You still need “Meeting Magic” 

but your budget’s been bashed!

The boss expects you to arrange your next meeting at a 5-star resort with 5-star service in 5-star surroundings at ONE-star prices?? 

     Talk about meeting planners having an impossible job… You’re expected to work miracles without a wand or a prayer… and now, to top it off, your budget’s been bashed. Right? Or am I just imagining things? In the “old days” you could book fancy meetings at fancy locations for fancy prices and get top management compliments left and right. Right? No more.

     In fact, if you’re still on the job, and your organization is still having off-site meetings, you may be what little kids used to call a “lucky duck”! Maybe that’s not a reassuring thought, but what I’m about to tell you can be the most reassuring option you’ve had in years.

     Here it is:I have designed, delivered, and facilitated nearly 2,000 management training sesions, workshops, seminars and meetings nationwide and in Europe and the Caribbean. The sessions I ran took place in some of the world’s finest hotels, conference centers, and campus and cruise facilities.

     I understand the importance of having an experienced, competent, and reliable on-site support team on-call, of not having technical glitches, of having personable engaging staff services from people who know when to provide quiet top level performance behind the scenes and out of the spotlights.

I appreciate the need for knock-out facilities and inspiring surroundings where participants can be both relaxed and challenged.

     I know how good it isto have facility services that are so outstanding that the chef actually visits tables (not while meetings are in session), that someone shows up at your door with a replacement toothbrush five minutes after you call the desk, that nice weather prompts a last-minute request to meet for golf or car-racing or ropes course experiences, or to relocate a session to poolside or lakeside or gardenside and it’s quickly and cheerfully accommodated.

     Yeah, right, you say, at six gazillion dollars per person. Nope. The best-kept-secret location—known for hosting America’s top executive management teams— is available at far less than you paid for your last exotic location booking, and probably far less than you paid for your last boring one-dimensional location booking.

     And odds are, by the way, if the absolute perfect setting and services you seek are likely to be just a couple of hours drive from Manhattan or Boston Commons, transportation expenses will be a whole lot less too!  

     If you’re interestedin knowing more about this no-gimmicks/no-strings-attached opportunity to book the best world-class service facility and location for the least amount of money I’ve ever experienced, return here later this week for the details. If you just can’t wait, email me as noted below.  

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Input welcome anytime: Hal@TheWriterWorks.com (”Businessworks” in the subject line) or comment below. Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals, good night and God bless you! halalpiar  # # # 

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Read My Ears!

     Like a lot of communication practices, it seems most of ustend to slack off, get careless, and periodically get to a point of not listening carefully. Y’hear? It’s normal for our minds to drift off every few minutes when we’re listening to someone else… attention peaks and valleys vary with each individual. [The average American’s attention span has been reported as 12 minutes!]

     If I were, for example, reading this aloud to you, and included a sentence that mentioned the word “football,” as in the size of my 100-pound Golden Retriever on the day I brought her home, your mind might zoom away to the touchdown you scored in high school, or the Superbowl game that cost you $87,934.56 per seat, or the neighbor’s kid’s football you just leather-pancaked as you backed out of the driveway.

     Okay, you say. You’re guilty, you say. Now what? you say.

     Maybe it’s a good time to take personal inventory in how you come across to others. Why now? When business is “off” you certainly want to make the most of your potential to succeed, to make additional sales, to make efforts more productive… all of that starts (and often ends) with maximizing communication skills.

     One of the best and most immediately productive tools available to get started with is http://halalpiar.com/2009/05/4-steps-in-one-minute-zero-stress/ because it relaxes your muscles and makes your brain more alert—the perfect combination for receiving and delivering effective communication.     

     Next, it makes sense to do a little survey of those who share the inner business circle of your life. To keep things abstract and impersonal (i.e., not threatening), you can, for example, ask each person privately what musical instrument she or he most identify you with in the ways you come across to others.

     Ask for clarification, but do NOT criticize any one’s response. Say thank you and smile and walk away, then study the list you get back. What does it tell you about yourself?

     You, for instance, may think of yourself as a versatile keyboard able to perform almost any type of musical message, and someone may tell you you remind him or her of cymbals, crashing into discussions with a finalizing punctuation point of percussion, or a flighty little piccolo that dances around issues while brightening everyone’s day, but not addressing real needs or solving problems. If this exercise doesn’t bear fruit, replace musical instrument with animal.

     Once you have a better sense of what others perceive as less than optimal, focus on ways you can change that/those assessment(s) for the better. Take a quick visit to http://halalpiar.com/2009/05/hearing-is-not-listening/ and then initiate a plan of action for yourself with daily and weekly goals geared to disciplining yourself to come across better by listening more attentively, more actively, more responsively. Remember when you can respond instead of react, you can never over-react! 

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Input welcome anytime: Hal@TheWriterWorks.com (”Businessworks” in the subject line) or comment below. Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals, good night and God bless you! halalpiar  # # # 

FREE BLOG SUBSCRIPTION? Click on ”Posts RSS Feed” (Center Column), or now on your AMAZON Kindle for just $1.99 a month after a free trial. BE A CO-AUTHOR: Add your own 7 words to the end of the daily 254 days old growing tale! Click under “7-Word Story” (center column)

Mind Over Undermine

     At some time or another, every business and professional practice boss discovers a hired or inherited employee or group of employees whose sole mission appears to be to undermine operations—from manufacturing to customer service/patient care to administration to sales.

     Sometimes it’s vindictiveness, jealousy, bitterness, resentment…all good stuff, right? Sometimes, though, it’s naivety, ignorance, immaturity, misplaced loyalties, or just plain stupidity. While the reason might be important to uncover, what’s most important is to act on the discovery before it has chance to fester.

     If it’s too late to contain the infection from spreading out and affecting others in your organization, it may require you to rise to the confrontative occasion and call for all the cards to be put on the table. This, however, is not always the best solution.

     Why? Someone who may have been undermining you or your business or practice may be truly innocent of premeditation, or was perhaps unwarily acting out someone else’s issues. In that situation, you could be pulling the plug on someone who is a valuable potential asset to your operations or reputation.

     This may be the right point, instead, to pull in a professional to facilitate differences and/or re-train problem employees, or to counsel you on how to do it, or to force the situation to a head on your behalf. At any rate, it’s certainly worth the time to discuss the circumstances with an outside consultant before making that decision. 

     Prepare a short bullet list of issues and individuals involved with your own assessments of how effectively each performs in the roles for which they/he/she were/was hired. Try to keep your comments as objective as possible so as not to prejudice an outsider’s opinions, but articulate your issues and concerns clearly.

     Make your mission clear, and make your goals for each position that’s involved clear ones. In the process, look to your self as well, and question what (if any) contribution your own statements or behaviors may have contributed. Ask your consultant for a straightforward, unvarnished opinion and recommendation.

     Decide when, where and how to act, and what to say. Be receptive to whatever responses you provoke, and assess those in private. In the end, you will have given enough time and energy to the situation to justify moving forward from the point of implementing your decision. Then move forward.     

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Hal@Businessworks.US   302.933.0116 

 Open minds open doors.

 Thanks for visiting.  God bless you. 

  Make today a GREAT day for someone! 

“The journey to discovery

is not

in having new landscapes,

but in having new eyes.”

—PROUST

     SO…creating a positive attitude climate for your employees doesn’t mean you have to relocate operations to the islands. It’s all a matter of how people choose to look at things, not the vantage point they commandeer. Here is a six-point approach you can start to use tomorrow morning to create a more positive climate for your business:

     1. GROW YOUR PEOPLE. Know the capabilities and weaknesses of each employee. Determine the fundamental goals of your business, and match those goals against the talents available. Encourage employees to be (as Thoreau once urged) forever on the alert…alert to new opportunities to acquire useful knowledge about the business, about your customers, and about their own individual areas of responsibility.

     2. SHARE THE VISIONS you have of your business goals. Encourage employees to participate in reaching those goals. Share the problems…tell your people what’s going on, but in positive terms and by presenting problems as opportunities…then, listen to their ideas!

     3. DETERMINE WHAT “POSITIVE CLIMATE” CHANGES NEED TO BE MADE. Should changes be made in job descriptions or physical layout to improve working conditions? Be very specific. And take the time and trouble to write it all down on paper with a pen in your hand instead of a keyboard (Yes, it makes a difference!).

     4. SET AN EXAMPLE. If you want to see others act more positively, YOU must act more positively…in bad times as well as good! You will not be fostering teamwork if you rule by threats and intimidation. Praise in public and criticize in private. Be consistent with the goals you’ve established.

     5. REASSESS WHAT IT IS THAT YOU DO EACH DAY, and the ways that you do what you do. Make adjustments to be more consistent with the changes you are making. For example, if you want to encourage better communications, you’ll need to establish a more “open door” policy…and do more listening! 

     6. DEVISE NEW METHODS AND SYSTEMS for developing a more positive climate–such as short weekly meetings to evaluate progress, and a reward system for improved performance.

IN AN OPTIMUM POSITIVE WORK CLIMATE, people know exactly what is expected of them, and where they fit in. Everyone shares the same goals. Employees know how they can be effective, and what kinds of behavior will be rewarded.

What kinds of behavior are you rewarding? Remember that what you reward, is what you get more of! 

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Hal@Businessworks.US or 302.933.0116

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson] 

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals. God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone! 

The Business of Healthcare

Reality is that doctors are no longer” just” examiners, diagnosticians, and healers. In fact, the way things have been going, odds are that something about the healthcare profession will be vastly different by the time we wake up tomorrow morning.

And today, doctors are routinely expected to be insurance experts; banking, investment and financial wizards; administrative hot-shots; marketing, patient relations and community relations gurus; human resource management directors; professional buyers; government compliance champions; shrinks (even if they’re not psychiatrists or psychologists); oh, yes, and family icons.

Does this all add up to patients not getting as much quality care and attention? Of course. How can ANY human being whose existence is devoted to providing professional healthcare be expected to give patients full attention with so many other commitments and expectations tugging at her or his stethoscope? There is a way. Read on.

Thankfully, doctors share many of the same hallmark characteristics as entrepreneurs — from managing diverse cases, juggling breakneck schedules, being able and willing to work long hours and turn on the proverbial dime (if FDR ever knew!), to being self-empowering, quick decision makers with fairly strong delegation skills…and commanding (commandeering?) egos.

     Both–doctors and entrepreneurs–are motivated by the desire for personal achievement and financial gain, as well as a deep sense of things spiritual. Both take reasonable risks. Hence the name I created many years ago: “Doctorpreneurs.”

The differences of course are equally important. Human (and animal) healing, relief, care, wellness, and hope are certainly not software, electronics, transportation…or beer, hot dogs, tobacco, and french fries!

Two telling characteristics common to savvy doctors and true-blooded entrepreneurs is that both will only take reasonable risks, and both are smart enough to recognize that:

A) They don’t know and don’t want to know everything outside their realm of expertise, nor do they want to sacrifice the time it takes to learn because it detracts from their specialized skills and interests, and

B) They need to find and surround themselves with people who are experts in their own fields because in the long run it’s easier and less expensive to pay professional fees than to waste time and energy learning by trial and error.

     These are not traits of government or corporate leaders.

In the end, they are the traits that will hold our embattled healthcare programs and services together in much the same fashion that entrepreneurs (ala Jobs and Gates) will be the true agents of change as captains of small business that will turn the economy’s tide to productivity, prosperity, and growth.

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Input welcome anytime: Hal@TheWriterWorks.com (”Businessworks” in the subject line) or comment below. Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals, good night and God bless you! halalpiar  # # # 

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How REASONABLE is the risk

of combining client interests?

It may very well be that when you decide to merge the activities of two or more clients who you think have compatible interests, you will get stung! You may be setting yourself up to suffer the consequences of their inadequacies.

It’s not just what you see on “COPS”–Odds are that more police officers will be killed and injured in response to a “domestic (family fight) call” than even a robbery or high-speed car chase. Why? Because battling relatives often turn on the police who are entering their home. They see the officers as invading their space and interfering in their private dispute.

Police crisis intervention training calls for officers to immediately separate warring or arguing members of a household to physically go to different rooms, or at least different sides of the same room as a tactic for diffusing the anger, preventing themselves from being set upon, and for setting the stage to encourage reasonable discussion and negotiation.

When you attempt to combine interests of different clients you service on the grounds that you see some mutually beneficial commonalities, you need to be careful in your assessment that you are not an unwanted invasion of one or both clients’ privacy.

Maybe, for example, they simply don’t WANT to work with one another. Maybe they’ve tried it or talked about it in the past (even generations ago) and decided NOT to combine interests. Maybe one suspects the other of undermining. Maybe there’s some professional (or industrial) jealousy present. Maybe one of them suspects you of having ulterior motives. Maybethe employees of one business don’t like the empoloiyees of the other business. Maybe…

ASK each client to be forthright about the idea…what each thinks of it, what each thinks she or he can gain by it, how–exactly– each feels about the other entity. ASK each to reassure you that each is totally supportive BEFORE activating any part of the plan. Meet ahead of time with each separately, and then with both together. Make sure they share the same understandings and goals.

Starting to sound like pre-marriage counseling?Absolutely! In fact, if you perceive even the slightest edge to any of these discussions, a pre-combined-interest agreement might even be in order. OR you may simply decide the winds are not favorable, and back off the deal before anyone steps up to the plate.

Let the track-records of the clients and your personal instincts be your guide in deciding between pursuit, abandonment and modification. Make certain the risks to all involved are “reasonable.”

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Hal@BUSINESSWORKS.US

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals and God bless you! 

For the first time ever…

…in over 330 daily entries, I have been so overwhelmed with visitor traffic to see last night’s post, that I’ve elected to simply let it stand tonight and tomorrow! Regular business and professional practice development input will resume tomorrow night (5/25). Thanks for stopping by. Please return tomorrow.  

“Thank you for your

service to our country!”

     It’s so simple. That’s all it takes. Walk up to anyone in a military uniform — or anyone who proudly wears or displays an insignia identifying him or herself as a veteran or active officer or recruit, extend your arm to shake hands, look her or him in the eye and simply say: “Thank you for your service to our country!”

     Not only will you make that person’s day, but (and this may surprise you) you’ll make your own as well. You’ll feel as pleased walking away as the person you took the ten seconds out of your life to stop!

     Remember Memorial Day Weekend is more than beaches, BBQ’s and parties. It’s a time for tribute to those who have lost their lives and those who have served us all in defense of America. What does this have to do with business to warrant attention on a business blog? Your business and mine could not even exist without the courage, vigilence and protection of those who serve our country.

     Thank you to all those who have served in and for the United States Armed Forces. You make and have made it possible for business owners and managers and entrepreneurs to be free to conduct business and grow business and make business work.

     It is, after all, small business that has made this country great, and it will be small business that leads the way to economic recovery. You who have served our nation have kept small business pathways clear. Now it’s the job of small business to step it up and take advantage of those openings to regain the economic stability that government and big business lost along the way.

TRY THIS:

Make “Thank you for your service to our country!”

a statement of appreciation year-round.

     By making it part of your ongoing practice to extend these words with every armed services encounter (not to mention the recognition due our police, fire and EMS personnel too), you will in fact be boosting your own business as well as your reputation for caring about what’s truly important…because it is!

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Input welcome anytime: Hal@TheWriterWorks.com (”Businessworks” in the subject line) or comment below. Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals, good night and God bless you! halalpiar              # # # 

FREE BLOG SUBSCRIPTION? Click on ”Posts RSS Feed” (Center Column), or now on your AMAZON Kindle for just $1.99 a month after a free trial. FEELING CREATIVE? Visit the daily growing 7-Word Story (That’s now 249 days in the making) and add your own 7 words: http://halalpiar.com/?page_id=157

     Thank you for stopping by. I’m closed on Fridays for postings while I work on producing a series of video clips to feature here on July 4th!

     But while you’re here, please DO skim through some Archives (far right column). I guarantee you’ll find info and ideas that fit your current personal and business and professional practice development needs.

     For more information on my business services, please visit www.TheWriterWorks.com  

     I’ll return with my regular Saturday through Thursday daily posts beginning again tomorrow (Saturday) night. Please return soon. I genuinely appreciate your visits AND my ongoing blog following of family, friends, past and present clients and students, and business owners and managers from more than 30 different countries! Thank you all!

     My writing can also be found at

• www.BizBrag.com 
• www.LinkedIn.com 
• www.MerchantCircle.com 
• www.Twitter.com/halalpiar
• on AMAZON’s Kindle (see below)
• with frequent comments on www.SalesBlogCast.com    

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Input welcome anytime: Hal@TheWriterWorks.com (”Businessworks” in the subject line) or comment below. Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals, good night and God bless you! halalpiar              # # # 

FREE BLOG SUBSCRIPTION? Click on ”Posts RSS Feed” (Center Column), or now on your AMAZON Kindle for just $1.99 a month after a free trial. FEELING CREATIVE? Visit the daily growing 7-Word Story (That’s now 248 days in the making) and add your own 7 words: http://halalpiar.com/?page_id=157

You’re boss for the day,

in charge of the zoo.

Whaddaya say?

Whaddaya do?

     Even when you think no one’s around or paying attention, everyone IS. It’s hard to run your own business on stage in the spotlights (especially in some of the larger more public theatres), but “on stage” is where you and every other boss perform every day.

     You may even need to drop the curtain (or close your door) every once in awhile for a few minutes privacy just to sniffle, pick, scratch or gargle without an audience. But–even then–remember you are still the chief muckity-muck and (like it or not) you’re a parental figure to those who work for you.

     You probably don’t think that your employees are anywhere near being neurotic. You may be astounded to learn that many of them (if not all) measure your every move. They all watch TV. So they all know how to observe, scope things out, size things up, and “case the joint.” It’s rare that anything you say isn’t repeated over and again both on the job, and at home, as well as to neighbors, friends, teammates and bar buddies. Your community and industry exposure is as public as a professional athlete’s is to her or his sport.

     Odds are pretty good that your people want to butter you up, or do you in, or simply not make waves. An exclusive small handful are self-actualized enough in the work they do to enjoy doing the work they do with no greater agenda. But this is a very small fraction of the total. None of them will do their jobs with the conviction and commitment that you have. None will do things exactly the same way that you would.

     But this is why you get the big bucks. It’s not your job to get things done. It’s your job to get others to get things done. Bottom line is that bosses who treat employees as underlings produce underlings. Underlings don’t sell. Underlings don’t innovate. Underlings don’t take initiative. Underlings hate their jobs.

     Bosses who treat employees like partners produce partnerships and employee teams that believe in what they are doing. These are the people who will strengthen the organization because they are granted the respect that renders them not afraid to step up to the plate, nor to challenge the status quo.  

     As Boss, the best, most productive and motivating thing you can do is to take the time and trouble to learn a little bit more than you presently know about what makes each employee who works with you “tick”…what kinds of dreams, desires, wants and needs does each have.

     You needn’t be a shrink to do this. Simply open your eyes and ears more. Tune in to the kinds of things people do and say. When you can reward behavior with rewards that really matter to each individual, you are cultivating long-term commitment, ongoing loyalty, and exemplary performance. 

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 Hal@Businessworks.US or comment below.

Thanks for visiting. 

Go for your goals, good night and God bless you!