Dealing With Difficult People

Had a really interesting coaching session with a client last week, when I asked “What would you like to get out of today’s session” the reply I got was “How do I deal with difficult people?” That’s a big subject, and I could write a book or two about it.

For the purposes of this blog we will define difficult people as people who behave in a way we would rather they didn’t and who say and do things that we deem are unacceptable.

Sometimes it is worth considering are these people really being difficult or are they just being different?

It is also worth holding the mirror up and asking “How are we contributing to making this situation difficult?” which leads us nicely into one of the first keys to dealing with difficult people:-

Recruiting the behaviours you want to see…This maybe a little late if you have already recruited but is still a worthwhile exercise going forward to prevent making the same mistake again. How clearly defined are the roles and responsibilities for each and every position in your business. Blurred lines around who does what by when can lead to what is perceived as difficult behaviours when the challenge is really a case of a bad hire due to a poor understanding of what is really required to fulfil the role.

What are the key behaviours you want to see from the person whose role this will be? Once you understand this you can gear your recruitment ads and process towards asking the focused questions that will help you hire not just on skills but attitude as well.

Define clear behaviour goals…Not only behaviours you want to see but also behaviours you want changed. Define clearly what you expect to see in people, and how you expect them to behave. In business it is normal to set goals for things that we want people to DO. A change in thinking may be needed here how about defining who you want people to BE. By having clear goals and objectives you can measure what those correct behaviours are and manage the performance and build that into a plan

Hold regular one to ones…It is okay setting goals and measures to achieving those goals or what is better known as  KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) I believe this description can be changed to Keeping People Informed. The way to do that is through having clear communication channels and giving regular performance updates.

In most businesses, employees get a once year review or appraisal, challenge is these tend to be held towards the end of the financial year and are a way of determining how much bonus the employee is to receive for their performance over the previous 11 months. If the employee has met all their targets brilliant life’s good but if they haven’t performed it’s too late to do anything about it, the business has already suffered because of this person’s performance.

Every business owner should be thinking in terms of building a meeting rhythm within their business. Meetings can be daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually depending on the message and agenda. They need to be designed to meet the needs of the business.

One of the biggest excuses I get for not holding meetings is “I/we haven’t got time” to which I normally reply “You have as much time as you’re ever going to get, what is it costing you and your business not finding the time to hold these meetings?”

Give specific feedback…There is a perception that we only give feedback when there is a problem with performance in other words leave people alone until they do something wrong and then zap them!

I sometimes get asked “What can I do to motivate my staff?” it may be that the question is wrong and a better question might be “What am I doing to de-motivate my staff?”

Instead of catching people doing things wrong and giving negative feedback how about flipping that and catching people doing things right and giving encouraging feedback? 

Instead of knocking people down build them up. As humans if we are getting recognition for a certain type of behaviour we are more likely to repeat it.

Understand why the person is doing what they are doing…By asking a better question you can effectively get inside the other persons head and have a greater understanding of what is driving the difficult behaviour. Once they have explained it they may also become aware of how the behaviour is affecting other people and other areas of the business. 

Feedback will have a similar outcome.

We spend most of our time doing things unconsciously we go through life in a state of hypnosis and let our sub conscious minds run the show. This can sometimes lead to us not knowing how we are behaving and the effect it has on other people.

Actions you can take to move this forward:

Look at your present team and in particular the people who you feel are behaving in less than useful ways.

Define the behaviours that are causing the issue.

Imagine giving those people effective feedback:

·         Describe the behaviour

·         Explain the impact that behaviour is having both good and bad.

·         Specify the behaviours you would prefer to see or the behaviours you would like continued in the event of giving positive feedback.

·         Spell out the consequences of not changing the behaviour. In the case of a great performance the consequences are obviously going to be great so please carry on.

Let me know how you get on with this process and I look forward to hearing all about your success.

The Number 1 Marketing Strategy Since The Beginning of Time

Over the past couple of days I have been gathering ideas and content for our next workshop which will be themed around marketing that actually works.

Occasionally when I am presenting a workshop there may be people in the room who can be thinking along the lines of “That might work in the widget industry but it would never work in mine.” For that person it may be true, although I would still challenge the thought by asking “How could you make it work?” This did however get me thinking, is there a marketing strategy that does actually work in every industry? There is, and truth be told it has always been and always will be the number 1 strategy for marketing.

Strange thing is we all know about it but I have rarely walked into a business that has a plan in place to work on and continually improve it. Let me tell you what it is and as way of a bonus I will also throw a couple of supporting strategies that will help take your marketing to a whole new level.

The ultimate marketing strategy is this, Be Remarkable in every single thing you do. You have to be remarkable from the way you deliver your product or service, the product or service itself, the way your phone is answered, the way you and  your people turn up, the way you invoice, in other words you have to be remarkable right across the board. Just to clarify this point you don’t have to be good or great you have to be remarkable. You want people to go away and because of the remarkable experience they have had dealing with you they feel compelled to remark about you to other people!

Just to make this point a little clearer when Sir Chris Hoy won the worlds sprint championship in 2012, who finished second? My guess would be that for some of you it is much harder to name the second man because most people just don’t care about second best.

The person who is remarkable by being slightly faster than everybody else gets all the praise, all plaudits, all the money and trappings that go along with being remarkable.

You may asking “why have I got to be remarkable?” here is why; who is your competition? Most of you might be thinking about a competing business or the company just down the street, truth is your competition is anybody your actual or potential customer chooses. Basically they can compare you with anybody.

If somebody can purchase an item on Amazon and have it delivered the very next day in a particular time slot your delivery will be compared to theirs. If somebody can make a purchase from a website in the evening and the very next day pick it up in store you will be compared to that experience. Rightly or wrongly you are always being compared to the best. Since the arrival of the internet you are on a world stage you have to be remarkable more now than ever.

So let me ask you “What is your plan to be remarkable? What strategies have you and your team got in place to make sure you are and continue to be remarkable?

The number 2 strategy is to keep in constant contact with your customers. Not every six months, quarter or monthly every single week! I’m not talking about trying to sell them something every week, what I am talking about is strengthening your relationship with them by giving them something that will add value to them which could be information, new ideas, or just plain old helping them overcome a problem.

The final strategy, ask for referrals if you are being remarkable and adding value when you keep in touch then ask them “Who do you know who would benefit and appreciate the level of service that we are providing you with” and once you have the name ask “Do you want to contact them or would you prefer to just give me their number?”

There are loads of great marketing ideas out there but I believe these are the top 3.

So just to recap:

1.    Be remarkable in everything that you do.

2.    Keep in constant contact and add value every time

3.    Ask for referrals

If these were the only three marketing strategies you used in your business what do you think the difference would be?

Give them a try and let me know how successful they have been for you.

Looking Into My Crystal Ball

Last weekend I was travelling back from a trip to Bristol and decided to break up the journey by stopping for a coffee at a service station.

At the table I sat down at somebody had left a Sun newspaper, not my usual choice of reading but I decided to have a quick flick through to see what was happening in the world through the eyes of the people at The Sun.

There’s not much to report back to you in the way of real news but one page did grab my attention and that was Mystic Meg’s astrology predictions for the National Lottery which had a rather large prize fund and was being drawn last Saturday evening.

Were her predictions correct? To be truthful I have no idea. What fascinated me about this piece was that there are people out there that do believe in horoscopes and indeed some who plan their lives by them.

So I thought I would look into my crystal ball and see if I could come up with any predictions for business owners for the rest of 2016, and here is one that will prove a challenge for the vast majority of businesses this year.

Take the last 3 months in your business multiply by 4 and that’s your 2016!

Most business owners will hate that because it highlights that HOPE is not a strategy.

Truth is that if you really want the last 9 months of your year to be better than the first 3, you need to start doing something different.

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you will always get what you’ve always got”…Tony Robbins

Change can be hard but that is not a reason not to change yet a great many business owners will go into denial when they look at their first quarter results or come to the belief that they just need to work harder!

If I was to ask you to finish off this line for me….. practice makes….?

Most will have answered that with ‘perfect’ after all that is what we have been taught.

Truth is practice doesn’t make ‘perfect’, practice makes ‘permanent’.

As an example if I were a golfer and because of the way I held the club my shots always seemed to swing to the left of where I am aiming and if I were to spend more hours practicing this swing I would see no improvement, I would be wasting my time.

In his heyday Tiger Woods was asked why he had a coach to which he replied “I can’t see my own swing”

And there lies a real problem for business owners because they are working in their business and caught up in the day to day operations doing the do so to speak, when things aren’t going as expected the go to strategies tend to be work harder or put more hours in.

So, by practising the thinking of work harder or put in more hours this can become a permanent fixture in the life of a business owner.  

So what can you do?

In life and business you either win or you learn and a vital process that you will find game changing for your business is to STOP take some time out for quality thinking, REFLECT what has gone well what has gone not so well, REVIEW and UNDERSTAND unpack and analyse what has happened and why did it happen? If needed CHANGE if what you have been doing isn’t working and now because you have taken time out to understand why it’s not working it is time to change direction by either tweaking your strategy or changing your strategy

For some of you it may be quite a challenge to take this time out to run this process but what is the alternative?

For all our clients and owners that attend our Ultimate Planning Day a pre-requisite for the day is that they take time out and complete a preparation document which is designed to take them through the first four steps  STOP, REFLECT, REVIEW and UNDERSTAND the CHANGE step is of course covered in the workshop itself.

If you would like your own copy of preparation document just drop us a line.

Your past does not determine your future is it time for you to give yourself and your business a real lift by taking time out to REFLECT, REVIEW, UNDERSTAND AND CHANGE?