The Real Truth About Loyalty

In the end, if you’re close by, easy to deal with and willing to make the sacrifices, you’ll be surrounded by those who are not likely to ever leave your side. In the business world, that means your employees are likely to stay with you and perform at the highest level. And in your personal life, it means that your kids will be high achievers who are going to live in your house until they’re 30!

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Selling Your Ideas: Getting People To Agree With You

[social_warfare]

Why is it that some of the best ideas are never considered and idiotic concepts that we know will fail are?

How did AT&T decide to focus on the picture phone and sell off the rights to the cellular telephone? Research clearly showed that the number-one reason people placed a phone call instead of showing up in person was speed and convenience. The number-two reason was they did not want to be face-to-face with the person they were calling. If you are at home on the phone in your underwear, do you really want people to see you? (OK, some of you do, and you know who you are, but let’s move on.) Why did it take so long to get squeeze-bottle ketchup? Squeeze-bottle mustard was on the market 20 years earlier! Were there really people who believed that ketchup in a glass bottle was sacred and could never sink to the lows of a seemingly misguided mustard?

The issue is that some of us are just much better at getting people to agree with us than others.

It’s why it took so long for people to wear seat belts and yet pet rocks sold instantly. We interviewed some of the most persuasive people in the Wynn Solutions top-performers research pool and found some interesting information about getting people to see things your way regardless of how ineffective your ideas may be:

  • Find out what people value most before you start talking. People are much more likely to listen to your ideas if you can prove you know what’s important to them first (agreeing that it’s important will also help a lot).
  • Make sure your ideas are clear. It does not matter how smart you are if no one knows what you’re talking about. You may need to have your top expert teach their concepts to your top presenter. A lot of great ideas are not considered because people don’t want to admit they don’t get it.
  • Make sure you can explain the basic value in about 20 seconds. People buy into what they can understand quickly. “The longer it takes you to explain value, the more people think you don’t have any.” Show how it will make the person(s) you are talking with look good personally. What’s in it for them?
  • Show the similarities first and differences second. The main reason people don’t want to change is that nobody wants to be a “senior beginner.” When things change, people are afraid their expertise will have less value—they may not be as important to the organization as they used to be. Show how the new way is similar to the old way first, and then the new way feels more valuable.

Our research showed that ideas have to be more than great. They have to get supported by humans as they make their way toward implementation. Some pretty weak agendas get moved forward because they are presented 10 times better than an agenda that was …well … 10 times better.

The Mouth of Change | Employee Resistance to Change

Change is always the same. Change itself is not the issue; it’s the resistance to change that causes problems.

Many of us learned this growing up as we competed in sports, or for the attention of others. In the business world, the resistance is naturally strong when we explain our great reform is based on doing more with less. We tell our coworkers and even our bosses that the future is based on being more productive with fewer resources. (I don’t know about you, but I always dreamed the future would somehow involve physically doing less with much more cool stuff.)

We can attempt to cultivate buy-in by explaining how to be more productive and how to lessen the cost of that productivity, ultimately enabling us to wrap our fingers around that holy grail of business achievement: profitability. But let’s get real. All signs might point to profitability as a logical product of the changes being proposed, and yet logical humans need to see how a change in process will make them look good before they will give it their all.

Through our surveys of top professionals who serve as change agents, Wynn Solutions has noticed a critical first leg of the buy-in journey. (“Critical” and “first leg”? It sounds like change is limping already!) We found that top professionals who succeed in implementing change begin by tactfully explaining that the more people focus on making change work, the more value they have to the company.

Additionally, these professionals dealt with the good-old-days syndrome that prevents some people from creating their own future. You may have heard that to spread change through an organization, you have to prove to key players that the new way is at least as good as, if not better than, the old way. You might think you need to provide some physical evidence (data) and a couple of testimonials (people thought of as straight shooters saying positive things about the changes) as well.

However, if you want people to see it’s possible to succeed by doing more with less, you need to find or create change agents who will massively benefit from the change and who have an outstanding advocate network, great communication skills and “above all” really big mouths.