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It’s easy to stand out in business when you are the only one of your kind, but what happens when the goods or service you offer are exactly the same as everybody else?

I am currently in Cairns getting ready to present at a conference today. Now, Cairns is a tourist town. Every street corner has a hotel or motel – all jostling for the tourist dollar. With all of this competition, how does  a tiny, unremarkable hotel stand out from the crowd?

The place I am staying in is called Inn Cairns on the main pedestrian mall. It doesn’t have  a flashy entry, the rooms are normal hotel style rooms and they don’t supply meals. So why am I writing about it?

Last night when I arrived the owner Selwyn was at the door, greeting me by name (this is my first visit so his crystal ball was great). He held the door open and welcomed me to his place – and not just a pat greeting, a warm heart felt greeting. He introduced me to his son and son-in-law who run the place with him – one of them had been up to my room to turn the lights and air-conditioning on for me. They gave great tips on local food and things to see and were just genuinely nice people.

They turned a room for the night into an experience of being a welcome guest in their home. So what is remarkable when you are the same as everyone else? You are. You need to bring your whole self and your passion to your job and your role. If you do that – people will love you for it and you will become remarkable.

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance copywriter

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This week I have been talking with a few not for profit groups and they reminded me of the challenge that many bodies who receive external funding face – the need for what appears to be 4 billion reports back to different funding bodies, government agencies and the community.  You can put some logic back into it … and the trick is to start with planning.

For a time I was in charge of planning & reporting for a core government department. I remember looking at all of the plans and reports we had to produce in a year to meet all of the legal & accountability requirements – and figuring there had to be an easier way (those of you who know me, know I love to recycle information – write it once and use it for multiple purposes).

What I ended up doing was create a planning calendar. I listed across the top of a spreadsheet the different months and down the side the various plans & reports that had to be produced. I then did a mini Gantt chart across the calendar looking at how long it took to create each plan & report. This calendar was made pretty by our graphic design team and every manager had a copy to put on their wall (no excuses that they did not know what was needed each month).

I then looked at each plan & report to work out specifically what was needed in each, and whether or not we could collect the data once and use it for multiple purposes.  I then renegotiated a few KPIs with funding groups to help make data collection easier – I wanted to reduce the number of KPI’s to manageable levels.

From a manager’s view, what that looked like on the ground was when our Executive did their strategic plan for the year, we took an additional half day out to look at the questions “If these are the goals & KPI’s, what are the HR, funding, IT, waste management, environmental impact etc implications and what are the KPIs’s for those?”  This meant we covered off all the planning & measure setting in one fell swoop. We used these existing measures in as many funding submissions as we could, rather than create new measures.

We included individual annual performance plans in the process. We had a set “performance review season” where every annual review had to be done & linked back to the overall kpis.

We then had managers do just one monthly report against each of the KPI’s (so they were happier as they only had one report to do). I collated the data from all of the separate managers reports and then split it out into the different reports that had to be submitted.  I started doing this manually and then got to the stage where I had a macro pull the data off excel spreadsheets into one central spreadsheet and then another macro pull the data out of that spreadsheet into the different report templates I had created. There is always technology to make things easier.

The point is, there is always another way with writing reports.  You don’t have to be bound by what is. Take a step out, reflect on your assumptions and then take action to fix the 4 billion reports.  And if you find yourself writing the same stuff over and over … there is always another way!

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

“You are only as strong as your weakest link”. “One bad apple spoils the barrel”. If you think about it, there’s a lot of sayings about the negative difference one person can make. But is this really true? Can one bad employee wreck  a team? This was the puzzle given to me by a client – they wanted proof that one bad egg can spoil the batch.

So … what proof is there?  Well there has been some very elegant research done by Will Felps, Terence R Mithcell and Eliza Byington back in 2006. They first did a review of all of the current research on the issue and then conducted clinical tests to find out exactly what happens when one negative group member joins a group.

In their research, they defined negative group member in one of three ways. They used academic language, but the categories were:

• The slacker - someone who doesn’t pull their weight, doesn’t take on tasks or responsibilities, who doesn’t contribute or meet deadlines.
• The jerk – someone who is obnoxious and puts people down, makes fun of people, these are the ones making ethnic or sexist jokes, publicly embarrasses people and are generally rude .
• The depressed pessimist – someone who always believes that anything the company tries is doomed to failure, they are highly anxious, insecure & irritable

I am sure most people at one time or other in their careers have met one of these charmers.

But what happens to the group when you add in one of these people? Well according to their findings, the group productivity drops between 30-40%. Add to that effect, you start to see other team members begin to exhibit the traits of the negative person, which increases the problems for the team in terms of productivity, cooperation, creativity, morale and learning.  People are less interested in finishing a task – they just want to “get it over with”.

So the next time a manager avoids dealing with a negative person in the workplace, you may want to point them in the direction of the research, and ask them if they are more willing to reduce their team’s productivity by 30-40% than have an uncomfortable conversation with one person.

If you want more information about the study, here’s a link to an interview with Will Felps, and a link to the full research report “How, When, and Why Bad Apples Spoil the Barrel: Negative Group Members and Dysfunctional Groups”.

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

Yesterday I attended an Unconference in Brisbane and had my first experience of an open spaces format. This approach could best be described as the anti-model of traditional conferences. In open spaces, the participants work out what they want to talk about, when they want to talk about it and then move to where they want to be. If they find the conversation not for them (translate that to being boring) they are encouraged to wander off and find another conversation.  As a facilitator, conference leader and control freak from way back, I can tell you that the approach would be enough to have given me a lot of very grey hairs if I was running it.

The people who attended were successful business leaders and were given the very strong boundaries of  “sell through not to” – meant the pressure came off in terms of people trying to flog their wares.  This was not the place for elevator speeches – but for building a community of peers. Any direct marketing was frowned upon.

So what happened? Well for starters a lot of brilliant topics hit the agenda – Getting stuff done, How much free info is too much?, Building a community around your business, how to engage your employees, effective networking, using social media effectively, charging what you are worth, what is a Thought Leader as well as a whole pile of useful discussions on best Apps/books/videos for business.

People were encouraged to be “self-full” – to actively get their needs met through the discussions and not wait and hope that someone would cover their issues for them. And as result, people wandered in and out of the conversations, adding their insights as well as getting ideas and strategies to apply in their business.  In terms of participation, some people participated boots and all. Others sat back and watched. Still others dipped their toes into the odd conversation and then shrunk back.

This to me was a metaphor for how people approach business and life. Some leap in and take action (even if they make mistakes), others watch and wait for the perfect moment and others flip between action and inaction. I am not sure there is a “right” answer – just it pays to know your natural tendency, and at times challenge your approach to see if it is helping you or hindering you.

So where would you place yourself – a watcher in life or an active participator? An observer or a leader?

Me, well I had a ball. I enjoyed the intelligent conversations with great people and have a few insights to work with over the coming weeks.

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter