hardwiring Archives - Excellerate Associates

Leaders: People Can’t Put Their Hands Around Vagueness

October 5, 2023 by Lisa Mininni Leave a Comment

In today’s fast-paced work environment, effective leadership communication is vital for engaging and motivating team members. Gallup reports that employees who receive “meaningful” feedback from their managers are four times more likely to be engaged.

But, providing feedback only once a year falls short in elevating performance. Equally disengaging is not providing specific feedback. The reality is people can’t put their hands around vagueness.

Unfortunately, performance development often goes awry due to critical shortcomings in leadership communication. Consider the following scenarios:

Scenario 1: The Executive’s Surprise

Despite facing resource constraints and putting in extensive hours, an executive managed to surpass performance goals. However, during the performance evaluation, the CEO unexpectedly revised the performance criteria without prior notification.

The CEO’s rationale behind this decision was that due to the company’s overall poor financial performance, everyone should share responsibility, even though the hard-working executive had saved the company millions of dollars and exceeded all the financial goals for their area of responsibility that was agreed upon at the start of the year. This sudden alteration left the executive feeling demoralized, much like changing the finish line right after securing the first-place position.

Scenario 2: The Sales Executive’s Misalignment

A sales executive and a team member agreed on a yearly goal, only for the executive to express an expectation of significantly higher sales at year-end, without any prior communication or goal adjustment conversations during the year.

Scenario 3: The Unspecific Complaint

A customer service manager confronted an employee about a customer complaint without providing specific feedback on what they heard, when they heard it, or inquiring about the employee’s perspective. The manager arrived at the conversation with preconceived notions, made accusations, and left the employee confused and without specific action steps for improvement.

What could these leaders have done differently?

Approach with Curiosity, Not Conclusion

Leaders should approach conversations with curiosity rather than jumping to conclusions. By asking questions and seeking to understand, they can avoid creating unnecessary drama, making hasty decisions and damaging relationships and trust with others.

Incorporate Performance Development into a Company Culture

Establishing a Performance Development Culture involves consistently following the Plan, Coach, Review/Develop, and Reward process. Leaders should engage in follow-up conversations when goals change and clearly communicate any unspoken expectations. This includes recalibrating expectations before the end of the year, as needed.

It’s also important to provide positive, strengths-based feedback so that the team member continues to build on their success. When they have specific, solutions-based feedback that aligns with the desired outcomes, they have a pathway for elevating their performance.

Understand Human Wiring

Recognizing individual differences in wiring, particularly in terms of certainty, is essential. Leaders should increase their awareness of their communication styles to ensure clarity and alignment with team members’ needs and preferences.

In each of the cases, the leader giving feedback was naturally wired lower in certainty. Leaders wired lower in the certainty driver not only want a loosely structured work environment but they don’t need as much information to form a decision or conclusion as someone higher in certainty. They didn’t collect information to relay it to the employees or think through their already-formed conclusions.

In some of these cases, the leader also didn’t relay their unspoken expectations when it shifted from the mutual agreement of the goals. In each of these cases, the employee leaves deflated and without knowing what action they could take particularly if the employee’s wiring is higher in certainty.

Strong leaders empower others by viewing feedback as a continuous process, encompassing various crucial elements. At Excellerate Associates, we show leaders a continuous improvement approach to elevating performance, which includes

Planning: Set Clear Expectations
Coaching: Encourage Professional and Personal Development
Review/Develop: Assess Performance and Provide Continuous Feedback
Reward: Align Rewards with Performance Goals

In conclusion, elevating leadership communication requires a holistic and ongoing approach to giving feedback. By avoiding common pitfalls and embracing a culture of continuous improvement particularly around elevating performance, leaders can engage their teams effectively and influence breakthrough performance.

INVITATION

In the world of business, success often hinges on the ability to build a winning team. But what’s the secret sauce to creating a team that can help you scale your business effectively? It all comes down to understanding human wiring (yours and your team members) and the very systems that build in freedom.

At our upcoming Wake Up Profitable Boot Camp on October 24-25, 2023, we delve into the fascinating intricacies of human wiring when building a team. By understanding the unique strengths, innate motivations, and communication styles for each position on your team, you’ll be equipped to assemble a group that not only works together seamlessly but also drives your business forward.

Our boot camp goes beyond the conventional wisdom. There’s plenty of hands on coaching to connect fresh ideas and provide you with cutting-edge strategies for team building and business scaling. We’re not just about theory; we provide practical solutions that you may not have considered, thanks to our systems approach. You will walk out with a Blueprint to scale and systematize your business.

Don’t miss out on this opportunity to unlock your business’s full potential. Join us at the Wake Up Profitable Boot Camp, where you’ll gain valuable insights, connect with like-minded entrepreneurs, and leave with your Blueprint to scale so that you take your business to new levels.

If you’re inspired to grow your business, please register by next Friday HERE and receive your human wiring assesssment, too.

Wired for Certainty? 3 Ways to Increase Productivity When Working Remotely

July 30, 2020 by Lisa Mininni Leave a Comment

As you may know, there are interesting aspects of your unique wiring pattern. We all have a human wiring pattern and some traits are more dominant than others.

Your wiring influences how you navigate changes, your daily communication, and how you get results in all aspects of your life and business. Your wiring tells us how you are best engaged in decision making, why some people want lots of information to make an effective decision, and others want the critical points of information.

None of this is good or bad, or right or wrong, it just is. When we can objectively define these traits and understand how they are strengths, and build on those strengths as well as understand where there are limitations, and coach to minimize them, we can maximize the differences that every person brings by their unique wiring pattern to each organization.

For example, people who have a high degree of certainty, are naturally careful that whatever they are responsible for is done right. While this hardwiring trait can be a strength – because it drives you to produce work of great quality, it can also be a limitation if not managed. Emotionally, this often means that instead of living your life from a place of self-acceptance, perfectionists are on a treadmill chasing the illusion of having everything in their lives be “correct,” “right” or “orderly.”

While all workers have adjusted to remote work environments, workers wired with a high degree of certainty that are transitioning for the first time from an existing office to a remote working environment experience challenges to their productivity. The same can be said when hiring an individual who has never worked on a remote basis before but will be doing so for the first time in your organization.

Remote working environments often lack the structure and certainty this wiring pattern prefers. Consider the following three ways to increase remote productivity in someone wired for certainty:

1. Set clear expectations.

To create certainty on the workflow, set clear expectations of the work anticipated for each week. Establish recurring periodic meetings to provide more information and increase the overall sense of security.

2. Increase the accessibility of reference documentation.

Construct a list of internal reference documents, co-worker contact information, or work protocols that they rely on at work are also easily accessible at home.

3. Answer the why factor.

Focus on the why factor (why work needs to be performed in a certain way for optimal results or to avoid problems). If you’re seeing productivity decrease, you may want to provide more performance feedback. First, list the areas where work is being done well. People wired for certainty can be sensitive to feedback so it’s important to identify what is being done well. If applicable, provide objective feedback on what needs improvement, making sure you answer the why it is done a certain way.

Every person brings value to the team; and when working environments shift, it’s important to address each person’s unique wiring pattern. As a leader, pinpoint the strengths, coach the limitations, and maximize the differences that every person brings to level up engagement and productivity.

Register now to learn more at the Wired to Win! Your Path to Passion, Purpose, and Prosperity

If you’re inspired to learn more about your human wiring and how it transforms your work environment, engagement, and results, attend our high-value class, Wired to Win! Your Path to Passion, Purpose, and Prosperity.

Register at https://excellerateassociates.com/wired-to-win/

Human Wiring Lesson: What’s Underneath How You Enroll Someone?

January 30, 2020 by Lisa Mininni Leave a Comment

At some point in your career, you’re selling something. You sell an idea, a product, or a service. Whether you’ve been in sales for a long time or have never sold, the key to enrolling someone in that idea, product or service is easy when you understand what’s underneath engaging them.

Human Wiring and Enrolling

When my clients learn about human wiring when having a sales conversation, they are relieved to hear that selling isn’t about persuading someone to buy something they don’t want. It’s not about forcing someone to change their mind. It’s also not saying certain things in an order to force an outcome. Yet, these are the very beliefs people have on their mind when they are trying to sell something.

Sales is about honoring the other person. The highest form of honoring another person is finding out what they want and delivering communication they way they want to receive it.

One of my clients had been in sales for many years but was new to her understanding about human wiring. She understood that she was energized by face-to-face interaction. She exuded energy and was the go-to fun maker. Naturally, she loved the social aspects of her position and excelled at motivating others in participating in projects.

However, there was one manager she had difficulty with enrolling in becoming part of a special project group. While she knew this manager for a long time and liked her, the manager, at times, occurred to her as someone who dismissed her ideas and was abrupt in her communication.

When I asked my client how she would invite this manager to participate in a task force group, my client responded with her natural impulse: to enroll her as she would like to be enrolled. She said she was going to engage the manager by sharing how fun it was going to be and explain what a great experience it was going to be for the manager. Before my client could further explain her approach, I invited her to consider another way.

How You Experience Someone is Key to Understanding How to Enroll Them

When someone describes someone and how they experience the other person, it often can be attributed to an element of human wiring that is the opposite. I asked her to engage the manager by finding out what was important to the manager. I also suggested that she focus on the results the manager wanted to get from her participation in the task force.

The next day, the phone rings. My client was thrilled that she successfully engaged her manager in participating in the task force with ease. In that moment of enrolling her manager, she realized that when she was focused on delivering communication the way the manager needed to receive it, like asking the manager what was important to her and focusing on the results, it was easy to enroll the manager in participating on the task force.

Engaging someone in an idea, product, and service is simple. Find out what’s important to them and deliver the communication in the way they need to receive it. When you do, it’s the highest form of honoring the other person.

Your Invitation to Learn More

If you’re wanting to transform your results in business and in life, I invite you to our upcoming workshop, Wired to Win! Your Path to Passion, Purpose, and Profit. In two days, you will discover your innate human wiring at a level where it changes your thinking, your communication, and your outcomes.

What’s more, is that we will reverse engineer your goals in all areas of your life (using our Excelleration App) so you take action from your Contribution in the World not your circumstances. You’ll enjoy the experience of working through our Legacy Model, showing you how to align your life with your Contribution and human wiring. You’ll see how much the framework works for you in your focus, direction, conversations, leadership, relationships, and results.

Your workshop begins immediately with a Welcome Strategy Call followed by the live two-day event on Friday-Saturday, February 28-29, 2020 at the Business Innovation Lab in Livonia, Michigan. If inspired to powerfully create your 2020, register today at:
https://excellerateassociates.com/wired-to-win/

Human Wiring: How to Stop Being the Bottleneck in Your Business

May 24, 2018 by Lisa Mininni Leave a Comment

Does the idea of scaling your business make you feel uneasy because you think it will just add more work for you? If your answer is yes, then you may be the bottleneck in your business.

There is good news. The solution may not involve adding a costly layer to your organizational chart. There’ are small shifts that can make a real difference.

One of my clients expanded his business and fell behind on some of the critical success metrics. When we started to work together his schedule was overloaded, he was behind on several promises, and was working too many hours not leaving him energy or time with his family.

It’s really easy to think you need to add someone to your organizational chart to be the implementer or handle the daily communication. In fact, that may not be the ideal solution. First, we looked at several key areas of his business alignment and especially the way he was naturally wired.

He was wired with a high degree of autonomy and a high degree of certainty. Biologically, it was natural for him to want to put his thumbprint on ideas and make sure they were done right, which often gets translated into acting on his own ideas and doing things himself.

Not only was he hanging on to tasks his team could handle, he created an environment where his team went to him for everything because he would figure it out.

The innate autonomy he needed he was not providing to his team. He created the bottleneck in his business. There is a lot of personal power in discovering that you create your environment.

During his mentoring session, I asked him a few strategic questions. He quickly realized that he needed to shift a few things to have all of his critical success metrics work in all areas of his life.

In order to scale his business more effortlessly, he recognized the need to level up his leadership skills. There are two things that made a significant difference for his mix of wiring.

1. He would ask himself: Who on my team is the point person for this new project/client? Whenever he brought in business, his natural instinct was to hold on to the client. He would be the go between adding more to an already filled scheduled.

With the question in mind, he shifted the way he worked. He immediately started to engage the point person on his team in the conversations with the client. This early introduction paved the way for the team member to develop rapport with the client so the client would go to that point person rather than to him. Regardless if you have employees or independent contractors, add this handy question to your sales process.

2. He would ask his team member, “what do you recommend.” As someone naturally wired to want to solve challenges, having his team members come to him to solve these problems actually fed into his natural need to problem solve.

To change his results, he had to manage his natural impulse. When someone would come to him with a problem, instead of trying to figure it out, he would ask them for their opinion and solution. It wasn’t his first instinct, but he worked on managing his natural impulse.

It wasn’t long before his team realized they needed to step it up, too. They needed to present a solution to the problem instead of just the problem.

As an internal thinker, it didn’t always occur to him to verbalize exactly what he was looking for. He recognized the need to verbalize more of what he wanted so that the other person was clear on the outcome that was needed.

Within 30 days, he noticed a shift not only with himself, but with his team and the results that were being produced. His team members were taking proactive roles in the company, his schedule opened up to cultivate strategic relationships, and he had more time with his family.

As he mastered managing his natural wiring, more opportunities came his way. His team was highly engaged, and his revenue numbers increased over 62% from the previous year.

If you want to change the outside results, change the inside first. Then, watch was shows up.

It’s one thing to know how you’re wired, it’s another to understand how to align it, manage it, and spot the wiring in others. If you would like to understand your human wiring at a level where you powerfully create your desired future, register today for Wired to Win: Your Path to Passion, Purpose, and Profit on June 28-29, 2018.

Information and Registration:
Save $200 on tuition when you register by May 31 and apply code: wired62018

Innate Wiring in Hiring

May 9, 2018 by Lisa Mininni Leave a Comment

Your business can only grow to the maximum amount you can personally handle, unless you leverage yourself. To leverage yourself, you can systematize, automate, and/or add to your team.

Hiring someone is easy. Hiring someone who is a strong fit is one of the more tricky aspects of running a business.

According to Forbes magazine, almost 46% of new hires fail within just 18 months. Those statistics are staggering and costly especially to a small business owner.

While there is no perfect way to select a new member, many business owners make hiring decisions based on their gut feel. Your team is too important an investment to take that kind of hit-or-miss approach.

There are ways to improve the odds that your final selection of your new team member is the right one. One of the first steps that I recommend to my Profitability Lab mentoring clients is to look at how the job functions.

Let’s assume you wanted to hire a receptionist or assistant. This is the first person your clients will speak to or see upon a call or visit. They are your company’s first impression.

They can make or break a relationship with your client. So, you want to make sure you have the best fit and that means assessing the position.

Most business owners often underestimate how their receptionist will function. Will they:

Be talking primarily by phone or have face-to-face contact?
Juggle multiple tasks or process sequential information and data?
Greet people as they arrive or take complaints all day?

For many business owners, they are missing something in their hiring process. What’s missing is often a way to decipher the type of environment a person best thrives. This can be determined by a person’s natural wiring.

Natural wiring can tell you how they:

Communicate,
Process thought, and
Are best motivated

If you hired someone who was naturally hardwired to want a variety of work in their environment and you hired them into a position of processing paperwork in a specific sequence the entire day, the job would be draining for them after a while. You would spend a lot of time, effort, and money training them only to have them leave in 90 days or less because they were bored. Other candidates, however, would thrive in this environment, in fact, be motivated by that kind of predictable environment.

Human hardwiring goes far deeper than what we learn by reading a resume or assessing from an interview. Understanding how your position functions and how a candidate is wired are essential puzzle pieces that, when put together, increase your odds of a successful hire and consistently motivated employee.

One of the companies I worked with reduced their turnover from 99% to 0 in 3 months. The savings in training alone was staggering.

If you are inspired to dramatically transform these following areas in the next 2 months:

Hiring
Sales (whether you’re selling an idea, product or service)
Team Performance
Team Communication
Leadership and
Motivation
Self Confidence
Decision Making
Personal Effectiveness
Communication

…then register today for the Wired to Win! Your Path to Passion, Purpose, and Profit workshop on June 28-29, 2018 at our new headquarters, coworking, and conference building.

Information and Registration

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