Business Specialties

  360 Degree Feedback

An effective place to begin to improve one’s performance is with an assessment of how one is perceived. The results are often surprising to clients. With 360-degree feedback, we interview people who can impact the client’s performance and career; e.g.:

• Peers
• Subordinates
• Superiors
• Customers (both internal and external to your company)
• Suppliers (both internal and external to your company)

The results are compiled, analyzed and discussed, and an action plan is developed to address opportunities for improvement. In addition to identifying and addressing “problems,” receiving candid feedback about one’s strength often empowers clients to leverage strengths to a greater degree. Because of the critical importance of the perceptions of others, 360-degree feedback has proved to be a very powerful tool.

Leadership

Promotions are usually based on one’s abilities to perform the key functions of one’s previous job. Along with a promotion often come increased leadership and management responsibility- often with larger teams and more layers of employees to supervise. The ability to coach and develop these people is often assumed to be present where it is not. Leadership is a more natural ability for some than others, but everyone can learn to be a better leader.

Interpersonal skills are key to one’s overall success as a leader. In fact, in a study of 18,000 leaders at 562 companies (Leadership I.Q., Emmett C. Murphy), key findings were as follows:

• The most successful leaders (as identified by a consensus of people surveyed at all levels) ranked the respect of one’s customers and the respect of one’s colleagues among the top four critical factors in their success.
• Less successful leaders ranked customers and colleagues much lower on their priority list.

In failing to acknowledge the importance of these relationships on their success, the performance of these less successful leaders suffered.

Another key finding of the Murphy study was that leadership can be learned. We work with the client to:

• Find his/her own leadership style.
• Ensure that the client is bringing out the best in his/her staff.
• Inspire and motivate his/her people.

 Conflict Resolution

In today’s stressful business environment, with conflict virtually inevitable, it has become increasingly important for a leader to know how to prevent combustible situations from exploding. How an executive handles these situations, both small and potentially disastrous, can have a major impact on business performance.

It is quite common for executives to avoid conflict or spend an enormous amount of time experiencing stress in anticipation of a difficult conversation. This dynamic creates a large and unnecessary energy drain. With the right skills and practice, anyone can learn to handle these difficult situations with calm and confidence.

We perform a variety of functions to help the client handle conflict effectively; e.g:

• Act as an objective sounding board for ideas to ensure that issues are handled in a constructive way.
• Provide skills to enable a client to handle conflict more confidently on an ongoing basis

Through coaching, we help the client achieve the following:

• Clarify what is important in each situation and maintain focus on the big picture.
• Identify and remain aware of his/her interests, rather than becoming sidetracked by anger or competitiveness.
• Construct a productive point-of-view to present to the other party
• Turn a potentially “bad” situation into an opportunity to build something even better.

These skills can be learned and practiced to produce spectacular results.

Building Successful Customer Relationships

It is well documented that the cost of acquiring new customers greatly exceeds the cost of retaining existing ones. For those customers you wish to keep, we can help you:

• Develop more productive and profitable relationships with clients
• Handle conflict more effectively
• Turn a “bad” conversation into a good one
• Develop “win/win” alternatives
• Learn to find the opportunities in conflict situations
• Develop a mechanism to receive regular feedback from customers

Acquiring these skills will not only improve business performance but also reduce stress and increase enjoyment on the job. (See Conflict Resolution for more)