
How To Leverage Virtual Meeting Tells In Influencing Others
One of the downsides of virtual meetings is that they make it harder to read people. Before COVID you could get a sense for how people were going to engage, now you have to use a different set of tells.

How To Play The Best Supporting Role In Meetings
the one thing you must do to keep your organization from becoming a soap opera is to keep your focus on your most important external mission – the problem you solve in the world.

Why New Leaders Must Not Let Their Predecessors Distract Them
Pay attention. It’s an essential choice for an executive onboarding into a new role – what you and others pay attention to. Focusing on your predecessor’s mistakes is a distraction from your call to action and is especially painful for your predecessor’s supporters....

The Merger & Acquisition Leader’s Sub-Playbook #7 – Change Management
Per our earlier article on A Merger & Acquisition Leader’s Playbook For Success, avoid the traps of 1) poor strategic focus, 2) poor cultural integration and/or 3) poor delivery of synergies by leveraging the full playbook and its seven...

Why Letting Others Win Arguments Is So Empowering
Letting others win arguments is empowering because it positively reinforces what you’ve asked them to do. It all goes back to the ABC’s of behavior modification – Antecedent, Behavior, Consequence. It’s easy to tell people you want to hear their perspective...

Why The Right Level Of Customer Service Is A Strategic Choice
While different organizations provide different levels of service—from dismissive to reluctant to systematic to reactive to anticipatory—the most effective do it by choice. They understand the return on their service investment and invest appropriately. For those...

When And How To Tell, Co-Create Or Delegate
First, understand the difference between the three. Then, tell for compliance. Co-create for commitment. Delegate for accountability. Tell In Bryan Smith’s Tell – Sell – Test – Consult – Co-create framework for persuading others, Telling is one-way...

How You Manage Differences Can Change Levels Of Compliance
Not all compliance is equal. There are meaningful differences between open and passive-aggressive non-compliance, minimal, and supportive compliance. You can move some people from one to another by helping them adjust their attitudes with careful management of...

How A Favor Bank Mindset Can Improve Networking
The most tactically effective networkers approach every conversation with clear objectives for what they want out of those conversations. But the most effective networkers over time approach those same conversations with the objective of helping others.

How Leading Questions Help Leaders Lead
Before you object to leading questions per se, generally discouraged in direct questioning in a court of law or by neutral journalists, consider their appropriateness as a leadership tool. If a leader directs someone to do something, the best they can hope for is compliance. If they ask completely open questions, they might get any answer. But, if they ask leading questions, they can lead their followers to get to the right answer and direction themselves.