Paying attention to your word choices will make you a more effective communicator. Keep your speech concise by avoiding these common phrases.
Today’s post is by Mike Figliuolo, Managing Director of thoughtLEADERS.
“At the end of the day…”
You sound ridiculous. You just don’t know it.
Word choice matters. We spend countless hours in meetings with colleagues discussing big, important ideas. We write hundreds of documents making our case for one initiative or another. We write thousands of emails. We give dozens of presentations. And you know what? We sound ridiculous. Using buzzwords can make us sound like hyper-educated idiots who swallowed a thesaurus.
In our efforts to sound more intelligent and compelling, we use big words and bigger phrases we hear other smart and compelling people use. The problem is, those words and phrases didn’t mean anything in the first place. By adopting those vapid phrases as our own, we’re saying things that are just as meaningless as the first person who uttered them.
Stop. Please stop.
Speak plainly. Speak simply. Speak directly.
Doing otherwise is a disservice to you and your audience. There are two reasons you’re likely using these words and phrases: either you’re using them as verbal pauses (instead of “um” and “uh”) or you think they sound really intelligent. If it’s the former, get comfortable with silence and simply collect your thoughts. If it’s the latter, it’s having the opposite effect but your coworkers are too polite to tell you so.
Here are a few of my (least) favorite ridiculous words and phrases: Read more
https://i0.wp.com/www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/20210127-Stop-Sign.jpg?fit=1280%2C854&ssl=18541280Mike Figliuolohttps://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/logo.pngMike Figliuolo2021-01-27 06:30:232021-01-27 03:43:145 Phrases That Make You Sound Ridiculous
Cultures are patterns of human interaction that define the values and the behaviors that help groups accomplish a shared mission. In an organization, the culture is the soup in which work gets done. It influences employee satisfaction, customer retention, and the bottom line.
Getting organizational culture right is complicated, but it can mean the difference between a flourishing organization and a floundering one. Defining an organization’s culture and bringing awareness to the vital role it plays is a big step to shifting productivity and positivity and to increasing customer satisfaction. Yet organizations are often like fish swimming in polluted water, unaware of the unhealthy environment that surrounds them.
Undefined unconscious cultural norms are hidden forces that encourage the worst of human nature. Put any group of ambitious people together in a hierarchical structure with sizable goals and a good salary, and you’re sure to see an outbreak of competitiveness, cliquey behavior, distrust, jealousy, and resentment. Competition overshadows collaboration, individual egos trump collective goals, and ambition outshines curiosity.
Without an intentional approach to culture, an unconscious culture will slowly emerge in a company or team, influenced by leaders’ personalities, relationships, and the quality of conversations that teams have or don’t have. Some people say, “$#!& happens.” I say, “Culture happens.” It’s not unusual for leaders to wake up one morning and say, “Why are we behaving this way? When did we become so disjointed?”
To fix a broken culture, it’s useful to examine how world-class teams work together and the role conversations play. Those teams typically have two things in common: they name and live in a purposeful culture, and they’re headed by leaders who make culture a primary concern and who create a psychologically safe environment where everyone has a voice and participates in dynamic conversations aligned with the team’s mission. Collaboration and creativity are essential elements in the success of those teams.
Changing a culture isn’t easy, but it’s required work for an organization that wants to realize its potential. External eyes and ears can often help teams uncover blind spots or patterns of unproductive behavior.
Here’s a four-step process to create a new culture or change an existing one:
Define a Desired Culture for the Coming Year
Have purposeful conversations to define a culture that will support your mission. Keep it simple. Long cultural treatises or big, clichéd posters won’t do the trick. Name a few values that begin to shape the rules of engagement. Name qualities you believe in (e.g., integrity, humility, psychological safety, respect for unique voices, or accountability). These values are the first step in discovering an appropriate culture. Here are a couple examples of value statements: “Our culture values transparency, collaboration, accountability, and excellence,” or “Our culture is based on individual creativity, team collaboration, and innovation.”
Have a Brutally Honest Look at the Current Culture
It takes time and effort to uncover the hidden forces driving unproductive behavior. Have a conversation to uncover the hidden patterns of behavior, and ask yourselves these questions:
Do we suffer from groupthink?
Is our hierarchy suffocating?
Do we allow for constructive disagreements?
How do we behave when things go awry?
These are tough conversations to have, to say the least, but without an honest investigation, you won’t discover or execute a new culture.
Explore the Gap Between the Desired State and the Future Desired Culture
Investigating the gap will uncover aspects that are working and those that aren’t. The gap points to the practices you will need to put into place. Every member of the team will have a role to play. Support one another, but also hold one another accountable in a nonjudgmental way.
Change Up Your Conversation
Consciously changing the pattern of our conversations takes practice and humility. Focus on your meetings. Change up your agendas to make time for better collaboration and creative thinking. In business, we’re addicted to stating opinions, telling stories, and making decisions. When we jump into action, we lose the ability to have collaborative and creative conversations. That leap to action is a “conversational bypass.” The hierarchy is obvious when the person with the most stripes is consistently the most powerful voice in the room, and when the members of a team are reluctant to offer differing perspectives, innovative solutions are lost.
Team members who have collaborative conversation have learned to hold their opinions lightly and to listen to and absorb other perspectives. Teams that set aside time in meetings to “chew” on a subject are engaging in such conversations. In any meeting, robust collaboration outshines report-out. Teams get smart together when they feel safe to speak up, disagree, and wrestle with ideas.
Creative conversations are byproducts of robust collaborative conversations. When team members have open minds, a world of infinite possibilities opens up. Fresh approaches to long-standing problems bubble up to the surface, which excites new energies that lead to unforeseen solutions.
Any leader’s efforts to make culture an asset to a team will reap the benefits: clarity of values, explicit rules of engagement, much improved collaborations, and cross-functional alignment. Those new values can start a virtuous circle that can have a profound impact on an organization, so let the conversations begin.
Chuck Wisner is a strategic thinker, coach, and teacher in the areas of organizational strategy, human dynamics, communication, and leadership excellence. He is currently working as an advisor with leaders and their teams at major technology companies in the United States, other Fortune 200 companies, and non-profit institutions. Wisner is the author of the forthcoming book, Conscious Conversations. (CLICK HERE to learn more).
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Our reader poll today asks: Which of the following statements best reflects your situation related to getting promoted?
I was promoted within the last 3 months: 12%
I expect to get promoted within the next 3-6 months: 11%
I expect to get promoted in the next 6-12 months: 14%
I’m more than 12 months from being promoted: 63%
Getting close? Looks like a lot of you (25%) see yourselves in line for a promotion within the next 12 months. The question is, what are you doing to secure that jump? If you’re not already acting “as if” you’re in that role, consider doing so. Many times it’s not about “can they perform at that level?” but instead the conversation is, “Are they already performing at that level?” When there’s uncertainty in the market, organizations tend to assume less risk which puts your promotion in question. Start acting as if you have the role in terms of the size of your contributions and your acceptance of responsibility.
For the 63% who see it more than 12 months away, what can you commit to in the next year to get yourself ready for the next role and get yourself the visibility you need for your leaders to see yourself as ready? Build a plan now. Execute it in the coming year. Without action, it’s simply wishful thinking.
Do you agree with these poll results? Let us know in the comments below!
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A critical part of effective leadership and success means the understanding of including all stakeholders and total collaboration in your leadership model.
Today’s post is by Kim Lorenz, author of Tireless (CLICK HERE to get your copy).
It’s that time of year again – many organizations have started diving into accomplishing their strategic business goals and objectives for 2021. Do you have a 2021 business vision?
In my years of experience as an entrepreneur, business owner, partner and CEO, I have come to realize that if you can learn to see opportunity, can innovate, and look past the “obvious,” you can achieve almost anything.
To me, a critical part of effective leadership and business success means understanding the importance of including all stakeholders and total collaboration in your leadership model.
Stakeholders are both internal to your company, some in higher levels of management, and often are suited best to contribute fresh ideas and perspectives, mainly because they are often the ones in the trenches and closer to the actual issue you might be addressing.
Unfortunately, when business decisions are made due to a lack of knowledge and failure to seek understanding and input from others, millions of dollars can be wasted. Sadly, these poor decisions, whether in the non-profit or for-profit arena, are not typically discovered for many years down the road, so the losses pile up needlessly.
With this in mind, I encourage leaders in this New Year to strive to gather more information and consult with others (who might know something they don’t) in every decision they make. Remember, you must be willing to meet with the people who do the work every day – and recognize that they are significant, valuable stakeholders who can help you craft smarter business decisions.
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Communication is crucial to effective leadership. With all professional relationships, one must clearly convey and maintain company guidelines and standards.
Your business reflects your ethos, which explains why it is critical to communicate company culture and goals clearly to new employees, new clients, and new suppliers. A leader lays the ground rules, describes operations, distributes priorities, and defines the values of the business. I focus a tremendous amount of energy into verbal and non-verbal communication. Asking questions, activating curiosity, and engaging as an active listener assists me in assessing clearly if an interviewee is a match, or if a supplier and client will connect and provide for my needs.
I see applicants as potential consultants, asking myself, “will this person provide the services he promises?” I notice their body language and verbal reactions to my questions, especially eye contact, which communicates confidence and honesty, or lack thereof. I learned to pay attention to a “feeling” of unsettledness. I pursue questioning until I understand the answer. If there continues to be an “unsettledness,” I listen to my inner spirit and may choose not to hire that person. I select people whom I believe will be assets to my business and examine their character. I observe the chemistry between the two of us and other staff members. Is there a willingness to take initiative and complete tasks efficiently and correctly?
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Our reader poll today asks: When you get knocked “off center” by unexpected problems, how long does it take you to recover?
A few minutes: 23.86%
An hour or so: 27.23%
A few hours: 17.60%
A day or two: 24.33%
Several days to a week: 6.98%
Returning to center. There’s no shortage of things to knock us off balance. Events big and small can throw us off at any given time. What’s important is how quickly you’re able to regain your center and get back in balance. For the large portion of you that get thrown off for a day or more, don’t feel bad about it, but do look to do something about it. Find a way to regain your perspective faster. Whether it’s exercising, taking a walk, talking with a friend or co-worker, listening to music, meditating or any other form of resetting yourself, you’d do well to try it.
Being off center for too long affects performance, stress and general happiness with the world around you. Let yourself experience the stressor, react to it, but then quickly put it in its place. You’ll find that regular application of these skills will reduce the amount of time it takes you to get back to center and back in balance.
Do you agree with these poll results? Let us know in the comments below!
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Finding the balance between speaking and letting your team speak for themselves is the self-awareness challenge of all leaders, and can be the different maker between good and great.
Today’s post is by Mike Figliuolo, Managing Director of thoughtLEADERS.
To help you be a better team member, colleague and boss, I’m bringing you a pointed lesson in the art of being quiet. Today I’m conjuring up the spirit of Run DMC. To quote the immortal Rev Run:
You talk too much! You never shut up!
Run DMC nailed the heart of the issue with this verse:
You’re the instigator, the orator of the town. You’re the worst when you converse, just a big mouth clown. You talk when you’re awake, I heard you talk when you sleep Has anyone ever told you, that talk is cheap?
Now let’s take DMC to the workplace. You know the person they’re singing about. It’s that guy on the team who can’t shut up about anything. Hopefully he simply blathers on about his antique smurf collection (and boy was he jazzed about the live-action movie). More likely though, he’s the guy who is talking about everyone and everything going on in the office.
But guess what? YOU might be that person. If you are, you’ve got a big problem. First let’s discuss your symptoms then some ways to fix it.
The end of year performance review process is broken but leaders can take 6 steps to change their performance culture and become better leaders in the process.
Today’s post is by Mike Figliuolo, Managing Director of thoughtLEADERS and author of One Piece of Paper(CLICK HERE to get your copy).
Whether you’ve just finished your end-of-year review process or it’s still finishing up, you can resolve to do things better this year in terms of managing performance. This post is probably even more relevant if you’ve recently been through the pain of a grueling review process because I’m sharing some tips on what you can do this year to make next year’s process less painful and more effective.
There’s nothing like returning to work after post-holiday food comas. The best part is you get to prep for one of the most dysfunctional, time-wasting, intellectually insulting, and leadership-lazy exercises known to mankind: the end of year review.
They’re stupid. Period.
And before you go all “I don’t need to read this – I’m a business leader and HR people are the ones who do performance management” you need to sit down, shut up, and read because if you have that mindset, you’re a huge part of the problem.
How failed is our leadership culture that we have to sit around and wait for HR or executive management to dictate when and in what form we must critique the people on our teams?
How messed up is it that we have to rely on compulsory forms with rating scales to tell people how they’re doing?
How sad is it that we have to hold cross-calibrations to stack rank people and force a performance distribution because our managers lack the ability to look outside their own organization and assess comparable levels of talent and performance?
If someone works for us for 365 days, we owe them much more than a once-a-year sit-down to discuss their performance. We owe our organization more than looking at all personnel once every four seasons. If we truly want to get out of the rut of annual performance reviews being as palatable as beet and Brussels sprout casserole, we have to create a new culture around reviewing performance. Here’s how we as leaders can do that:
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Join our free webinar about how to continue to learn and evolve and lead your organization through crisis.
As the Coronavirus pandemic and resulting economic slowdown continue, leaders need to become more deliberate students of how to lead in a prolonged crisis.
To help with that, thoughtLEADERS will be offering a free webinar called Leading in Crisis: Four Leaders Who Did It Right. We’ll be sharing case studies of four exceptional leaders as they faced significant crises and the perhaps unconventional wisdom they gained from those experiences.
The webinar is a one-hour session you can attend live or on-demand, free of charge, and will be taught by Paul Smith and Gary Ross, the thoughtLEADERS principals who developed the firm’s courses Storytelling for Leaders and Leading Through Change.
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The how-to’s and don’t-do’s of disagreement, at work, but also in life.
Today’s post is by thoughtLEADERS principal Maureen Metcalf.
As leaders, we continue to face an increasing level of complexity. With political shifts happening across the globe, we are finding more than ever before that we are working with people who have dramatically different views than we have. Many are even violating the time-held rule not to discuss politics or religion at work.
For many, these discussions, along with a barrage of political demonstrations and news coverage, have left us feeling overwhelmed and often concerned about our immediate and long-term future. Many people appear more agitated, and agitated people are less effective employees, family members and friends.
An emerging leader and MBA student, Ben, recently told me that he watched two of his staff members come close to physical blows because of a political disagreement. His department is not directly impacted by the political discussion at hand, yet tempers are still high. The challenge for Ben was restoring a civil and supportive working relationship after people crossed lines that are hard to uncross.
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Our reader poll today asks: How willing is your organization to walk away from low-margin business?
Very — we do it all the time: 29.06%
Somewhat — it has to be really low margin before we consider walking: 41.89%
Rarely — we only walk away in extreme situations: 21.13%
Never — if they’re buying, we’re selling! 7.92%
Is the work worth it? There’s no shortage of “opportunities” to do work at low margins. Unfortunately all too many of you take on work that’s likely not worth it. Even if something is marginal in terms of value, you’re likely losing money on it. The hidden costs of administration, contracting, selling and servicing are rarely factored into the value you’re delivering and how much you’re getting paid for it. Add to that the opportunity cost of not being able to pursue higher-margin work, and you’re definitely in a negative situation.
Sure, there are times to take on low-margin work, like a pilot or trying to land a new customer, but those should be strategic exceptions. If you’re finding a lot of low-margin work on your plate, take the time to do the analysis of the true cost of delivering that work and add to that the opportunity cost of lost higher-margin work. That might help you make a compelling case for walking away from that low-margin project (or at least help you to price it more appropriately).
Do you agree with these poll results? Let us know in the comments below!
Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!
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A holiday party for employees is a nice touch as the year winds down, and nobody ever turned down a big bonus as a reward for doing a good job month after month. But the best way a business leader can say “thank you” to valuable employees might not have anything to do with parties, money, or gifts.
The most meaningful way to show a hard-working, loyal staff that you truly value and appreciate them is to listen to them and respond when they have ideas, complaints, and personal struggles.
Here are five ways to show your gratitude to employees this season and all year round.
Solicit their ideas
When former PepsiCo CEO Roger Enrico sent a video to the corporation’s thousands of employees saying they should “take ownership of the company,” janitor Richard Montanez took it seriously. He pitched Enrico an idea for a new product that he created by dusting the company’s popular Cheetos with chili powder instead of cheese powder. The result: Flamin’ Hot Cheetos are among the company’s top sellers, and Montanez, who never went to college, is a marketing executive worth millions.
Montanez didn’t set out to create a goldmine snack. In fact, he was just trying to salvage a pile of Cheetos rejects that had come through a malfunctioning machine without any cheese dust so his family could eat them.
But Enrico gave Montanez the same attention and respect he gave to the corporation’s product development team. Now, Montanez is one of the company’s most-enthusiastic ambassadors.
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