Blog – Page 6 – What? Did You Really Say What I Think I Heard?

I wonder why I rarely hear the word Dignity used in business. Not only do we each seek to do work and have relationships that encourage and include dignity, we aspire to promote products and have client connections in ways that maintain the self-worth and self-respect of all.

But I’m certain we could all do a lot more to achieve it. Let me share a personal story that first alerted me to the importance of dignity.

In the 1980s I moved to London to start up a tech company and simultaneously started up a non-profit to support folks with the neurological disease my son suffers from (We just had our 40th year anniversary!). The woman I partnered with (Joan) was a long-time sufferer of the illness and had great difficulty opening her eyelids or lifting her neck. But she worked hard to type notes (just a few typos!) to other sufferers sending resources, and setting up ‘meet and greets’ with doctors and medical schools around the UK where we’d travel to share the latest treatment information.

Every Wednesday night Joan and I went to dinner prior to getting down to work. And every Wednesday night I picked up the check, knowing Joan – age 75 at the time and obviously disabled – was living on state assistance. But one Wednesday as I reached for the check, Joan’s hand came down onto mine.

Joan: I’ll pay tonight.

SD: That’s okay. I’m working and have more available cash than you have.

Joan: I said I’ll pay. I may not have money, but I have dignity. Don’t take away my dignity.

I then realized that by always paying I was taking away her agency, her dignity as an equal partner. Seems it wasn’t about the money at all. In fact, my decision to pay for each meal suddenly seemed like a power thing. How many times had I substituted money and power for dignity?

PROMOTING DIGNITY IN THE WORKPLACE

Dignity is a private, personal consideration we each hold that matches our beliefs about who we are; we gravitate toward people who honor it. Through our personal dignity we show up authentically and remove ourselves from people and situations that threaten it.

In our personal lives we observe the dignity of our friends and family. But I am unaware of this term being applied in the workplace with specific actions that will ensure we provide dignity to those we touch. This article discusses how to impart dignity and what to do to achieve it.

As entrepreneurs and business owners we must

build dignity into our norms, policies, communications and conventions,
make sure we treat each other, our employees and our clients, with respect at meetings, interactions, emails, etc.,
act in ways that respect each other’s self-worth,
minimize the stress our employees feel when being disrespected.

But how do we ‘do’ dignity?

1. Fair pay: I can’t say this strongly enough. Paying people fairly enables them to feel respected and valued, and take care of their families and their health. Without fair pay, the rest of this article is moot.

2. A culture of diversity: Diversity is a word thrown around a lot, but what does it really mean? Sure, it means racial and gender diversity in hiring and advancement practices. But what about neurodivergent folks who get ignored because their ideas don’t seem to fit in? What about folks who think or act differently? Each difference expands possibilities and enables a broader range of ideas and promise.

As someone with Asperger’s and highly out-of-the-box ideas, I spent years being ignored and denigrated when in fact my concepts would have prevented many situations, facilitated successful projects without resistance, and closed a lot more sales. How do we create and maintain a culture of real diversity in which everyone’s voice gets appreciated and no one faces indignity?

3. Transparent communication: Too often management omits making the full data set available, making it impossible to gather the full fact pattern or inspire creativity. Worse, good ideas get dismissed or go unheard and employees end up being disincentivized. The cost is incalculable to companies, employees, and clients: not only does creativity falter, but people lose trust in their employers.

4. Work-life balance: When we expect our folks to work weekends, long hours, lots of overtime, we take away their dignity as human beings, not to mention their time to destress, think, relax so they can return to work invigorated and creative. We not only harm them, we harm our own productivity and success.

If there’s a frequent problem causing staff to work excessive hours, it becomes a stress/health issue. We need to either hire additional staff or allow the problem a lengthier solution process that doesn’t require employees to regularly give up their private time.

When we exploit our employee’s dignity, we cause folks to go home crying, face sleepless nights, feel disrespected. I know this from the countless interviews I’ve had with unhappy employees: They may not tell us, but their work will fall off and eventually they’ll leave for a job that will respect them.

Sample

PROMOTING DIGNITY WITH CLIENTS

Promoting dignity must extend to clients and customers. Here are a few factors to consider:

Communication: Too often we fail to let our clients and customers know if there’s a problem from our end: delivery/time issues; delivering the solutions promised with the same people they’ve become accustomed to. When I ran my tech support company, I checked in with each client for 15 minutes every month. That went a long way to resolving brewing issues. And when some companies find a flaw in their product or service, it’s vital they formally announce the issue and resolution so clients aren’t left in the dark.
Value our promises: As per above, our clients and customers must be notified if there are disruptions in service or quality. It’s respectful and maintains the dignity of our promise as suppliers.
Respect clients/customers as partners: There are plenty of other providers our clients/customers can go to when/if they feel we’re not respecting them. In other words, no overly long hold times; delivery as promised; follow up to ensure quality as promised; no pushy sales practices.

Remember: without addressing and maintaining our client’s dignity, we wouldn’t even be in business.

DIGNITY IS A PRIMARY BUSINESS PRACTICE

It’s necessary to add dignity as a necessary element for creating and maintaining integrous business practices for our staff and customer base. Here are some Facilitative Questions™ to help you think through any changes you might need to make and inspire compliance:

How will you know when/if your current business practices need upgrading?
What criteria will you and your team need to meet to decide on what practices might need improvement?
What skills/tools will you use to let your clients/customers know of changes or problems, to insure your communication enhances their dignity?
What skills/tools do you and your team need to learn to ensure you consider Dignity as a standard business practice?

Should you wish to enhance your skill set to include Dignity in your staff training as a soft skill, marketing, promotions, decision making practices and projects, please contact me to discuss: sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

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Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision making, the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen October 28th, 2024

Posted In: News

A few years ago I had an incident that illustrated the restrictions of my own curiosity. I’d begun attending life drawing classes as an exercise to broaden my observation skills. In one session I had a horrific time trying to draw a model’s shoulder. I asked the man next to me – a real artist – for help.

Here was our conversation:

SDM: Hey, Ron. Can you help me please? Can you tell me how to think about drawing his shoulder?

Ron: Sure. Let’s see…. So what is it about your current sketch that you like?

SDM: Nothing.

Ron: If I put a gun to your head, what part would you like?

SDM: Nothing.

Ron: You’ve done a great job here, on his lower leg. Good line. Good proportion. That means you know how to do a lot of what you need on the shoulder.

SDM: I do? I didn’t know what I was doing. So how can I duplicate what I did unconsciously? I’m having an eye-hand-translation problem.

Ron: Let’s figure out how you drew that leg. Then we’ll break that down to mini actions, and see what you can use from what you already know. And I’ll teach you whatever you’re missing.

Ron’s brand of curiosity enabled me to make some unconscious skills conscious, and add new expertise where I was missing it in places I wouldn’t have looked. His curiosity had different biases from mine. He:

entered our discussion assuming I already had all of the answers I needed;
only added information specifically where I was missing some;
helped me find my own answers and be available to add knowledge in the exact place I was missing it.

My own curiosity would have gotten me nowhere. Here was my internal dialogue:

How the hell do I draw a twisted shoulder? This sucks. Is this an eye/hand problem? Should I be looking differently? I need an anatomy class. Should I be holding my charcoal differently? Is it too big a piece? I can’t see a shadow near his shoulder. Should I put in a false shadow to help me get the proportions right?

Ron’s curiosity – based on me already possessing the skills I needed – opened a wide range of possibilities for me. I never, ever would have found that solution on my own because my automatic assumptions would have limited my curiosity to little more than an extension of my current knowledge and beliefs.

WHAT IS CURIOSITY?

Curiosity is a good thing, right? As you can see from my story, it’s far more restricted than we imagine it would be. But what is it? Wikipedia defines curiosity thus: a quality related to inquisitive thinking such as exploration, investigation, and learning, evident by observation in human and animal species.

What, exactly, does this mean? What’s ‘inquisitive thinking’? Does it matter that everyone’s inquisitiveness is subjective, unique, and limited by their biases? ‘Evident by observation’? Evident to whom? And by what/whose standards? And ‘observation’? Really?

In this article, I’ll explore what stops us from being curious (and why it’s so difficult to recognize or learn from the data we find), offer loads of questions that will take you beyond assumptions, and steps to follow to enhance our curiosity.

IT’S A BRAIN THING

We all see, hear, feel the world through our subjectivity. Our assumptions, what we notice, what we’re curious about, is largely automatic mostly outside our control. Even worse, adding new ideas when we seek out answers to what we’re curious about is not so simple as, well, adding new ideas; it’s a listening problem and a brain problem.

Listening: It’s hard for us to take in new information when it goes against what we take for granted. Because of the way our brain filters incoming words, we end up (unwittingly) restricting what we think we hear Others say according to our own beliefs and history, i.e. subjectively. As a result we may not readily accept new ideas that are different from what we currently believe because we ‘hear’ them through our own biases, even if they offer relevant data on what we’re curious about.

Neural Circuits (brains): We can only be as curious as our existing neural circuits allow. Said another way our curiosity is restricted to what we have stored in memory, and we can’t notice, think, etc. anything we don’t have representative circuitry for. Try as we might, our subjectivity rules our lives.

Since our exploration involves some unconscious ‘givens’, here are some questions to inspire a broader curiosity:

How can we know that the information we retrieve is accurate, complete, or the most useful data available?
Can we be certain that our data gathering was sufficiently broad?
How do we know that a new piece of learning is important, even though it feels uncomfortable and we want to dismiss it?
Can we supersede our biases that we judge all incoming data against?

Hence, I pose the question: can we really ever be entirely curious?

WHY ARE WE CURIOUS?

There are several different reasons for curiosity. I’ve included questions under each category to help you consider each:

Need to know something we don’t know. Sometimes we need to know something we have no, or skimpy, knowledge about. How do we know the difference between the ‘right’ or the ‘wrong’ answer? How do we know the most effective resources? How do we pose our query to lead to the broadest range of answers? How do we know that what our brain translates for us is an accurate rendition of new content?
Desire to expand current knowledge. We need more data than we possess. How will we recognize when the available, additional data is the appropriate data set? How do we pose an inquiry that offers the broadest range of relevant knowledge? How can we keep from resisting new data if it runs counter to our long-held beliefs (given that new data gets compared against our existing, unconscious judgments)? How can we be certain that we will accurately understand new content?
Achieving a goal. We’re missing data to achieve a goal. How can we know the extent of what we’re missing, or know to accept new content if our existing data has been our go-to knowledge and it now might be incomplete?
Interest in another person’s knowledge. We suspect someone has knowledge we need, but don’t know how to judge what might be accurate. How can we adopt/adapt new content so we can avoid internal resistance, so we ensure what we think we’ve heard is an accurate portrayal of what was said? How can we language our inquiry to avoid limiting any possibilities?
Complete internal reference points. Influencers (coaches, leaders, consultants, sellers) seek to understand the Other’s Status Quo to formulate action points. How can we know if our ‘intuition’ (biased judgment) is broad enough to encompass all possibilities – and be able to go beyond it when necessary – to match the Other’s mental models and existing/historic brain circuits? How can we know for certain that what was said to them was understood accurately?
Comparator. We want to know if our current knowledge is accurate, or we’re ‘right’. But we unconsciously compare our query and hear responses against our subjective experiences, running the risk of acquiring partial knowledge, misunderstanding what was said, or blocking important data.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty impossible to seek, find, or receive what we don’t know what we don’t know. When we hear content that doesn’t fit our existing circuitry – regardless of the efficacy of the information – we face:

Resistance: By the time we’re adults, our subjective beliefs are pretty much built in and determine how we organize our worlds. When we hear something that goes against our beliefs – whether or not it’s accurate, conscious, or unconscious – we resist. That means new knowledge will be accepted in relation to what we already know and believe, potentially omitting important data and making real change difficult.
Restricting data: What we’re curious about is automatically biased, mistranslated, and limited by our subjective experience, ego needs, history, and current data set. We have no way to know if we accurately understand what’s been said, or if we’re posing our search query in a way that will include the full range of possible answers.
Restricting knowledge. Because our subjectivity limits the acceptance of new knowledge to what fits with our current knowledge (we’re only curious about stuff that is tangential to current knowledge), our brains automatically defend against anything that threatens what we know. So we unconsciously choose answers according to comfort or habit rather than according to accuracy or need.
Intuitive ‘Red Flag’. When our egos and professional identity are curious about something we have assumptions and expectations about, we limit possibility by our unconscious biases. How do we know if there aren’t a broader range of solutions that we’re not noticing or eliciting?

If you’re interested in learning how to consciously generate wholly new circuits to permanently change habits and behaviors I’ve developed a How of Change™ program. Here’s a one-hour sample video of me teaching in the 5 hour program.

HOW TO EXPAND YOUR CURIOSITY

In order to broaden our curiosity and allow our unconscious to accept the full data set available, we must evolve beyond our biases. Here’s how to have a full range of choice:

1. Frame the query: Create a generic series of questions to pose for yourself about your curiosity. Ask yourself:

how you’ll know your tolerance for non-expected, surprising answers,
what a full range of knowledge could include,
if your answers need to be within the range of what you already know or something wildly different,
if you’re willing/able to put aside your ‘intuition’, bias, and annoyance and seek and consider all possible answers regardless of comfort,
if you need to stay within a specific set of criteria and what the consequences are if you don’t.

2. Frame the parameters: Do some Google research. Before spending time accumulating data, recognize the parameters of possibility whether or not they match your comfortable criteria.

3. Recognize your foundational beliefs: Understand what you believe to be true, and consider how important it is for you to maintain that data set regardless of potentially conflicting, new information.

4. Be willing to change: Understand your willingness to adopt challenging data if it doesn’t fit within your current data set or beliefs.

5. Make your unconscious conscious: Put your conscious mind onto the ceiling and look down on yourself from the Observer/Witness/meta position. This provides neutral data, sams your biases and resistence.

6. Listen analytically: Listen to your self-talk. Compare it with the questions above. Note restrictions and decide if they can be overlooked. And recognizing your brain may play tricks on you, be sure to ask if what you think you heard and learned is accurate.

7. Analyze: Should you shift your parameters? Search options? What do you need to shift internally?

Curiosity effects every element of our lives. It can enhance, or restrict, growth, change, and professional skills. It limits and expands health, relationships, lifestyles and relationships. Without challenging our curiosity or intuition, we limit ourselves to maintaining our current assumptions.

What do you need to believe differently to be willing to forego comfort and ego-identity for the pursuit of the broadest range of possible answers? How will you know when, specifically, it would be important to have greater choice? We’ll never have all the answers, but we certainly can expand our choices.

If you’d like some coaching on how to use your conscious mind to get into your unconscious neural circuits, I’d love to help. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

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Sharon Drew Morgen October 21st, 2024

Posted In: Listening

I recently heard yet another excuse as to why a buyer didn’t buy: seller/buyer misalignment. Seriously? Because the seller didn’t close a sale (That was expected by the seller? In the mythical pipeline? According to the expectation of the seller?) there was a relationship problem? No. The problem stems from sellers not understanding what a buyer is, and what a buyer must know before self-identifying as a buyer. In this case, there was no buyer to be ‘misaligned’ with.

The fact is, selling doesn’t cause buying.

FROM PERSON TO BUYER

A decision not to purchase has very little to do with the seller, the solution, the relationship, or the need. In fact, making a purchase is the very last thing a buyer does. Just because a situation seems like a perfect fit with your solution does not make it a buying/ selling opportunity; just because someone really needs your solution does not mean they are ready, willing, or able to buy.

Let me begin by defining ‘Buyer’: a person (or group) who has

assembled all people, causes, and elements that created their problem and agreed to a problem definition AND
recognized they cannot fix the problem with familiar resources, usual vendors, or workarounds, AND
determined the risk of change and found it palatable, AND
gotten buy-in from everyone/everything involved with the changes a fix would affect, AND
decided that the cost of a fix is lower than maintaining the status quo,

and decides that purchasing an external solution is their best option.

As the thought-leader behind how buyers buy (programs, books, models, steps, terms, since 1985) , the author of the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity, and the person who coined the terms Buy Cycle, Buying Patterns, Buying Journey, Buying Decision Team, and How Buyers Buy, I’d like to offer some thoughts:

1. A buyer isn’t a buyer until they’ve bought something. Until then they are people with a problem who may, if they can’t resolve the issue themselves and the risk is manageable, seek an external solution.

2. Solving a problem never begins as a decision to buy anything (unless a small personal item), regardless of ‘need’. People don’t want to buy anything; they merely want to resolve a problem in the most efficient way with the least risk. Hence, they won’t respond to or read your marketing or sales content based on ‘need’.

3. People prefer to resolve their own problems. Workarounds are always the first option, a purchase the last.

4. Unless the risk of making a purchase is lower than the risk of staying the same, there will be no purchase regardless of the need or the efficacy of your solution. By seeking folks with ‘need’, sellers only find the low-hanging fruit and reduce their potential prospect audience by 80%.

5. A purchase occurs only when the stakeholder group has found the risk of change manageable and buys-in to something new. It’s only when there’s agreement from all elements that created the problem that

it can’t be fixed with known resources or workarounds,
the cost in resources/change is lower than the cost of the fallout of bringing in something new,
a path forward is defined by everyone who will touch the final solution,

that the full scope of a bringing in a new solution (i.e. buy something) is understood. Until then ‘need’ isn’t fully defined, people haven’t yet self-identified as ‘buyers’, they won’t read your content or take a meeting (unless to pick your brain), and no external solution is required. Here is where sellers often get caught thinking there’s a ‘need’ before the folks with the problem think there is one.

‘Need’ is NOT the criteria people use to buy. Until they are convinced they cannot solve their own problem and change without much disruption, until the understand and can accept the risk of change, they are not buyers and won’t heed pitches or appointment attempts.

6. There is a defined series of 13 (generic) steps that determine if, when, why, how, what to buy. A buying decision is a risk/change management problem before it’s a solution choice issue. Until the full set of stakeholders have agreed they can’t fix the problem with familiar resources AND have developed a plan for congruent change with minimal risk, there is no willingness to seek an external solution. In other words, before people become buyers they’re merely people trying to fix a problem themselves.

Sample

7. People don’t need you to sell to them. They can get all the data they need from your site. They really need your help in traversing their decision steps: the time it takes them to figure this out (non-buying, cultural, systems/ rules based) is the length of the sales cycle, and sales overlooks this entirely.

8. Making a purchase is a risk/change management issue before it’s a solution choice problem. The first question people consider is how they can achieve Excellence with the least ‘cost/risk’ to the system; the last question they consider is what solution they’d need from ‘outside’. With a focus on placing solutions, there is no element of the sales model that facilitates systemic change. Sales overlooks the largest portion of the buyer’s journey – how to manage the change a fix will cost to the system.

9. Until any disruption caused by a purchase (i.e. all purchases are ‘foreign’ to the system) is understood, planned for, and agreed to, no purchase will take place. The existing environment is sacrosanct; keeping it running smoothly is more important to them than fixing a problem that’s already been baked into the system, especially if it would cost unwanted internal disruption.

10. Everyone and everything who created the current problem and would potentially touch a new solution must agree to any modification (purchase). This is why pitches, marketing, presentation will only be noticed by those who have completed their decision path.

11. The time it takes people/buyers to discover their own answers and know how to manage change in the least disruptive way, is the length of the sales cycle. It has nothing to do with selling, buying, need, relationship, content, or solutions until the route to congruent change is defined and agreed to. It’s a risk/change management issue before it’s a solution choice issue. And the sales model ignores this, causing 5% close rates instead of 40%.

12. The last thing people want is to buy something. With their criteria of ‘solution placement’, sellers often enter at the wrong time, ask the wrong questions, and offer the wrong data – and end up selling only to the low-hanging fruit (the 5% who have planned their route to change already).

13. Buyers buy using their own buying patterns, not a seller’s selling patterns. Using a specific type of sales effort further restricts the population of those who will buy. We don’t necessarily object to the products Robocalls promote. It’s the invasive selling patterns we object to.

14. There is a difference in goals, capability of changing, and level of buy-in between those who CAN/WILL buy vs those who sellers think SHOULD buy. By entering to seek folks in the process of solving a problem your solution can resolve, we can find and capture 40% of those on route to become buyers.

15. The time it takes people to come up with their complete set of buy-in and change-based answers is the time it takes them to seek an external solution – i.e. become a buyer. Let me say this again: Buying has nothing whatsoever to do with their need, your solution, or your relationship.

By only listening for clues that lead you to assume a ‘need’ for your solution, by entering into ‘relationships’ based on what you’re selling, by only asking questions to ‘prove’ a need/solution match (too often with only one or two members of the full Buying Decision Team), you’re not only biasing the interaction, but limiting your sales to closing those who have gotten to the point when they’re ready, willing, able to change – the low hanging fruit; you’re missing the opportunity to enter earlier, develop a real relationship, and facilitate the path that people who CAN buy must take before they are buyers.

The current sales model ignores the possibility of facilitative buying, or becoming real relationship managers and true consultants and Servant Leaders.

In other words, the sales model enters too early in the buying decision journey to reach or serve the maximum number of prospects.

BUYING FACILITATION®

Potential buyers need your help figuring out how to figure it all out much more than they need a product pitch, or more biased questions, that attempt to uncover a ‘need’ they don’t yet know they have.

I’ve developed a model (Buying Facilitation®) that uses wholly unique skills (Listening for Systems, Facilitative Questions, etc.) to facilitate a prospective buyer’s route to Excellence.

A generic model used for coaching, management, leadership, healthcare, Buying Facilitation® finds folks trying to solve a problem in the area of your solution, then leads them down their decision path and turns them into buyers in one-eighth the time it would take them to close.

I’ve been quite successful teaching it to global corporations ( i.e. 100,00 sales professionals at companies such as IBM, Kaiser, Wachovia, P&G, KPMG, etc.) to increase their sales. In fact, over 30 decades, my client’s pilot training groups close 8x more sales on average over the control groups, regardless of product or price.

Currently you’re now wasting 95% of your time running after those few who have finally arrived at step 10 – the low hanging fruit – ignoring the much larger pool of those who are on route, and fighting for a competitive advantage.

By adding new functionality to the front end of your sales model, you can enter earlier, be a Servant Leader, and facilitate congruent change and THEN be on board as a provider as they go through their buying decision process.

Buying Facilitation® is NOT sales; it’s NOT selling/purchase-based; it IS change- and decision-based. Right now you’re waiting while buyers do this anyway (or merely running after those you THINK have a need but end up fixing the problem in other ways) because all people must manage their change before they are buyers. Why not add a skill set, stop wasting time/effort, and close more. Then you’ll never be ‘misaligned.’

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Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharondrewmorgen.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

Sharon Drew Morgen October 14th, 2024

Posted In: Communication

As an inventor of systemic decision-making models, I’ve worked with well-meaning leaders, coaches, sellers, and managers who frequently end up with inadequate decisions and difficult implementations.

Too often incomplete information is collected, causing time delays, resistance, or unsatisfactory results. Sometimes faulty assumptions end up misrepresenting important data sets. And far too often, standard decision-making processes consider and weigh options too early in the process.

I’d like to share with you what I think are the initial stages of decision making that often get ignored. By managing these steps it’s possible to achieve successful, timely, accurate outcomes that evade resistance and are maintained over time.

STEPS OF DECISION MAKING

Stage One: Assemble or represent (in large organizations, it could be a representative of a group) those involved with the initiating problem as well as those who will ‘touch’ the ultimate solution. Excluding any of these means

the originating problem cannot be fully defined;
ownership, creativity, consensus, and a full set of solution ideas won’t be obtained;
resistance and failure are possibilities;
risks won’t be recognized and addressed in a timely way;
human issues – trust, fear, ego slights – won’t be noticed until too late;
data gathering, research, weighing, and choice will be limited or unreliable;
time delays and inefficiencies become probabilities;
it’s difficult to make an accurate, long term decision that gets maintained.

Rule: A complete data set is needed to define a problem and goal. To do so requires the full representation of people, and an understanding of the systems, involved with the current problem and the final solution.

Stage One concludes with a complete, accurate, stated goal that’s been agreed-upon by all who will use the final output.

Stage Two: The system that underlies the problem/solution must be managed. Questions to be answered:

Are there existing solutions that can be tried before anything new is considered?
What has prevented the problem from being resolved until now (current systems, politics, rules, relationships, money, technology)?
What must be managed to set the stage to do something different and ensure buy-in, ownership, creativity, idea generation, and transparency?
Are the full set of the risks of change understood and agreed to beforehand?
What must be managed to remove any obstructions?
Is the system set up for change? What systems must be in place for the new solution to be created and maintained optimally?

Rule: Because outputs are restricted by the input, before the formal decision making process commences, it’s necessary to manage whatever has kept the problem from being resolved and new systems must be in place to house the new solution.

Stage Two concludes with an understanding of, and plans to resolve, the systems that have maintained the problem with new systems and rules in place to generate and maintain the new solution.

Stage Three: Standard decision-making models and processes take over, including research for solutions assigned, weighing of choices, plans for implementation, etc.

SKILLS FOR STEPS

To accomplish these early-stage decision making steps, you’ll need these skills:

Self/Observer/Choice. The ability to move between Self (our natural, unconscious, automatic, restricted, biased state) and Observer (our on-the-ceiling, dispassionate, rational, conscious viewing of a broad set of possibilities).
Rules of trust agreed upon in group.
Willingness to give up early biases.
Facilitative Questions™ to ensure data gathered is unbiased.
Listening without bias. Natural listening involves distortions, deletions, and biases from our brain causing listeners to hear and interpret incoming data uniquely. Extra steps must be taken to verify accuracy.

Sample

Too many decision-making processes forget these early steps and end up with flawed data and difficult goal setting, decision weighing, and implementation, not to mention the probability of resistance and struggle maintaining over time. If you would like help ensuring these early steps get done completely, I’d love to coach you and your team through the process. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

___________________

Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision making, the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

Sharon Drew Morgen October 7th, 2024

Posted In: News

I’m a dancer. When I studied the Argentine Tango there was a foundational metaphor that I believe is true for all leaders: The leader opens the door for the follower to pass through using her own unique style; the leader then follows. If anyone notices the leader, he’s not doing his job. The goal is to showcase the follower.

Much of what is written about leadership falls into the category I call ‘trait-centered leadership’: someone deemed ‘at the top’ who uses their personality, influence, motivational skills and charisma to inspire and give followers a convincing reason to follow an agenda set by the leader or the leader’s boss – a mixture of Jack Welch, Oprah, and Moses.

But what if the leader’s goal overrides the mental models, beliefs or historic experiences of the followers? Or the change is pushed against the follower’s values, and resistance ensues? What happens when the leader uses their personality as the fulcrum to cause change? What if the leader has a great message and incongruent skills? Or charisma and no integrity? Adolf Hitler, after all, was the most charismatic leader in the 20th Century.

WHAT IS A LEADER?

Whether it’s for a group that needs to perform a new task, or for someone seeking heightened outcomes, the role of leadership is to

facilitate congruent change and choice by
enabling followers to discover their optimal behaviors
in accordance with their own values, beliefs, and ability,
to match agreed-upon requirements
without resistance.

In other words, enable them to employ their best skills in service of an agreed-upon outcome. It demands humility and authenticity of the leader to let go of their own concept of success and enable Others to bring their ideas, skills, values, and commitment to the project to meet agreed-upon outcomes uniquely. This way, the followers share their best ideas, creativity multiplies, and resistance is avoided as everyone buys-in to the project they own.

This type of leadership is other-centered and devoid of ego, similar to a flashlight that merely illuminates the most harmonious path, enabling followers to discover their own excellence within the context of the change sought.

And remember: change is an inside job. Leaders are outsiders.

YOU CAN’T LEAD IF YOU CAN’T FOLLOW

Too often leaders use their own assumptions and goals to influence and persuade others to comply with their vision. They begin with something they want to accomplish and work hard at inspiring their followers to make the fixes they believe necessary, using their passion and motivational skills to encourage buy-in, later wondering why they’re not on target, or work is falling through the cracks.

But being inspirational, or a good influencer with presence and empathy, or a great storyteller that seeks to motivate, or even being a ‘nice guy’ that staff generally likes following, merely enlists those whose beliefs and unconscious mental models are already predisposed to the change. It omits, or gets resistance from, those who should be part of the change but whose mental models don’t align.

When we try to change others, we only reach those who have a conscious ability to comply, bypassing those who could use what we have to say but aren’t ready to change. I call this trait-centered leadership: using our own skills as influencing strategies.

Sample

SERVANT LEADERSHIP

What if our jobs were to serve? What if we trusted that Others had good skills, and by agreeing on a course of action that met everyone’s values and the ultimate requirements, help them figure out how to get there their own way?

If we enter our leadership situations as Servant Leaders we are guiding Others through to their own best actions in the area we seek to shift, facilitating them through their own ability to change according to their own beliefs and norms. This form of leadership has pluses and minuses.

Minuses: the final outcome may look different than originally envisaged because the followers set the route according to their values and mental models.
Pluses: everyone will be enthusiastically, creatively involved in designing what will show up as their own mission – meeting the vision of the leaders (although it might look different), and owning it with no resistance.

Do you want to lead through influence, presence, charisma, rationality? Or facilitate Another through their own unique path to congruent change and ownership? Do you want people to see you as a charismatic chief? Or teach them how to congruently move beyond their status quo and discover their own route to excellence – with you as the GPS? Do you want to push your agenda using your own ideas? Or enable followers to discover their own route to systemic change? They are opposite constructs.

POWER VS. FORCE

Here are some differences in beliefs between trait-centered leadership and more the more facilitative leadership that I call Servant Leadership:

Trait-centered: Top down; behavior change and goal-driven; dependent on power, charisma, and persuasion skills of a leader and may not be congruent with foundational values of followers.

Facilitation-centered: Inclusive (everyone buys-in and agrees to goals, direction, change); core belief-change and excellence-driven; dependent on facilitating route to excellence rather than developing and strategizing the route to enable systemic buy-in and adoption of new behaviors.

Remember that real change happens at the unconscious belief level. Attempting to change behaviors without helping people change their beliefs first meets with resistance regardless of the efficacy of the solution or the need for the change.

New skills are necessary for the facilitation-centered, Servant Leadership style I suggest:

1. Listen for systems. This enables leaders to hear the elements that created and maintain the status quo and would need to transform from the inside before any lasting change occurs. Typical listening is biased and restricts possibility.

Sample

2. Facilitative Questions. Conventional questions are biased by the beliefs and needs of the Questioner, and restrict answers and possibility.

3. Code the route to systemic change. Before asking folks to buy-in, facilitate them down the 13 steps of change to build consensus and collaborate to define, agree on, and set strategy for, the necessary changes thereby avoiding resistance.

Sometimes Leaders assume that their job is to assign tasks and get shit down. From what I’ve learned with clients, that only gets them mediocre results, resistance and time wastage. Worse, it fails to capture the passion and creativity of the followers. Be the Servant Leaders who open the door and follow your followers.

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Sharon Drew Morgen September 30th, 2024

Posted In: Change Management, Listening

I’ve trained many coaches, all of them passionate about serving their clients and helping them be their best selves. And yet sometimes they miss the mark. It’s their brain’s fault. Let me explain.

A client seeks a coach when they seek change, often after trying to make the change themselves. One of the main skills coaches use is listening to best identify the problem. But sometimes, through no fault of their own, coaches don’t accurately hear what their clients tell them.

EARS DON’T HEAR WHAT’S SAID

The problem is that our ears don’t actually hear words. To make it worse, words don’t get translated according to the Speaker’s meaning but according to the Listener’s existing neural circuits. In other words, sometimes neither the coach nor the client hear exactly what’s been said.

The problem occurs in our unconscious listening filters. As I write in my book What? Did you really say what I think I heard? the problem lies in our brains.

Sample

Here’s what happens. Words enter our ears as meaningless sound vibrations. After these are filtered (and some discarded!), our brain then sends them on to become signals that eventually get dispatched to a ‘similar enough’ (the term used in neuroscience) circuits that have translated similar signals before. And – this part is the most disturbing – where the signals don’t match up, our brains kindly discard the differences!

In other words, incoming thoughts and meanings get translated in our brains according to our current biases and knowledge, often missing the real intent, nuance, patterns, and comprehensive contextual framework and implications.

Sample

When we think we’re listening carefully, we naturally assume we’ve accurately heard what clients want to tell us. But given how unreliably our brain translates incoming words, there’s a good chance we won’t fully understand.

Bias. By listening specifically for details, motivation, or story line, a coach’s brain will merely hear what it has a history of hearing. This causes a problem for a client. If:

there are unspoken or omitted bits,
there are meta patterns that should be noticed,
there are unstated historic – or subconscious – reasons behind the current situation that aren’t obvious,

the coach may believe something different was meant and might make the wrong assumptions, potentially offering inappropriate suggestions or comments.

Assumptions. If a coach has had somewhat similar discussions with other clients, or historic, unconscious, beliefs are touched that bring to mind questions or solutions they’ve used with others, coaches might offer clients flawed or inadequate suggestions.

Habits. If a coach has a client base in one area – say, real estate, or leadership – s/he may unconsciously enter the conversation with automatic habits from handling similar situations and miss the unique issues, patterns, and unspoken foundation that may hold the key to success.

WAYS TO HEAR MORE ACCURATELY

Disassociate

One way to avoid unwittingly misunderstanding or mishearing is to disassociate – go up on the ceiling and look down. This goes a long way to minimizing our personal biases, assumptions, triggers or habits, enabling us to hear what’s meant (spoken or not).

For those unfamiliar with disassociation, try this: during a phone chat, put your legs up on the desk and push your body back against the chair, or stand up. For in-person discussions, stand up and/or walk around. [I have walked around rooms during Board meetings while consulting for Fortune 100 companies. They wanted excellence regardless of my physical comportment.] Both of those physical perspectives offer the physiology of choice and the ability to move outside of our instincts. Try it.

For those wanting more information on disassociation, I explain in What? how to trigger ourselves to new choices the moment there is a potential incongruence.

Phrase to use

Given the possibility that you may not be ‘hearing’ accurately, the best way I know to get it right is to say this:

“In case there is a chance I didn’t accurately understand what you’re saying, I’m going to tell you what I heard. Please correct me where I’m wrong.”

That way you both end up on the same page. And to help you enter calls with fewer assumptions.

For those times it’s important for you to hear accurately, here are some questions for you to consider:

What would you need to believe differently to assume every speaker, every call, is a mystery you’re entering into? One you’ve never experienced before? To start each call with Beginner’s Mind?
What can you do to trigger yourself beyond your natural assumptions, and use them to pose a follow up question to yourself: What am I missing here?
What will you hear from your client to let you know that you’ve made an assumption that may not be accurate?
How can you stay on track during a call to make sure you’ve helped them discover their own unconscious drivers and aren’t biased by previous calls?

It’s possible to help your brain go beyond its natural, automatic translation processes. I can help you do this one-day program on listening if you’re interested. Or read W hat?. The most important take-away is to recognize your brain’s unconscious activity, and learn how to override it.

_____________________________

Sharon Drew Morgen September 23rd, 2024

Posted In: Listening, News

I used to live in Taos, New Mexico, where I bought everything I ate from a small grocery called Cid’s Market. Run by Cid and Betty Backer, they always offered fresh organic produce, freshly cooked healthy meals, and a health/vitamin section that had everything I wanted. The store environment was happy and very obviously committed to the Taos community. It felt like MY STORE each time I went in. Any question I had was answered; anything I needed was procured, even if it meant they went out and bought me the item at a different store! I was a rabid fan.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who loved them. In the 11 years I lived there (1989-2000) I watched as they grew from a small store to a three story building taking up half a city block. Their service to customers was exceptional. Every morning as the store opened, Cid held a brief meeting with the entire team. “Who pays your salary?” he’d ask. They’d respond “The Customer!” And then they’d start their day.

Everyone’s job was to take care of customers, whatever that entailed. They didn’t need to ‘follow the rules’: that WAS the rule. And creativity and service ensued: In the health department, the manager created free evening community programs for different groups – diabetes sufferers, parents with kids who wouldn’t eat veggies; the produce manager created free cooking classes and lessons on growing organic veggies. Everyone was trusted to make their best decisions and the customers felt their commitment and respect. And in 1993 that was unusual.

One year, on a plane to Mexico to give a keynote address about Servant Leadership, I noticed Cid and Betty.

“Are you going on vacation?” I asked?

“No. We’re going to a conference on Servant Leadership.”

“Oh. I didn’t think a grocery store would seek out that sort of thing.”

“We’re going mostly to learn what we need to learn to serve our employees. If we can’t give them the respect they deserve, and create an environment in which they thrive, we can’t run a business that will also serve our customers. We go to one conference a year to learn all the tools we can so we all have the best knowledge available to serve with.”

Sample

They understood that their success came from serving people, community, customers and staff. And they actively made it a priority.

WHAT ARE OUR JOBS?

When corporations consider what their jobs are, they sometimes think Profits, or Products, or Shareholders. But I think it’s something else. Think about it: there’s no job that doesn’t include serving:

Sell more? Serve customers.
Grow the business, be respected in the industry, and retain clients? Serve the company.
Retain and inspire good people with tools to inspire creativity? Serve employees.
Maintain optimal skills and health? Serve ourselves.
Maintain communication skills? Serve each other.

Without hiring and retaining good people that know how to lead collaboratively; without the skills to help managers, sales folks, team leaders, facilitate buy-in; without the creativity from an entire group that, working together, can develop top notch solutions that produce competitive and imaginative solutions; none of us are in business. No matter what our jobs, our core business is to serve.

Unfortunately, too many of us unwittingly follow trends that take us away from our core business of serving. For example, too many companies have chosen the trend of using their websites to collect names. They embed pop ups to retrieve email addresses, making it impossible to find answers to questions and rendering the site unusable (unless you agree to the cookies) and annoying folks with real interest who might even be customers.

Obviously they’re putting their own goals before those of a possible customer. Why would a company do that? Especially the smaller companies who truly depend on offering information as a sales strategy. Is acquiring my name to push out marketing materials that important? Don’t they know I’ll leave the site rather than agree to accept more spam? That they’ll lose my business because I don’t want my name captured? Those companies have lost their way: they are only serving themselves.

OUR JOBS ARE TO SERVE

What if our real jobs weren’t only to collect data, or create content, or push products? What if our jobs were merely to serve? That requires a new skill set, a different viewpoint that produces very different results:

Leaders wouldn’t be getting resistance because they’d attain buy-in and work collaboratively to engage all voices before making change.
Sellers would only pitch to those ready to buy, and use the bulk of their now-wasted time to facilitate people them through their buying decision path as they figured out how to achieve their own type of excellence (and possibly buy solutions).
Managers would hire people whose goal was to serve and retain them because the company’s practices facilitated their excellence.
Coaches would use Facilitative Questions to guide folks to their own answers, trusting each person had their own type of excellence to achieve without the biases of an outsider.
Tech folks would save a great deal of time on projects because they’d be curious without bias, gathering the most accurate data the first time and avoiding biased assumptions that caused flawed results and user complaints.
Companies would be aware of the environment, the role they play in it, and factor in climate issues as a way to serve the planet while serving customers.
Senior Management would dictate that each employee, as well as customers, be cared for respectfully. When an employee isn’t happy, it’s difficult for them to care about customers.

By maintaining focus on ourselves, on our individual needs, we miss the larger picture. By using our jobs and companies as the vehicle to serve others and the planet, we will all live in an excellent world.

__________________________

Sharon Drew Morgen September 16th, 2024

Posted In: News

How do original thinkers, folks with exceptional, trademarked IP, handle plagiarism and misrepresentation? How can we ensure our work gets in the world without it being misdefined, misused, or pirated? And what do we do when the misrepresentation and pirating harms others?

In the age of artificial intelligence, many of us are at risk of losing our cutting-edge ideas to the melting pot of mediocrity. How we handle it is an open question.

MY IP HAS BEEN MISAPPROPRIATED

I’ve recently gotten several calls from clients of Jeff Molander at Spark Selling Academy divulging his misuse and plagiarism of one of my inventions, Facilitative Questions™ (FQs), and sending me copies of the articles, videos, guides, and courses that directly lift my words from my books and articles with no attribution. Worse, the material is presented out of context, with inaccurate use and definition.

Without proper training or licensing, without understanding the material and with no attribution, with the actual paperwork in hand from his clients, I see that Molander is training and coaching my FQs out of context as manipulation devices, wholly outside their intended use.

Molander and I have history. Years ago, I discovered the first of Molander’s articles titled ‘Facilitative Questions’. It contained content taken directly from my books and articles without attribution, and wholly misrepresented my work. He took it down.

But the problem continued: each time I discovered his articles misrepresenting my work I offered to train and license him so he’d learn/understand/use the material accurately. Each time he refused but agreed to take the faulty content down. I kept believing him. I shouldn’t have.

I now have actual proof that Molander continues to pirate exact words directly from my writings but with the wrong explanations and intent, and gets paid to teach it. To sum it up, Molander is using FQs as the “foundational” skill offered at the Academy in his videos, coaching, user materials, and workshops

without attribution,
without training or licensing,
without using them accurately or as intended.

Sadly, folks studying with Molander are learning distorted fragments of FQs as manipulation tools (he uses them to provoke curiosity) instead of the Servant Leader, ethical tools, that lead folks efficiently through their values-based, unbiased decision making (in this case, buying decisions).

His misinterpretation of my work not only harms his clients but also harms my brand that I’ve worked hard to build and sustain for 40 years. And the only ethical solution I can think of is to find the folks he’s trained so I can offer them free, accurate training.

WHO AM I?

I should probably tell you who I am. I’m an original thinker and inventor of systemic brain change models, that enable folks to get to the relevant neural circuits for change and decision making. One of my inventions is Buying Facilitation®, a model that finds and leads would-be prospects through the Pre-Sales, change management steps they must take on route to self-identifying as buyers.

To say it simply, in the area of sales, I help people figure out the decisions they need to make in their unique situations before they can buy anything – a front-end to sales.

Some of you may know me from my New York Times Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity. But how I got here was circuitous.

In 1983, after years of being a successful sales person, I started up a tech company where I was hit upside the head with the problem I’d had with prospects not buying: as an entrepreneur, before the team could consider buying anything, we first tried to fix our problems ourselves. If we couldn’t, we then needed to understand our risk of change. Before deciding to buy anything we had to know for sure that the risk of bringing in something new was not greater than the risk of staying the same.

So different from the sales model that only addresses assumed needs and a seller’s solution placement issues, not the internal decision issues folks had to discern before making a buying decision. Sales actually starts at the end of the buying decision path.

When I realized this I began my decades-long focus (inventing tools, writing books/articles, doing global training) on developing ethical tools to facilitate buying decisions as an adjunct to selling.

FACILITATIVE QUESTIONS™

Knowing my own questions to prospects had bias, and now realizing that prospects lived in unique environments that required buy-in and risk management before buying, I wondered if there was a way to help prospects efficiently figure out the decision path they had to traverse before they could buy.

Enter Facilitative Questions™. Different from standard questions, they use a new form of listening, specific words in specific sequences, and traverse a stepped pathway to personal decision-making, helping prospects and first contacts quickly figure out their Pre-Sales decision issues that then lead to them buying.

Facilitative Questions™

To learn Facilitative Questions™

Not just for sales, FQs are extremely effective at enabling very quick values-based decisions – great for docs to help patients change habits, for sellers to help prospects take action, and for coaches to help clients make permanent change. They require days of training and months of practice. In the wrong hands, with the wrong intent, FQs become highly effective manipulation tools.

BEYOND PLAGIARISM

Unfortunately, over the years, several folks have plagiarized FQs from my books and articles. They all removed the offending materials eventually. But Molander plans to continue, saying that because he allegedly shared an online course with a buddy and read some of my books, because my work is in the public domain, he’s entitled to it.

Worse, the materials I have from Spark reveal he’s taken it beyond plagiarism: he’s also defining FQs inaccurately and twisting their use to manipulate selling – the precise opposite of the reason I spent 10 years inventing them. Certainly they’re not being used to facilitate the precise steps of off-line risk management and decision making.

It’s currently unclear if Molander will ever stop without going to court. But in the meantime, I want to find folks who have been misled and train them properly. My email: sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Managing plagiarism and misuse is a problem we all face these days and as yet there are no standards to follow. I’d love to start a dialogue with other original thinkers having similar issues.

____________________

Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision making, the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen September 9th, 2024

Posted In: News

During a day we make innumerable decisions. What should I eat for lunch? When should I go to the store? Should I complete this paperwork now? Or wait until after the meeting? We make these simple decisions quickly, effortlessly, using top-of- mind answers. But sometimes we must make consequential decisions that need some pondering.

Whatever we go through to get to our final end point, the process is often fraught with confusion, time delays, and unknown risk. To help you minimize these downsides when making important decisions, here are a few foundational elements:

Perspective: Have you collected the full data set necessary for resolution?
Criteria: What are the norms and values you must consider?
Goal: What is the specific goal you seek to achieve?
Risks: What are the threats to specific choices?
Steps: A replicable route to practical decision making.

I’ll take them one at a time.

PERSPECTIVE

One of the problems with decision making is the way your brain presents you with habituated responses. Like when you decide to go on a diet and unconsciously duplicate the patterns you used in previous (failed) diets, or when you stop at the same point when trying to learn a new hobby – again. So much of how we decide is ruled by our brain’s historic biases and restrictions.

To have as broad a range of options as possible with a minimum of bias and restriction, it’s necessary to consider the problem from different perspectives.

Ordinarily we automatically think our standard, familiar thoughts and unconsciously pose our standard, familiar questions to ourselves. I call this perspective Self. Self is our natural state, a largely unconscious idiosyncratic mix of physical, mental, emotional, unconscious and comfortable reactions and ideas. In Self we are the fish in the water.

From Self your decisions are based on your immediate world view – restricted by your momentary feelings, what’s going on in your life, and your history of managing similar issues.This is perfect for daily living. But for making consequential decisions it’s good to have as broad, and unbiased viewpoint as possible. For this you’ll need an expansive perspective that I call Observer/Witness.

Being in Observer offers more a conscious choice with a broader perspective and far less bias. You already do this, albeit unconsciously: the quick intake of breath telling you to be more alert and consider a new choice; that it’s time to go beyond your natural reaction, your standard thoughts and feelings.

You use Observer when raising children, like when your 2-year-old so creatively crayons the wall and you gently guide her to the coloring book but really want to scream ‘I JUST PAINTED THAT WALL!!!’. It’s when you’re fighting with a partner and take a step back to say, ‘Wait a minute. Let’s chill.’

In Observer, you notice a broader range of choices that weren’t visible from Self. They were always there, but not habituated like the more-used options. My book HOW? teaches how to do this.

Rule #1: Make important decisions from Observer to perceive a broad range of choices.

Sample

CRITERIA

Values and Beliefs – the basis of any decision making criteria – are the primary determinants for making important decisions as they defend and maintain who you are and what you stand for. Indeed, people often delay making a decision because they fear they’ll overlook something significant, because they don’t know the full set of risks involved.

From Observer you can consider the underlying values that must be maintained in the new decision. They’re often personal, although in team decision making the group must collaboratively agree to the values they want to maintain.

Here’s a personal tale of how my switch from Self to Observer converted my criteria to more authentic, less reactive values and a positive outcome.

A mythic row with a dear friend ended our relationship. He betrayed me! He lied! He broke my values-based criteria of honesty, of my ‘right to be respected!’ But as time passed I began to get a different perspective: I must love with ‘Ands’ not ‘Buts’. That meant (to me) I had to find a way to be in relationship. So I shifted my criteria (and Self perspective) from honesty and ‘right to be respected’ to my Observer perspective: ‘How do we love each other AND be respectful and honest?’ With this new criteria our relationship had a way forward.

Rule #2: Know the criteria you want to meet for your decision and write down some thoughts on what it will look like when it’s met.

GOALS

Goals often include specific target actions and a time limit for completion, and require a well-worded goal. So “I want to go on a diet to lose weight” becomes “I will do the research to find the best foods for my body to find and maintain its best weight.”

Goals must include details that can be evaluated or you run the risk of failure. The more specificity, the higher the possibility of success.

Rule #3: Set a goal using very specific words and expected results.

RISKS

All decisions carry some sort of risk. What risk are you willing to take? Are you willing to switch values? Are you willing to let go of people in your life? Relationships? Money?

Before making a final decision it’s important to know the risks involved in the change caused by the final outcome. Ask the people in any way involved in the final decision what the upsides/downsides are for them. Make sure you pose questions from Observer so you instill as little bias as possible. I’ve invented Facilitative Questions™ that lead to unconscious circuits where decision criteria are stored. Again, I teach them in HOW?.

Your final decision may not be able to address all risks but knowing them in advance is valuable for goal setting. Where there’s a chance the risks won’t be fully addressed, do as much advance work as possible to reduce the fallout.

Rule #4: before making a final decision, know the risks involved for the people, policies, values, etc.

STEPS

Often people begin seeking information too soon. I suggest you wait until you’ve determined the goals, risks, and criteria so you’ll have a more accurate foundation. Then:

Assemble all the elements involved: Know the goals, criteria, people and fall-out from each. Include gathering data (from Observer, to minimize bias) from the people who will be touched by your decision. While you might not be able to meet their criteria, you’ll at least have an idea of the risks.
Determine and manage the risks: Fully understand the distance between where you are now and where you will be once the decision is made. Will the same values prevail? Will jobs or situations be changed? How will this affect the status quo? How will you deal with any fallout?
Gather data: Once you know the risks, goals and criteria involved, gather supporting data (both internal and external) that ensures you’ve got the important elements covered and the risks managed best you can.
Weight the options: You’ll now have the information you need to understand the types of choices and risks. Go back to the drawing board. Get into Observer. Write down a hierarchy of criteria to meet and see how/where they match the options. Weight them according to risks and values. Know precisely the fallout.
Carry out the decision: make sure to personally manage any fallout.

And good luck! Should you require some team coaching to facilitate an important decision, please contact me: sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

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Sharon Drew Morgen September 2nd, 2024

Posted In: Change Management, Communication

I’m curious why so many professionals are satisfied using change and support practices knowing the fail rates in their industry: change management has a 97% fail rate as do all Behavior Modification practices; coaching and training have a 90% fail rate; and sales a 95% fail rate.

A leader in the Change Management field complained of persistent resistance during a recent call, showing me the model he was using that had ‘connect with/convince people’ at Step 6. I suggested the problem might be he brought people in too late to gather the full fact pattern of the underlying problem making goal-setting certain to be flawed, and setting up resistance when solutions are thrust on folks without their input.

Why, I wondered, had he kept using a change model that regularly got resistance rather than do something different? “What else can I do? There’s nothing else to use.”

Sales is also based on a flawed premise, starting with a desire to place solutions and prospecting for folks with a ‘need’ by posing biased questions they can then sell into. But with a 5% close rate, ‘need’ may not be the reason people buy.

Coaching has a similar problem. Coaches assume they must ‘understand’ the client’s problem by posing questions meant to either gather data or lead to problem solving. And yet clients often don’t find a permanent solutions.

WHY YOU CAN’T CHANGE OTHER’S BEHAVIORS

I’ve developed new models that increase successful permanent change, and enable efficient values-based decision making that use different intent and tools. But I’d like to first offer you some of my Morgenisms:

You can’t change a behavior by trying to change a behavior;
Selling doesn’t cause buying;
The time it takes people to understand their risk of change is the length of the change/sales cycle;
Brains hear as per a Listener’s existing (historic, biased) neural circuits that translate the incoming sound vibrations/signals (i.e. words) into meaning, very often quite different than the intent of the Speaker.
Questions are posed using the Asker’s wording, intent, needs and goals, and as such, are biased by the assumptions of the Asker, which may not be aligned with the needs, goals of the Receiver.

In other words, using conventional practices (questions, stories, examples, explanations, information sharing) influencers may not be able to persuade Others to act on their suggestions as there’s a strong possibility they won’t accurately hear/interpret what’s been said. As I’ll explain, there’s a way to help folks make necessary changes directly in their brains.

WHERE DOES CHANGE COME FROM?

Any change, any decision, any willingness to do, know, be something different requires different actions in the brain. Standard models attempt to change behaviors by trying to change behaviors! Not possible, regardless of the need or the efficacy of the solution presented: behaviors are outputs from specific prompts in the brain, not changeable without changing the original neural programming that triggered them.

Change is a brain thing. The dilemma for influencers is that due to the way brains listen and store history, information provided may not reach the specific circuits that triggered the problematic action. Just because we lead others through what seems like a rational change or decision-making process, or try to convince folks to eat healthy or pitch them a great solution, doesn’t mean our words will change the place in the brain where their problem initiated.

What is we give influencers the job of changing brains rather than behaviors, so the client can then make their necessary behavior changes from within.

Sample

NOT VENUS RISING

Behaviors are the result, the outputs, of meaningless electrochemical computations in the brain; they do not arise like Venus from the sea.

When we try to change behaviors without changing the circuits that triggered them, it’s like telling a forward moving robot to move backwards by explaining why it should, or showing it a video of other backwards robots, or telling it a story of the benefits of flexibility. You must go back to the original programming and reprogram. And the job of influencing change is both a listening problem and a questioning problem.

THE LISTENING PROBLEM

I’ll explain the issues that make change a problem for outside influencers. To begin with, it’s a listening problem. Brains don’t hear incoming words as per the meaning the Speaker intended.

Incoming sound vibrations (words, or ‘meaningless puffs of air’ as neuroscience calls them) get translated according to the existing neural circuits in the brain of the Listener (i.e. biased, restricted), circuits that may have no relation at all to what was said or how distant it is from the original intent. It’s automatic, meaningless, and electrochemical.

Indeed, there’s a good chance something said will be misinterpreted by the Listener. It’s all unconscious and electrochemical. Think motherboard.

It becomes a multifaceted problem: Speakers may misunderstand Responders, Responders may misunderstand Speakers. And no one knows how their intended message was received or if what they think they heard is accurate.

Sample

Obviously this gives leaders, docs, coaches, and sellers dilemmas when they offer what they consider necessary information (no matter how relevant).

That’s the first hurdle. The next is the questions we ask.

THE QUESTION PROBLEM

Leaders, coaches, sellers, and doctors try to pose ‘right’ questions to discover the Other’s problem or to gather data to understand. This is problematic in many ways:

Both Speaker or Listener may inaccurately hear what the other intends to convey, possibly misinterpreting what was said without being aware they’re doing so;
The question may not be worded in a way that the Listener hears what’s intended and may unconsciously go against the values of the Listener causing resistance.

To address these problems I spent 10 years inventing a wholly new form of question [Facilitative Question], and 13 steps of change that enable Listeners to accurately hear the incoming message and leads them to the relevant brain circuits where the initiating triggers reside for discovery and change.

In other words, Influencers unwittingly use questions that may not 1. gather accurate data, 2. be heard accurately, 3. enable the Responder to reprogram their brain to make change possible. Hence you end up with change initiatives that

face resistance and sabotage,
fail to collect the full data set and face faulty goals, time delays, and resistance,
are based on the viewpoints of a small group who seem to believe they can speak for the entire group
fly in the face of the beliefs and values of the underlying system,
assume Listeners will make permanent change based on direction from a seller, healthcare provider, leaders, or coach,
don’t trust that Others have their own answers or routes to permanent change.

But it’s possible to facilitate Others through to permanent brain change. My book HOW? teaches Change Facilitation to accomplish this, including traversing the steps of change, formulating Facilitative Questions, changing perspectives, shifting hierarchies of beliefs, and listening without bias. Additionally, I coach and train folks to enable influencers to facilitate permanent, congruent change directly from the appropriate neural circuits.

I recognize this isn’t standard thinking yet. But my Change Facilitation model has been successfully trained to 100,000 sales folks and leaders globally. Contact me and I can coach or train you.

_______________________

Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision making, the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

Sharon Drew Morgen August 26th, 2024

Posted In: Sales

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Dear Sales People (and Leaders, Coaches, and Doctors): We have new information, by Sharon-Drew Morgen