Sanders Says

Don't Use Email As Your Shield, Pick Up the Phone!

About eight years ago, while working at Yahoo!, I developed a few rules of email etiquette.  Too many of our team mates were misusing email, or applying it in emotional clumsy ways.  Tempers flared, and I had to put out fires.

It was a unique problem to this generation, where email became 75% of all communications inside & outside the company.  The more we used it without any guidance, the more we abused it. 

When I taught new hires or coached sales execs, I always issued what I call "Rule Number One: Don't Use Email To Give Bad News."  By that I mean that email is a horribly ineffective communication channel when it comes to conveying your intentions.  Too often, when someone gives you blunt criticism over email, it makes you steam...but in person, you'd be OK. 

Even worse, email promotes cowardice at work.  People will send me emails that contain language they'd never say to my face.  I think some people are as brave behind their laptop as my poodle is behind a plate glass window!  As times goes on and the GenY, "I don't believe in real time" ethos sets in...expect email to be the bearer of bad news...and negative emotions.

The key then is to pick up the phone or have a face-to-face discussion when covering emotionally charged, personal or potentially negative issues.  As you'll see below, you are 500% times more effective over the phone than over email. 

Here's my full Rule Number One, from the Dirty Dozen Rules of Email Etiquette video training program I developed for companies.  (Email me if you'd like more information on bringing it to your company, we've got a great deal going between now and Labor Day.)

Don't Use Email To Give Bad News Or Criticism 

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Why Being Injury Prone Can Kill Your Career

Show me a ball player who injured most of the time and I'll show you someone either on the trading block or moving towards retirement.  When someone develops a reputation for being injury prone, their stock plummets...along with their playing time.  

Why? After a few injuries, people begin to wonder whether you really want to play the game for better or for worse.  So many injuries are latent, and too often players take their time coming back from them.  While they are out, the seaons gruels on and other players covered for the injured reserve. And that doesn't build up trust. 

Now apply this to your worklife.  If you get your feelings hurt a lot at work, causing you to withdraw from projects or to give up on the task at hand, you'll eventually be the last person picked for a team.  If you are too easily exhausted by hard work, having to take off time to recoup, you won't be seen as a finisher that your colleagues can depend on.  And when times get tough, they'll only keep the strong.

In my career, I've prided myself on concealing injury and playing on.  This was instilled in me by my grandmother Billye, when she talked about succumbing to an emotional or phsycial injury as a public sign of weakness...and one step backwards. 

"A winner never quits, and a quitter never wins," she'd quote me, from the pages of Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich.  Then she'd apply it to my situation: "If you can't play through pain, how can you ever finish the season of life?  Why are are going to let your feelings get in the way of doing your job? Why would you quit on your friends that work by your side? Why does being sensitive make you management material?" 

Now, mind you, I'm an echo-boomer and she came from the GI Generation.  It's pretty natural that she would give me advice to buck up, never let 'em see me out of breath and play through the pain -- and I'd follow that prescription. For our current generation(s) of workers, that conversation is not as easy. X'rs and Y'rs grew up in a world where they were raised to protect their self-esteem and get out of a bad situation ... even if means quitting.

I believe there is a middle ground when it comes to the intangible injuries we often face at work. After all, it can be a contact sport as we deal with: Overbearing customers.  Relentless managers. Prima Donnas.  Bullies.  It's how we decide to respond to them that defines our sense of toughness.

If we elect to take them personally, cop to an injury and reduce our engagement level, we are letting them put us on the sideline.  We are shrinking to the situation.

While I am a ferverent proponent of standing up for youself, I recommend you do it from a position of strength, not pain.  Instead of letting your negative feelings (Sick & Tired Of This!) be expressed by your actions (dialing out), push back, then resume your efforts with an even keel.  If you need to, rely on your closest friends and family to hear you out, give you comfort, and keep it behind the firewall. 

Leaders are often picked because of their uncanny ability to recognize reality, but maintain hope. Where others melt down or shrink in the face of ignoble treatment and aggressive adversity, they stand tall, if not bruised.   Now you know their secret sauce.  They are winners.

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How To Read 20 Books A Year

Sounds daunting, doesn't it: One year/20 entire books read.  For some of you, it's a piece of cake and for others, "It had better be Harry Potter or 50 Shades!" Here's the reality: Readers are leaders of society. They earn more, deliver more value, lead more people and respond to adversity better than the average. 

Reading expands your capacities to think, feel and problem solve.  However, based on research we've done at Deeper Media, the average professional reads less than 2 non-fiction books a year, cover-to-cover.  On the flip side, the average CxO reads about six.  Readers are leaders. 

This is not a matter of will.  It's a matter of having a knowledge-acquisition strategy. If I had to point to one system that's changed my business life, it's my personal system for reading 20 (great) books a year to double my value.  Here's the skinny: 

Buy Books That Are Interesting To Your Outcome - Not just interesting or intriguing books, mind you.  Books that might change your situation, solve a big problem, give you a winning perspective.  I think of business book shopping as looking for brain-food for my issues at hand.  Start an Evernote and enter any books you read or hear about that might serve your current mission. 

Buy 50 Books a Year and read 200 Samples - Face it: You invest five to ten hours of your life in a book...don't let bad ones ruin your POV about reading.  The key to being a voracious reader is being judicious about where you invest your time.  While most samples don't give you the entire picture, frequently, you'll get right away whether the book is worth finishing (buying).  Go to bookstore, invest an hour every other week, and buy a few every visit.  If you aren't taking notes and racing your mind by page 100, you likely need to quit the book and move on to the next.  (PS - I don't read reader reviews.  They are usually not helpful, accurate or aligned with my perspective on reading.) 

Make It Convenient To Read - Benjamin Franklin was a voracious reader because he carried books with him everywhere he went.  He stashed them in carriages, guest rooms and inns and when a slice of time presented itself, he cracked open a book.  You can carry books with you easily due to eReaders.  The next time you are stuck waiting on service or in transit, instead of using your smartphone to check social media, read a book instead.

Share What You Are Learning - Like gratitude, reading becomes more valuable when you share the experience. Inject ideas or surprising findings from books you are reading into conversations at work. Give books as gifts to colleagues or customers, and deliver a succint description of what the book will do for them. Share your recent reads (and recommendations) on social media. 

This will create a positive feedback loop in several ways.  First, people will reciprocate with their own recommendations or personal experiences.  Share enough, and soon, you'll be swimming in trusted book recommendations.  Second, by sharing the knowledge, you'll feel rewarded for the time you've invested in reading.  This will only stoke your desire to read more! 

What are you reading?  Why should I read it?  Post it in comments.  If we get more than 10, I'll pick out someone and give him or her ... a book! 

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You Don't Have To Be On All the Social Networks To Succeed

I remember back when blogging first started, when people told me, "you need to blog to keep up!" I pushed back. I was already writing a book every two years, pumping out a beefy newsletter every month and answering over a hundred emails a day!  The thought of more writing work was simply overwhelming. 

And then the social networks started popping up, begging for my precious time and attention.  I could ignore MySpace, and at first facebook.  LinkedIn lurked on the horizon, offering a little value if I was looking to poach someone for my company ... and then it all converged into a blizzard of gotta-be-here-hammering-it-daily networks that I felt like I had to invest in.  

Turns out, only a few of them actually drive my speaking or writing business.  The rest are flotsam...time wasters...content vampires.  Through this I 've learned that you don't need to be everywhere, because that's like trying to dance your way out of quicksand.  You'll never get there.  

During my keynotes on The Social Opportunity, I tell businesses that they need to think differently about the rise of social networking and all the opportunities that come with it.  Here's what you should really look at: Are your business targets moving to new streams to find, connect and share? Are they harder to reach with your current marketing and CRM strategies?  If so, then you likely need to setup a new camp, otherwise, wait until you have a real need to make the leap. 

Some consultants say that it's easy to make this decision based on your type of business: Professional services on LinkedIn, Consumer offerings on Twitter and Pinterest, Technology and media services on Google+ and everybody on facebook, but I think that's an overgeneralization that is disproved by countless case studies. Here's a more scientific way for you to figure out where you need to be.

First, you need to be clear on who your targets are.  By targets, I mean, who do you want your content to reach and who do you want to interact with more often?  For most of us, the prospective or current customer represents your top target.  For some companies, reaching partners is more critical.  Those could be resellers or strategic providers, where constant contact generates more performance.  In some cases, like McGladrey Accounting, their top targets are entry level accountants (team members and candidates).  You may say, "all of them", which is fine if you really have the resources to shoot for three targets with your interactive strategy. 

Next, you need to ask your best clients/partners/employees where they fish for solutions, graze for information and share their content.  Ask them where you can connect with them, share their content, and give them updates and special offers.  Create a survey (no more than seven questions), or better yet, make it part of your ongoing conversations and then distill the information to develop a top three social networks list.  In my experience, my top customer has a media profile that closely resembles my top prospects, so this exercise will scale from current to prospective victories. 

Now, create a program to serve NO MORE than the top three networks.  If you can, limit your work to two.  Often, you'll do this to serve multiple types of targets.  In the case of McGladrey, they invest in LinkedIn for new customers and facebook to recruit accountants.  They use their Twitter account to drive traffic to their blog posts.

In my case, my targets include readers, conference planners and speaking bureau partners.  I work my blog, facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (in that order of priority).  I don't really do Google+, Tumblr or Pinterest.  They don't offer me ROI against my defined targets.  If I tried to do everything, I'd likely be spread too thin.  

Finally: Monitor the results, refresh your survey every year and drop dead-weight networks.  So far, my blog and facebook have generated the most business for me, but Twitter keeps me directly connected to most of my targets.  I've been investing more time in LinkedIn, but haven't seen much results yet...so I might drop it (like Chris Brogan did last year when he moved to Google+). This way, I don't end up with network creep, where I simply add new ones to the pile, ending up spread out eventually.  

If you'd like some advice for your business, do a straw poll of your top targets, share the results and your business situation in comments and I'll jump in with my .02. OK?

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How To Be Generous Without Being Took

Last week, I had a chance to catch up with a friend who just moved to LA to work in the music production industry.  He's read Love Is the Killer App several times, and put several of the ideas into practice.  He's mentored several up and coming engineers as well as lending his network to those seeking a new gig.  

"But here I am, still living check to check," he said to me.  "Few if any of the people I've helped have done squat for me.  How can your system work in the real world?"  This is a question I've struggled with while writing the book, touring to promote it and mentoring dozens of people over the last decade.  It's very hard for a human to give to a taker, and then be OK with being took.  

In my experience, however, I've learned something critical: Nice Smart People Succeed.  Note I didn't say Nice People Succeed.  The big difference lies in being smart about whom you help out and what to look for before you help out a second time.  So here's the advice I gave him: 

Only Give To Fellow Givers - Too often, we get sucked into helping out users, because they are very good at conning us out of resources.  Screen people first for their generosity by asking them who they've helped out recently, and how it made them feel.  If they fumble for an answer, reconsider whether this is a good person to promote or mentor.  If you give to a generous person, at the very least, they'll pay it forward.  (I know that it sounds harsh for me to say that we should deny selfish people our talents and gifts, but the Takers are well organized and constantly stealing what they can.  The Givers need to circle their wagons accordingly.)

Don't Give Away The Scarce Or Non-Replenishable - You have intangible gifts that actually grow when you give them away.  Take knowledge sharing.  When you give wisdom or advice to others, often you get feedback from them later about how it worked, which only sharpens your saw.  When you intelligently share your network of relationships, your total circle usually expands due to reciprocity and goodwill.  If you give away too much time, money or permissions (letting others break the rules), you'll run out eventually, and then be VERY senstive to the ROI of giving. 

Take The Long View - Don't expect to see results immediately.  By suspending your expectation for immediate reciprocity, you send a powerful message to your recipients that empowers them: I expect nothing in return.  This usually gives them a feeling that they too should be as generous and helpful as you, and that you truly gave them a gift...and did not look at them as an investment. 

Photo/Drawing by Joy Martin

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Up To the Minute Tips For Posting to Facebook Pages

Recently, I've had the opportunity to hang out with an assortment of highly successful facebook page owners and administrators.  The include the manager of a popular band, two Fortune 500 Company Social Media Directors and the CEO of a firm that manages hundreds of high traffic-high profile pages.  Collectively, they've given me some good advice and keen insights into the state of Edgerank. 

• Post Directly To facebook -- This was the most consistent piece of advice I received.  "Edgerank hates 3rd party posting apps like Hootsuite, etc.," was told to me several times.  There is a new Hide feature that facebook is trying out, where you not only hide the author of the offending/obnoxious post...you can block ALL posts coming through that 3rd party app!
• Post During Prime-Time -- Your audience has a prime time, and your insights page will likely reveal this to you by traffic time stamps.  Don't waste a post at 2AM if your biz-oriented crowd is fast asleep.  If you are entertainment oriented, don't post at 8AM unless the data says you are a cup-of-Joe companion.  
• Post Links Sparingly -- Edgerank hates third party links (say, to your blog post or something you found on HuffPo) as much as it hates 3rd party apps.  One social manager explained that links are in "dead-last" when it comes to Edgrank's affinity algorithm.  "Furthermore," he explained, "When you post an URL, not only does that post not see daylight, future posts are punished for it, until you gain back your affinity rating." 
• Post Videos Direct to facebook -- This is connected with the last point.  When you post a link to a YouTube video, Edgerank doesn't see that as a video, it's just another link and in fact .... a link to a mortal competitor's property.  By uploading videos directly to facebook, you are ensuring that it gets much more traffic as native video is the heaviest of all content on facebook.
• Post Once a Day -- Unlike Twitter, where there is no Edgerank and the feed resembles the Wild-Wild-West, you don't need to post multiple times a day to garner attention.  If you are a wordsmith or offer inspiration/helpful advice, some experts have told me 2 a day on the weekdays will work.  It turns out that facebook owners are sensitive to too many posts and quick to click the Hide key, which means your content won't get through to them in the future. 

Do you have any posting tips for facebook page owners or admins?  Please contribute them in comments.  If I decide to add one of them to this post, I'll send you a book on social media or marketing. 

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Here's An Unconventional Way To Grow Your Business

Warning: This is a get-rich-slow plan.  If you are looking to jumpstart your business in the next 30-90 days, you might not find what you are looking for here.  But if you are looking to grow your business in a sustainable, fulfilling and profitable way ... and you are willing to take the long-view ... I've got some killer advice for you. 

Grow your business by growing everyone you do business with.  That's it.  A simple, yet hard to execute strategy for greening up the bottom line.  You grow people best by sharing your intangibles: What you know, who you know and your ability to give encouragement and support.  

I wrote about this as an author-pup in Love Is the Killer App, and it's the core perspective behind my lecture circuit talk "Multiply The Value!".  Over the last dozen years, I've met countless people that have practiced this way of developing their business, and it's no longer considered a naive way to think. 

It Starts Inside: Grow the person sitting next to you or looking up to you.  You can spot a mentee candidate, because he or she is in transition (usually going up) and is missing information that you possess. When your colleagues excel, give them honest and instant encouragement.  In his fabulous book Primal Leadership, Dr. Daniel Goleman observes that when employees feel positive about their job, engagement and customer satisfaction levels grow.  When you grow people, then, they likely pass it forward to the customer, and in turn, the love comes back to you. 

Your Partners Needs Love Too: Your day to day business contacts, be they suppliers or vendors, need to grow too in order for your business to flourish.  Are you lending them your network, along with your reputation?  It's the best marketing they can ever receive. Surprisingly, as they scale up, their service levels will actually increase because they have more resources than ever and a willingness to share them with you.  I love speaking at partner conferences, like the one that Cisco puts on every year for their value-added resellers, because it's a win/win for everyone involved.  The Cisco Partners learn new tricks of the trade along with gaining strategic insight and Cisco develops closer relationships with their sales channel, which translates to invaluable insights and of course ... loyalty. 

CRM Is Dead, Long Live Customer Development: One of the most courageous things you can do is challenge, educate or inform you customers in order to improve their fitness for business. Too often, we worry this distracts them from what we are selling, but in fact, it gives us more access to them in the long run and generate endless referrals.  It's good to network customers to new opportunities as well.  That's how Elmer Letterman built his insurance business in the 30's.  

I believe we need to think more like farmers than butchers.  Farmers plant seeds and nurture them to harvest. Too much grow-your-business thinking resembles the butcher business model: More meat delivered daily sold through to more customers walking through the front door.  While products and marketing deliver numbers, sometimes working with what you've got ... at a human level ... will yield more in the long run. 

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How Social Media Can Increase Employee Engagement

Managers: What if I told you that you could leverage social media to increase your employee's engagement and job satisfaction? Do you think I've lost my new-media mind?  Let me ask this: Have you ever received an award at a company event (conference, banquet, etc.) and then the next workday, had boundless energy and motivation? 

Sure you did.  That's how recognition works, especially when it is public.  When I keynote for HR and talent management groups, I talk about three compensation plans they can offer: Financial, Emotional and Social.  (Financial = $, Emotional = working environment and Social = public praise).  The social compensation plan may not be what attracts talent, but according to research by Bersin and Associates, recognition programs can give a company 14% more engagement and reduce voluntary turnover by 31%.  That's why employee recognition is a whopping $40billion dollar industry! 

Most of the time, though, recognition is doled out annually, based on extraordinary results.  For Gen Y workers, AKA the status-update-generation, this is not fast enough.  According to a Harvard Business Review article (Mentoring Millennials), younger workers need faster feedback, if not real-time.  Most companies, though, haven't figured out how to do this.  Enter social media, the world's cheapest recognition machine. 

Recently, when I was researching for a keynote talk for security equipment manufacturer Interlogix, I came across a great case study of how a company can give social-recognition that works.  AVI-SPL, a video integration service provider, uses their facebook page to recognize milestones for employees: 15 years of service or a recently completed project.  In both cases, there is interaction with the posts, spilling over to employee's family and friends.  

If your company culture is Twitter-centric, that may be the best platform to give instant and public shoutouts. Same goes if your company's mostly using LinkedIn.  Here's the challenge: Can you find a way, this week, to give some much needed recognition to you employees over social?  You know they'll find out, and when they do, you'll see the results in terms of spirit and energy.

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When to Send a Top Producer to the Competition

Have you ever heard the phrase, "horizontal turnover"? This is where the jerk stays and the team around him or her leaves.  This happens more than you think, especially in a sales driven culture where top producers are god-like Rock Stars to management. 

How can it happen?  Easy: They get hired, and once in, their numbers act as a shield to protect them from their personality or pure evilness.  This is why I advise recruiters to scrutinize a candidate for the jerk-factor, especially when he or she has a solid track record...yet is available.  There are tell-tale signs: They brag, focus on what is wrong with others, make excuses for past mistakes and show disdain for those who 'bring in less money' than they do.  You might also test the candidate by having him or her hang out with very junior staffers, then find out how he or she behaved.  Better yet, have an employee pose as a fellow applicant in the waiting area, with instructions to attempt to strike up a conversation.  That always brings out the (competitively fueled) jerk. 

If you realize you have a Larry David sitting in front of you, if you can, refer them to a competitor. I've seen this happen before when I was working in HR at Yahoo and it works like a charm.  The competitor is seduced by the numbers, hires the jerk and a year later at the SHRM conference when you ask about Larry you hear, "He's still here.  But everyone else in the group bugged out." 

Your culture is a conversation, led by leaders, about 'how we do things around here'.  If you hire jerks, especially those with great numbers behind them, your culture will become negative where 'you eat what you kill' becomes the mantra of the organization.  BTW: The very people who the competent jerk chase off are the ones you need to stage a positive customer experience and cooperate for the sake of innovation.  You can train people to achieve metrics, but unfortunately, there's not a good cure for being insensitive and arrogant. 

For more read: The No Asshole Rule by Bob Sutton 

 

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Four Things To Ask Your Professional Speaker To Deliver

If you are a meeting planner, event manager or charged with organizing your company's annual conference, you likely hire speakers to give keynotes.  Their fees can range from a few thousand to six figures, mostly depending on their celebrity or business profile. 

Since the last recession, speakers have had to fight for every piece of their business.  Events have tinkered with using free (friends of event) speakers or reducing the speaking slots to a single keynote. Today, it is clearly a buyer's market.  So what are you getting for your $$$$?  Ideally, your outside speaker reinforces your event's objective and moves the audience to action.  And often, that's hard for a speaker to accomplish with a canned speech or even worse, a tailored speech that's off-the-cuff. 

If I were you, here's what I would expect from a speaker I've hired for my event: 

1. Interview Call -- The speaker will do some research on the event, industry and organization and then host a conference call with meeting stakeholders.  This call is about defining the event's objectives, the audience profile (from demographics to psychographics), the desired outcome and at a high level, and what the speaker's talking points will be.  As Nick Morgan writes, "the only reason to give a speech is to change the world," and you can't do that as a speaker unless you know all of the above. 

2. The Keynote Outline -- The speaker will submit a one or two page outline of the talk, including case studies naming companies or organizations involved.  This is important because some case studies may involve competitors to the event host or sponsors.  Whenever possible, the outline should include at least one or two industry relevant examples or takeaway points. (That's real customization, BTW.)  You should socialize this outline to all the meeting stakeholders and not be timid about going back to the speaker for clarifications or modifications. 

3.  Meet and Greet -- In most situations, there is a reception or dinner each night of an event.  This is a great opportunity for your speaker to meet his or her audience and deepend insights for the talk the next day.  If your speaker wins over a small portion of the crowd the night before,  odds are the next day will equal a total success. 

4. A Post-Event Deliverable -- Often times, the deliverable may be an audio or video recording of his/her talk to be distributed to non-attendees. (Get permission first.) In my case, I've offered a custom book list for more reading on the topics I've covered.  And the book lists never include my works!  For my latest topic (The Social Opportunity), my audience receive a free copy of an eBook I've written on the subject which contains at least two industry relevant case studies.  In fact, I've gone a step further: I research the audience members if it is a customer conference, and when I can find a case study in the crowd, I interview them and include them in the book.  

I know this sounds like a lot to ask of a speaker, but if you get it, you'll have an effective talk that generates long term value for your audience (and makes you look like a rock star!).  While some of my speaker friends think this is over-reaching, I've found that it's a win/win approach.  The gigs I've worked the hardest on are usually the ones that produce the best results.  

NOTE: Requirements 2 and 3 don't usually apply when you've hired a motivational speaker to share his or her inspirational story.  I would still expect any speaker I hired to be able to tie their story or experience to my event objectives, though. 

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