, if not more, than they face the mirror; also periodically moving away from the mirror/front of the class and dancing among the attendees.
  • Making the dance moves easy to follow with clear hand signals, verbal cues, and repetitive steps.
  • Encouraging fun and fitness while reinforcing attendees’ participation throughout the class in ways that are most comfortable for them; no one is ever made to feel inept.
  • Preparing for each class by practicing the routines and learning/demonstrating new ones to mix things up a bit.
Gladys Colon, Zumba instructor
Gladys Colon, Zumba instructor

I recently spent time outside of class with Gladys Colon, one of the more popular instructors, to talk about her experience teaching Zumba. I also wanted to let her know how much I enjoyed her class. The more we talked, the more I realized we had much in common as instructors even though our classes are so very different: she teaches Zumba fitness in a gym and I teach marketing workshops in a corporate business setting.

Here’s what we have in common. We both practice as much as possible – regardless of how well we know our subject matter. We intentionally engage our attendees without overwhelming them. We work hard to ensure the people in our classes feel the time they spend with us is worthwhile. Above all, we both share a passion for what we do — whether it’s energizing people through cardio or helping them broaden their marketing acumen.

In what unlikely places do you find professional inspiration?

[With special thanks to my favorite instructors Gladys Colon, Tarnisha “Moe” Sass, Manny Balseiro and Krista Cernansky … you all rock!]