Home Archives for Leadership
June 2, 2010 3 Comments

How to Lead Meetings that People Want to Attend

Don’t Laugh at the title of this post! It is possible – it is desirable – to learn how to lead meetings that produce results. To learn how to lead a meeting that people want to attend.

This begins by re-thinking your meetings. Stop thinking about the meeting itself. Successful meetings are part of a process – a three-step process – that I walk you through in this video.

Click here to read or download this as a Text Doucment – Published on www.ezinearticles.com

(Note: This is a re-post so that I can feed this to my Podcast at the iTunes store.)

You can view, download and subscribe to my podcast – for free! Click here to follow the link to my Podcast at the iTunes store.

Follow a three-step process to learn how to run effective meetings Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (558)
Link to this post!
Filed Under: Business Communications, Communications, How to Lead Effective Meetings, Podcast Tips & Timesavers Tagged: , , ,
February 27, 2008 Leave a Comment

Starbucks – This is Not About Training

starbucks-closing-stores.jpgI applaud the leadership of Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks. As you may know, Starbucks closed all 7,100 of their stores yesterday for a 3 1/2 hour training session. Here is a short excerpt from Mr. Schultz introductory remarks:

“This is not about training,” he said to his employees, looking somewhat somber. “This is about the love and compassion and commitment that we all need to have for the customer.”

I like to remind myself that “A business without customers is not a business.” Customers define your business. Attracting and retaining customers is the number one job of every employee. Starbucks is selling much more than coffee. It is selling the “Starbucks Experience.”  And recently, customers – as well as the CEO – have found that experience to be lacking.

Mr. Schultz and others had a mission and a vision to elevate coffee from a commodity (10 cents a cup and free refills) to a lifestyle choice. He wanted to recreate the experience he enjoyed on a trip to Italy, sipping espresso in a cafe. He wanted to create a sensual experience for customer when they visited a Starbucks location. He wanted to create a sense of theatre as the barista prepared each special beverage. He wanted the exchange between the barista and the customer to be personal.

This is what Mr. Schultz had to say  (in a recent memo) about the present state of Starbucks:

…one of the results has been stores that no longer have the soul of the past and reflect a chain of stores vs. the warm feeling of a neighborhood store. Some people even call our stores sterile, cookie cutter, no longer reflecting the passion our partners feel about our coffee. In fact, I am not sure people today even know we are roasting coffee. You certainly can’t get the message from being in our stores.

Definitely time to wake up and smell the coffee!

I promised to go out to my local Starbucks first thing this morning in order to observe any immediate changes as a result of yesterday’s training. It’s now time to go … I’ll report on my experience later today.

Let me know what you think on this topic. Share your experience with our readers.

Link to this post!
Filed Under: Business Communications, Customer Service, Leadership, Main Page, Small Business, Training Tagged: , , , ,
February 11, 2008 Leave a Comment

Less is More

“A speech should be as long as a piece of string – long enough to wrap up the package.”

– Anonymous

Read Patrick Healy’s NY Times article, “For Clinton the Speaker, the Smaller the Better” (Click here) for insight into how the venue (where a speech is given) determines the effectiveness of both the speaker and their message.

There are books titled “It’s Not What You Say, It’s How You Say It,“ and “It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear.” But in his article, Healy draws a sharp contrast to Sen. Hillary Clinton’s shortcomings when she speaks in front of large audiences and her remarkable success in connecting with her audience in more intimate settings. Consider:

“Big rallies are clearly not her strength,” said one senior adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity in exchange for a blunt assessment of his candidate. “She’s far better at town-hall meetings, round tables, smaller venues. The challenge for her is to connect with and inspire large audiences more than she does now.”

versus

Yet in intimate settings, like her visit on Monday to the Yale Child Study Center in New Haven, Mrs. Clinton comes across far more personably, listening and empathizing and on occasion showing her emotional side. Indeed, at the Yale center, where she volunteered in the early 1970s, she became teary as her old boss praised “the incomparable Hillary.”

I remember Senator Clinton’s “Listening Tour” of New York state when she first ran for Senator in 2000 – and it was a great success. Sen. Clinton is a very good listener – she shows empathy and people really feel that she cares about them and that they have been heard.

And to her credit, she has shown great improvement as a speaker in venues both big and small. However, in my opinion, she needs to improve two things: Continue reading “Less is More” »

Filed Under: Business Communications, Business Practices, Leadership, Main Page, Political Strategy, Public Speaking, Speeches Tagged: , , , ,