Staying Relevant For The Zombie Apocalypse

Posted on by Christina Hamlett

nice-night-to-shoot-zombies

Most people who know me are unlikely to put my name in the same sentence with zombies, especially in the context of designing book covers. My style tends to embrace architecture, nature, Art Deco and sometimes a splash of unabashed whimsy. Yet when a colleague recently asked me if I could come up with something for his Romeo and Juliet riff in which the star-crossed lovers team up against the ghoulish undead, I heard myself say, “Sure! Why not?” Not only was it a chance to expand my mental margins (and get paid for it) but also to explore the correlation to today’s businesses needing to stay relevant in a mercurial marketplace.

In a nutshell, no matter how well a particular approach to your services and products has served you in the past, nothing courts obsolescence faster than the belief that the status quo will continue to work in the future.

Take restaurants, for instance. When customers began paying more attention to what they were eating, savvy restaurateurs recognized the need to tweak their menus to reflect nutritional information, calorie-count, heart-healthy choices, gluten-free, sugar-free, vegan, low sodium, no trans-fat, etc. Longstanding cooking techniques such as fried, breaded, battered and glazed began giving way way to grilled, roasted, broiled and steamed. Depending on the cuisine, there has also been a downsizing of plate and portion size to trick the mind into feeling “full.”

Another example is the landscape design business. Southern California homes that once boasted lush green lawns have now turned to a combination of drought-resistant plants and ground cover, artificial turf, and bark, brick and decorative rock – lawn alternatives which 21st century landscapers have had to step up and accommodate in order to stay viable.

Own a brick-and-mortar shop? Many have already transitioned to an online or hybrid presence in response to their customers’ desire to have 24/7 access, not have to deal with holiday crowds and parking lots, and addressing the escalating fears that being out in public places such as urban malls isn’t nearly as safe these days as it used to be.

Even publishers of books, magazines and newspapers are making the shift to electronic platforms in concert to the way today’s readers like to read. Given the fact that 30 percent of trade paperback and hardcover books end up in landfills, the evolution of ebooks and self-publishing reflects not only a “green” environmental solution but also a way for authors to exercise more control over their intellectual property, accrue higher royalties and get their books on the market much faster than via traditional channels.

With these examples in mind, what has your own business done to reinvent itself in the past year? The past five years? The past decade?

The following are some considerations which should be at the top of your To Do list:

  1. Study your competition’s unique selling points. What can you do to (1) emulate their successful platform and (2) differentiate yourself in attracting the same clientele?
  2. Explore new ways to keep your existing clients and customers happy. Engage them in the process by letting them know their opinions count. At the end of the day it’s much easier and less expensive to retain loyal fans than it is to pursue new ones.
  3. Become a lifelong learner. Educate yourself (and your employees) on industry trends by attending seminars/webinars, reading new business books and trade publications, tuning in to podcasts, and expanding your social media network.
  4. Update your business image. Whether it’s a creative retooling of your website, a redesign of your corporate brand, an expansion of your existing services and products, or doing seasonal window displays to catch the attention of passersby, it’s the Bright Shiny Object Syndrome that makes people curious to discover something new.
  5. Invest in new technology that will allow you to manage your time and delivery systems more efficiently. You may also want to invest in the expertise of a marketing coach to guide you in maximizing your resources, identifying ways to diversify, and reach potential consumer groups you might not have thought of.

It also goes without saying that survival is ultimately contingent on the mindset to take risks, to try things you’ve never done, and to stay absolutely and positively fearless. Your business adversaries may not be zombies but they will indeed eat you alive if you’re not prepared to stay one step ahead of them.

 

 

Five Easy Ways to Build Positivity in the Workplace

Posted on by Christina Hamlett

 

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For the first time since Media Magnetism debuted in 2012,  I’m taking April off and putting this month’s column in the capable hands of  Rosalind Cardinal, aka The Leadership Alchemist. What makes Ros’ guest blog such a timely fit is that the world at large is currently awash in negative energy that not only foments distrust but also incites violence, jeopardizes global economies and causes many to view the future through a perspective of doom and gloom. While it’s a reality that nothing changes overnight, it’s the small, incremental steps we can each take on a day-to-day basis (including in the workplace) that can lead to a better – and more productive – tomorrow.

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Positivity in the workplace makes a real difference.

It not only determines a person’s well-being but their success as well. In fact, it does more than that. Positivity can also:

  • enhance team members’ ability to think creatively
  • help them cope with challenges
  • nurture their progress in their career
  • and aid them in getting along with others in the workplace

So how do we build a positive culture?

Martin Seligman, positive psychologist and author of the 2011 book Flourish, developed the PERMA model, which details the five elements that must be in place for us to experience lasting well-being.

P: Positive Emotion

E: Engagement

R: (Positive) Relationships

M: Meaning

A: Accomplishment/Achievement.

Let’s break each of these elements down further and see how they apply in the workplace:

Positive Emotion: As a leader, it’s essential you set a positive tone for your team and their working environment inasmuch as possible. One way to do that is to reframe the negatives that can and will arise at times. For instance: “We failed.” Vs. “The project wasn’t successful this time around, but we received valuable feedback that will make the next one more viable.”

Engagement: Rewards and incentives can be great motivators to keep a team focused on crossing the finish line when used correctly, but team members can also develop self-rewards of their own, even if it simply means getting a cup of coffee once they finish a section of a project. The key is to create a reward the team member will enjoy working toward.

Relationships:  Human beings are social beings, which means that we crave healthy, empowering relationships. Many studies show that people with a larger support network often outlive those without it by 22%! Devote at least 20-30 minutes a day toward relationship building. Visit a team member’s office during lunch, ask about their family, encourage them in their personal goals, and learn more about what they’d like to achieve in their career.

Meaning: People want to feel a sense of meaning and purpose in their day-to-day work life. We want to feel that what we does matter; that what we are contributing plays a central part in the ‘bigger picture’. Leaders therefore must empower their team members to see the deeper layers in their work. Revisit your company’s mission purpose and vision statements in a special meeting. How does each team member’s work relate to those statements? In what ways does each team member fulfill your company’s unique vision? Getting to the heart of it may very well be what your team needs to feel inspirited and encouraged.

Accomplishment/Achievement: We are naturally programmed to want to better ourselves. In doing so, we flourish and experience well-being. So how can leaders empower their team members and equip them with what they need in order to experience accomplishment and achievement on a regular basis? One way is to help facilitate their development. Connect employees with a training program that can up-level them. Introduce them to the appropriate connections within your workplace for the advancement of their career. Devote time regularly to reflecting on how you can help develop your team members and they’ll thank you for it.

When a leader focuses on building positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment in the workplace, a positive culture will flourish, making for happier employees, a stronger team, and better work.

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Ros

Rosalind Cardinal, known as ‘The Leadership Alchemist’, is the Principal Consultant of Shaping Change, a consulting practice in the field of Organisational Development and Human Resources. She has coached clients at Executive and Senior Levels in government agencies, private enterprises, and the community sector and is a sought-after speaker and expert at conferences and events. Visit her website at www.shapingchange.com.au to learn new strategies and game-changing ideas toward becoming a better leader and to download Ros’ free e-book on leadership.

 

Owning the Table

Posted on by Christina Hamlett

Cielito

A few months ago, my husband and I went to a favorite Japanese restaurant. The former owner – a dear friend – had recently retired so as to travel and work on his golf game. Since we had always enjoyed the food, the service and the ambience, we decided to check out how his successor was doing and have a mid-week lunch date. Although the server took our drink order immediately, it was sometime later before she returned to ask if we’d like some food to go with it. My own order arrived in a timely fashion and we both assumed my husband’s would be out next. Nearly 10 minutes passed. When she finally strolled by to ask how everything was, we asked about the still-missing order. With a shrug, she said she’d go check on it. Upon her return, she immediately threw the chef under the bus with the explanation that “He screwed up because we’re really busy” (which, rather obviously, they weren’t). When the order finally arrived – and after a long enough passage to suggest it had never gone in to begin with – it wasn’t even correct. All this time, the manager had made several strolls through the dining room; although he would likely have seen and heard what was going on, he never stepped up to remedy the problem. Suffice it to say, we won’t be going back.

We contrast this to quite a different experience we had this past weekend at Cielito, a delightful Mexican restaurant in downtown Santa Barbara (California). Not only was our server pleasant and attentive but over the course of our lunch we were checked in on by four other servers, both of the young hostesses and the eatery’s new owner – each of them genuinely interested in how we were enjoying our meal and whether there was anything else they could get us. In a nutshell, not only did every employee “own” that table but also clearly owned Cielito’s reputation as a “go-to” place for an enjoyable experience. Whenever future getaways include a trip to Santa Barbara, there’s no question where we’ll be headed for lunch.

So how does this correlate to your own business? If you’ve ever dealt with a snarky receptionist, a put-upon sales clerk, or a customer service rep who’s clearly in the wrong career, it impacts your impression of the entire organization and makes you disinclined to remain a customer. On the flip side, how many times has a store employee walked you to the correct aisle to find a particular item, wished you a great day or – if you’re a regular –addressed you by name?

Couple the interpersonal equation with the dismaying reality that despite the fact we’re living in a technologically rich wonderland where we can nimbly text someone 8,000 miles away, participate in chat rooms with total strangers, and share Instagram photos across a broad swath of social media channels, we have become increasingly starved for real-time face-time with fellow human beings. Such insularity subsequently breeds a mindset of spinning in a solo orbit – a potentially damaging scenario if what you project in the workaday world reflects poorly on the entity that employs you.

If we choose to define “communication” as 140 characters, emojis, and hashtags, we’re purposely choosing emptiness over the chance to connect on a deeper level, to empathize, and to not only let others know we have actually noticed their presence but that such presence has made a difference – even briefly – in our lives. It is a table ownership in which both sets of participants must be fully engaged in order for the experience to be memorable.

Scattered Thoughts With Intermittent Brainstorms

Posted on by Christina Hamlett

December 2015 image

If you want your business to stay viable, visible and competitive in the coming new year, it’s essential that your staff not only have a sense of ownership in that process but also be invited to show you what they’ve got in terms of untapped creativity and problem-solving skills. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy for a risk-averse manager to use “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” as an argument to discourage initiative. By the time the breakage occurs – sometimes irreparably – the chance is often lost to hear solutions that may have been floating in the hallways all along and yet were never actively solicited.

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Thinking Outside the (Suggestion) Box

If the drop-slot of your employee suggestion box is crisscrossed with cobwebs, it’s time to embrace a more interactive approach to feedback. Distribute questionnaires (with an option for anonymity) to gauge staff satisfaction levels with working conditions, procedures, policies, and perks/privileges. Demonstrate that you’re actually receptive to input by publishing the results in your company newsletter and using them as your talking points for the launch of a brainstorming task force. This strategy works well if the size of your organization precludes a full group meeting or if you’ve observed that workers are hesitant to speak out with suggestions for fear of rejection or reprisal.

Thought Bubble Diversity

Within any goal-oriented group – be it TV sitcom writers, nonprofit volunteers or corporate committees – there are typically four personality types: leaders, creative thinkers, analysts, and pleasers. If all the participants in your think-tank session are drawn from the same quadrant, don’t hold your breath for progress to ensue. Why? Because functionally they will cancel each other out: the leaders will grapple for power, the creative types will bounce off the walls, the analysts will scrutinize everything to death, and the pleasers – too timid to offend anyone – will assume the role of bobblehead yes-men. Likewise, if you’re exploring new ideas which will impact multiple departments, the reception to those ideas upon implementation will be a lot warmer if each division had a rep involved in the planning stages.

Forbid Podium-Hogging

What do brainstorming meetings and elementary school classrooms have in common? They are either a scene of cacophonous pandemonium in which everyone talks at once or a setting wherein a handful of know-it-alls dominates the discussion and intimidates the rest into silence. For a brainstorming session to be effective, you must not only brush up on Robert’s Rules of Order (http://www.rulesonline.com) but encourage full participation as well. To get the conversation started, make sure everyone has a clear understanding of The Problem. In other words, what, exactly, are they there to solve? Next, have each participant write down his/her solution to the problem on a folded slip of paper and put it in a bowl. Each “anonymous author” idea is then drawn forth and written on a whiteboard for everyone to see. Start with the first idea listed and ask each participant’s opinion regarding that idea’s merits and flaws. Set a timer so no one is allowed to hog the stage with a filibuster. Rebuttals and interruptions are not allowed when someone has the floor. Ideas that accrue a higher number of negative hash tags are erased. Once you have gone around the entire room, start the process again, gradually whittling down the list – and incorporating modifications – until you arrive at a solution that everyone can agree with.

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As energizing and empowering as these brainstorming techniques can be, however, an absence of sincerity – coupled with an unwillingness to compromise – is the quickest way to kill esprit de corps. Whether you’re requesting fresh ideas and then stealing them, trivializing contributions or ascribing value based on rank, or asking for input on a decision you’ve already made, it won’t take long for employees to start keeping their best thoughts to themselves or, worse, giving them to your competition.

Wherever you are in the world, here’s to a joyful holiday season and a spectacular 2016!

Office for One

P.S. Will this be the year you decide to go into business for yourself? If so, you’ll want to add Office for One: The Sole Proprietor’s Survival Guide to your wish list. Available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle, this indispensable resource is perfect for any entrepreneur who wants to go it alone without getting lonely.

 

 

Making More Spaghetti Stick To The Wall

Posted on by Christina Hamlett

Spaghetti

“Hi there! How’s it going? I just discovered your website and I have to say it’s really great. The content really shows that you’re the best in the industry. I’m sure you receive hundreds of emails like this but mine is the one to pay attention to because with the introductory SEO package I can offer you and your awesome sales team, you’ll be driving even more customers to your store and excellent products!”

Any guesses how long it took me to hit the “delete” key on this ground-floor opportunity?

For starters, I wasn’t personally addressed by name, nor was the name of the website referenced. Flattering to know the sender thinks I’m the best in the industry…and yet doesn’t identify what my particular industry is. And while it’s true indeed that I receive hundreds of emails making the same glowy promises of global exposure, where exactly is this store stuffed to the gills with trendy merchandise supposed to be? For that matter, who’s on my awesome sales team? I should take them to lunch.

Like many a salesperson on the hustle, it’s the old “Let’s just throw a big plate of spaghetti against the wall and see how much of it sticks.” While now and again an accidental noodle and some sauce might get someone’s attention, it’s more often than not an enormous waste of pasta (and probably broken plates). To make matters worse, they never even think of varying the recipe before they’re skipping off to the next wall, thus perpetuating a messy cycle of trial and error.

Let’s apply this for a moment to writers. A colleague of mine was recently lamenting her history of copious rejection letters. Her style, I learned, was the scattergun approach of ignoring submission rules and simply sending out the same manuscript to every magazine she could think of. While an impersonal “Dear Sir or Madam” photocopied letter should never be cause for tears, I asked what she did about the ones where an editor actually took the time to offer some constructive advice. “Oh, I just need to find the right editor,” she dismissively replied. In other words, “I like my spaghetti recipe exactly the way it is and I refuse to change it for anyone.”

In the arena of sales, how much do you really know about your customers’ interests, needs and wants? Do you really expect them to take seriously any mass-produced “Hi there! I’ve been thinking about you” letter that was stuffed without any thought into an envelope or distributed with even less thought via an electronic mailing list? Do you ever consider when you throw your spaghetti that some of your customers might be vegetarian? Or gluten-intolerant? Or on a tight budget and unable to afford artisanal marinara? Are you averse to switching up or swapping out ingredients just because “this is the way we’ve always done it”?

Takeaway lesson: Whatever you think you’re saving by doing generic, one-size-fits-all advertising may actually be costing you much more than you realize in terms of building customer trust and a belief that you sincerely care about what they’re really hungry for.

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Here’s my line-up of stellar guest bloggers this month:

Giving Back Made Easy – by Lee Romano Sequeira

How Your Name Is Your Most Important Brand – by Rainier Fuclan

Challenging The Disconnect Between What Science Shows And Business Does – by Linda Ray

5 Ways to Simplify Scheduling During a Busy Season – by Brett Duncan

Building a Culture of Health at Start-Up – by Jill Gambaro

 

Help Wanted

Posted on by Christina Hamlett

Blog Image

Back in the days when I worked in state government, I always viewed summer with a mixed sense of anticipation and dread. Summer was the season of interns, the season when the floodgates would open and spill forth dozens of cattle-call applicants in their late teens and early twenties. Although these positions were unpaid, it was management’s vision of a win/win scenario: the interns would get work experience to put on their resumes and the rest of us would get a cadre of malleable minions to do the filing, open mail, stock supplies, and run errands.

While now and again we’d delight in finding a true gem who had the skill sets, initiative, and leadership qualities that could one day translate to a full-time job with us, the majority of them were clearly not the sharpest knives in the drawer. Among them:

  • The one who threw out any mail that personally didn’t look interesting to her. (She asked me why we never got fashion magazines or People.)
  • The one who filed all the travel claims under “S” for “someone who took a trip.”
  • The one who took over an hour to deliver a file to an office located on the same floor. (If we had traced his footprints, they would have looked like Billy’s from a Family Circus)

As the saying goes, good help is hard to find. Bad help (which is worse than no help at all) can take years off your life, cause costly mistakes and jeopardize your reputation. While government agencies and nonprofits have no problem doing shout-outs for extra pairs of hands, a lot of sole proprietors I’ve known over the years are not as willing to admit they’re getting overwhelmed. A part of it, I think, is that they want to maintain the image they’re completely in control (albeit exhausted to the point of collapse). They’re also cognizant of the reality that in the length of time it takes to train a helper how to do something – or correct how the helper did it totally wrong – they could easily have just done it themselves.

Whether you’re looking to go the intern route for short-term projects or planning to one day expand your small business and put out the call for prospective employees, it’s critical to have a clear sense of what you want, how much supervision you want/need to provide, and what the participants can potentially gain from the experience of working with you. The more “ownership” they feel they have in the process and the outcome, the more pride they’ll take in paying attention and doing their assignments well.

These same elements apply to situations where you’re subcontracting with local vendors to provide services (i.e., catering) or outsourcing product-oriented tasks (i.e., assembling goods) to an off-site team an ocean away and with whom you have no physical interaction or quality control mechanism. While you may have the highest trust that everyone is doing what they’re supposed to, the bride whose flowers aren’t delivered on time or the client who receives 500 logo key chains with the company name misspelled isn’t going to mad at your helpers; they’re going to be mad at you for allowing that mistake to happen in the first place.

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Here’s the lineup of my guest contributors this month:

Take the Sting Out of Stress When Moving Offices – by Zachary Rook

And, Or, But – How to Handle Objections – by Julie Garland McLellan

How To Design a Marketable Signature System – by Ling Wong

Using Lists to Draw Web Traffic and Media Attention – by Mickie Kennedy