Skills blog

Let people sense your strong will to succeed. You communicate with your words, your appearance, your manners, but especially with your sense of purpose. Certainty is more persuasive than charm. In business as in sport, the person who wins is usually the one who wants it the most.

Love them or lose them. As the economy brightens engagement is hugely important. You need to make sure each of your people think ‘this is the best place for me to be’.

The only certainty about change is that it will never be this slow in the future. Everyone has resistance to change, but research shows those with high performance potential have lower resistance.

In a leadership role, and anyone who is responsible for the performance of others is a leader, you are always setting an example whether consciously or not. If you’re hacked off who is going to pick it up? Everyone.

Something that never ceases to amaze me is the effort that many organisations direct towards getting new business while overlooking their existing client base. That’s crazy – it’s like filling a bucket that has a hole in it.

Many people start a new job or their job description changes and they have the attitude, ‘I’ll wait and see whether or not this job comes up to my expectations.’

The ability to convince yourself of your potential is the greatest selling skill of all. To win more business with this approach, one of the questions you must ask yourself is: ‘Am I a two- or three dimensional salesperson?’

Protect your attitude in sales and leadership roles

The laws of aerodynamics tell us that the bumble bee cannot fly. Its wings are too small, it’s too heavy, it has insufficient muscle and it’s the wrong shape. Technically there is no known way that a bumble bee can get off the ground. But fortunately, no one has told the bees and they carry on flying around.

Your ability to set the direction, quite rightly, is a key focus of good leadership training. What’s your goal? What key areas do you need to work on? What are the priorities?

Your responsibility to your followers is to be clear about where you are headed. You must define the performance objective.