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| Learn the purpose behind the chart and the Blackberry. |
Ah-Ha! Moment – As I shared in early 2010, my focus for this year is "Adding Value to the People" – and I always enjoy adding value to the folks in my firm. As is typical, we have a firm meeting every September or October. In planning this year's September firm meeting, I had noticed how engaged my staff were at our April 2010 firm meeting, when we focused on "soft skills" – in particular, skills such as "Active Listening" critical to our overall firmwide goal of doing a better job expanding our relationships within our clients.
Taking a little risk, I decided to expand this focus on communication and interpersonal skills. I brought together two key persons to brainstorm ways we could not only tie together many of the group and self-study courses designed for the firm members over the past two years – but illustrate how applying their concepts, both inside and outside the firm, was already benefitting the firm members, the firm, and our clients.
It took the three of us two meetings lasting nearly four hours to initially chart our course, and then to adjust our final approach. Between and following our meetings, work continued individually, with emails and phone calls and impromptu working sessions used to fine tune our individual presentations.
The result? Three hours of content which engaged all members of the firm – because we reinforced and expanded specific, easy-to-apply techniques showing how to:
- Understand others better by actively listening,
- Sense a person's communication style and tailor messages accordingly,
- Provide effective performance feedback,
- Assess and deliver the leadership style appropriate to a person's development level, and
- Apply techniques to allow you to honor all your promises and thus live in full integrity.
Achieving all this with a diverse group of talented people is "Adding Value" in my book!
