Relieve your stress by identifying which hemisphere of your brain is being solicited. If you feel depressed or excessively emotional, your stress originates from the right hemisphere – the creative, emotive, holistic side. Switch to the more factual left side: do math, write, plan, organize. The emotional right hemisphere will calm down. And if your overstuffed schedule is stressing you up, it means that the left hemisphere is involved. Sing or play sports to switch to the right one.
January 22nd, 2012
Getting a Positive Return on Your Training Investments
Training programs are too often seen as events instead of processes. If that is what you do, don’t be surprised if you get a negative return on your investment.
I know from experience that the weak link in the chain is not the training itself – I am assuming that you have chosen a seasoned trainer offering tried and tested class material! No, the problem often rests in the level of preparation or the number of integration opportunities.
If you want to maximize your training investments, especially with soft skills training, the training you select must be well-adapted.
Ask yourself: Who truly needs training?
Since training needs vary depending on one’s expertise, the first factor you should consider is the knowledge level of your participants. There is nothing more counterproductive than having experienced participants growing bored while waiting for beginners to learn, or having beginners getting confused and lost because they don’t already have the knowledge necessary to follow advanced training. Participants should all be at about the same knowledge level.
Now, ask yourself: Will participants have opportunities to immediately apply what they just learned?
The other key factor is giving the training at the appropriate moment. There is no point in transferring knowledge and know-how to participants if they won’t have opportunities to use them immediately. Providing “just-in-case” training is futile, because when the time finally comes to use what they have learned, participants will have already forgotten most of it. For training sessions to be profitable, and to make sure that participants don’t forget what they have learned, any training must be applied in real-life situations within the next few ...
March 18th, 2011
SURVEY SAYS… People Skills More Important Than Technical Skills
As business leaders look for ways to motivate their employees during the recession, many are choosing to develop their interpersonal skills, rather than improving their technical abilities, a new study reveals. The study analyzed the personal development plans of nearly 11,000 leaders from a variety of industries in North America. They discovered that more than half of leaders chose to improve their interpersonal skills--such as developing direct reports and communicating more effectively--after reviewing their 360-degree feedback.
Another 13 percent set the goal of being an example of practicing self-development, believing that regardless of your position in the organization, you can always get better. The only other target for development that came close to these was the 9 percent who elected to place a greater emphasis on obtaining results. Together, these accounted for roughly three-quarters of all the plans for development.
Source: Inside Training Magazine (March 16, 2011)
March 9th, 2011
Putting a Price Tag on a lost customer
In today’s world, customers have more choices than ever in the marketplace and Internet has given them an outlet for expression. If the experiences they have with our company become too difficult or don’t provide enough value for them, the company loses them as a customer and as a potential advocate. Customers leave for many reasons. Some move (3%), some die (1%), some are influenced by friends (5%), some are lured away by the competition (9%), but overwhelmingly, customers leave because they are dissatisfied with the product (14%) or turned away by an attitude of indifference on the part of a company employee (68%). The message from all these numbers is pretty clear: 82% of our customers leave because they are dissatisfied either by our product or by our service. You should worry about dissatisfied customers for the following reasons:
- The average dissatisfied customer will tell 8 to 16 people (about 10 percent will tell more than 20 people) about what rotten treatment he or she was made to endure at the hands of your company,
- Each one of those dissatisfied customers has a circle of influence of 250 people, and usually 10% of the people fall in your primary target group, which means 25 people.
- Of those told, 2% (one in 50) will not purchase services from that organization.
- However, satisfied customers express their satisfaction to 5 other persons only.
- 96% of the customers that are dissatisfied with the services do not complain to the person or organization responsible (that means that for every customer who bothers to complain, there are 26 others who remain silent.)
- 91% of unhappy customers will never purchase service from you again.
- The cost of getting a new or replacement customer is estimated to
