What would it take to make (sales) training REALLY work?

Have you attended any sales training recently? Or perhaps organized one for your sales team?

One point that keeps troubling me when it comes to sales training (or any soft skills training for that matter) is that I can’t help getting the impression that it’s a waste of time and money for the participants and the organization funding it.

The sales management (often including HR or L&D) spends significant efforts in selecting a vendor, designing with them a program, arranging for venue & catering and not to forget the fees for the vendor.

What is the outcome? Hard to tell. Are the participants happy with the program? Often yes. How much did the participants really apply? In my experience much less than expected. Was it ultimately a good Return on Investment (ROI)? Who knows...

What is missing?

I have attended a number of sales and leadership trainings myself and while I enjoyed most of these trainings, I’d say they were not worth the time and money invested if I look at my actual behavioral change resulting from these trainings. Analyzing why the change didn’t happen, I can see three reasons:

• No clear commitment to any specific (!) changes at the end of the seminar
• No support during the implementation of any changes – when something doesn’t work immediately, one easily gives up and returns to previous behavior
• No framework that reminds me of keep trying new behaviors that lead ultimately to more success

To achieve significant behavioral change that leads to better results, we came up with a number of cost-effective strategies how to overcome these short comings. Contact us to find out how. 

Let’s keep progressing!

Charlie Lang
Executive Progress Expert and Founder of Progress-U Ltd.

Author of the E-Book Stop Selling! Accelerate Your Business in Asia

Author of The Groupness Factor and the upcoming "A New Map for a New Age"

Upcoming Special Events in August & September 2010 August 30, 2010 in Hong Kong The Starbucks Experience click here for more info September 02, 2010 in Hong Kong Sponsored Half-Day Event: How to Become a Professional Corporate Coach click here for more info September 07, 2010 in Hong Kong - with Guest Expert from Germany What prevents your organization from fully benefiting from coaching? click here for more info September 14, 2010 in Hong Kong - with Guest Speakers from Israel and Germany The Joy-Care Factor - Achieving personal happiness and better relationships click here for more info Starting in September 2010 in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore Signature Program: Develop Yourself as a Professional Corporate Coach click here for more info

It's done! India is confirmed

As some of you know, we are in the process of establishing a joint-venture company in India together with our Gurgaon/Delhi based partner Asha Sridhar.

We got confirmation now that our desired company name Progress-U India Pvt. Ltd. is approved, i.e. officially we are now 'on the map'.

Unfortunately, there is also a software company with the name Progress India but since their biz is quite different, we don't worry too much.

I'll be heading to Gurgaon this coming Thursday as we (Asha and I) will co-deliver already our first workshop with our first client for Progress-U India: the health insurer Apollo-Munich. That's actually a nice coincidence because Apollo-Munich is an Indian-German joint-venture and Asha is Indian (obviously) and I'm German (somewhat obvious).

Stop! to Accelerate

FIRST-CLASS LEADERSHIP E-ZINE - ISSUE NO.59/ AUGUST 2010 Charlie Lang Dear Reader, Are you actively involved in social media? Do you love it? Do you hate it? Do you avoid it? I avoided it for quite some time as I’m already busy enough and I didn’t want to burden myself with even more ‘requests’. Also, I was a bit suspicious if this would be all just a big waste of my time.  Nonetheless, I signed up with LinkedIn and Facebook already a couple of years ago but was never very active and somehow didn’t see the point. About five years ago, I stopped blogging and Twitter is something that I never even started as I didn’t fully comprehend the concept behind it. Update August 2010: A few days ago, I signed up for Twitter, restarted this BLOG and became much more active on LinkedIn and a bit more active on Facebook. Why the change of mind? Actually, my mind didn’t change that much. I’m still rather skeptical but I reminded myself of an important principle I dearly believe in: “You don’t know it until you do it.” So I decided to ‘do it’ and will see what happens. Perhaps I’ll come to love it, perhaps I’ll hate it or perhaps it will just become a normal thing to do like sending emails or browsing the internet. What’s your experience? Feel free to share here on this blog. Let's keep progressing! Charlie Lang Executive Progress Expert and Founder of Progress-U Ltd. Author of The Groupness Factor Follow Charlie on Twitter Upcoming Special Events in Aug. & Sept. 2010 August 26, 2010 in Hong Kong Sponsored Half-Day Event: How to Become a Professional Corporate Coach click here for more info September 07, 2010 in Hong Kong - with Guest Expert from Germany What prevents your organization from fully benefiting from coaching? click here for more info September 14, 2010 in Hong Kong - with Guest Speakers from Israel and Germany The Joy-Care Factor - Achieving personal happiness and better relationships click here for more info Starting in September 2010 in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore Signature Program: Develop Yourself as a Professional Corporate Coach click here for more info Stop! to Accelerate By Charlie Lang, Executive Progress Expert Corporate Culture & Senior Leadership Expert @ Progress-U Limited Download this article No, this is not another article that bores the busy executive with the appeal to slow down, take a vacation, and recharge the batteries. No, it’s neither an article that appeals to find more work-life-balance by reducing one’s pace. As you might know, a core part of my work is to coach senior executives. Having been in this line of work since 2002, I sometimes wonder why the majority of my clients truly cherish the time with me. Over the years, I learned to admit that I (and my charm) might only be a secondary reason. The people I’m spending time with in my coaching sessions are typically first or second level executives – Managing Directors, Sales Directors, General Managers and the like. And they all have at least one thing in common: they are super-busy! They are often the ones who are the first to arrive at the office in the morning and are frequently among the last to leave. Their schedules are insanely packed with meetings and before, in between and after they need to go through their emails, often numbering 100 – 200 per day. Have I mentioned that most of them travel a lot, too?” When every minute of the day is precious, why would they want to add another 3-4 hours per month to their schedules to see me?  Interestingly, while many of my coaching assignments started out with some very specific objective to be achieved, they often turn into a continuous assignment and the specific objective seems to disappear. That seems strange, doesn’t it? Very busy executives cut significant time out of their schedule for something unspecific? And even cherish that time?  Let me explain what I observed.  Did I say that they waste time with me? By no means! They cherish the time with me because they figure that it makes a significant difference. And as I said, I might be only a secondary reason for that – and secondary means that I still have a role to play…  What I noticed is that the executives I’m coaching realize through our sessions - which may have started for a very specific reason - that a ‘time-out’ with their coach makes a bigger difference to how they run their business than they would have thought at the outset.  They realize that during these 90 – 120 minutes, something almost like magic happens. They stop, yes, really stop – and think. This is part of my job: to really make them stop by establishing certain boundaries to ensure that there will be no disturbances. Take for example, the case of one of my coachees, the only person who is allowed to interrupt our sessions is his wife. My job is not only to stop them, but to challenge their current way of thinking as well, as to trigger new insights. That’s not where it ends. New insights in most cases require a change in action. Part of the process is ‘to nail the action’, to ensure the coachees actually make specific changes in the way they think and do things that will lead to improved outcomes. The last part of the process is to keep them accountable through follow-up and follow-through in the subsequent sessions.  Tom, Managing Director of the Global Sourcing office of a European retailer once shared with me the following after I asked him why he still kept seeing me once or twice a month even after 1.5 years since we started his coaching sessions: “Charlie, you know by now how crazy our business is. You are aware of the daily madness and the pressure we get from both headquarters and our customers. Taking these 90 minutes off to meet you every few weeks is a great way of recharging myself for the daily battle.” “You could go to the spa instead. I’m sure that would recharge you, too, and might be even more pleasurable.” I responded.  “Perhaps, but I wouldn’t get the same level of inspiration and I’d probably make more stupid decisions which would lead to even more pressure. So it’s not just the 90 minutes that make the difference, but the impact of these 90 minutes on my daily work. That’s something I can’t get in the spa.”  One of my friends at Toastmasters and NLP expert Talis Wong insists: “Practice doesn't make perfect – unless you get useful feedback. Otherwise, practice may make you perfectly wrong.”  Let me twist that a bit: “Just taking time off doesn’t guarantee gaining great insights. Most of the time, to make a real difference, it takes qualified feedback, as well as effective challenging of current thinking. ” But why pay a coach for that when you could do the same with spouse, friends or colleagues. There are two main reasons why using a professional coach tends to be more effective:  • Spouse, friends, and colleagues are all ‘party’ in your life, so they’ll tend to be biased to some extent. Even if they consciously try to be totally objective, it would be difficult for them to avoid being biased.  • Professional coaches are trained in the art of reflection and use various tools to get their coachees think on a much deeper level thus triggering more profound insights  Stop – Think – Accelerate! What do you do to move faster?  Feel free to share on this blog. Want Content for Your Web Site or E-Zine? You may copy any of the Manager as Coach articles written by Charlie Lang to your web site, or distribute them in your e-zine or magazine, provided that you include the following attribution (including links to http://www.progressu.com): With permission of Charlie Lang, Executive Progress Expert of Progress-U Ltd

Are you tweeting? And other news

1. Twitter

This twitter thing has been on my mind for many months now and quite honestly, I still don't get what's the fuss about it. Following my motto: "you don't know it until you try it" I finally signed up on twitter a few days ago: http://twitter.com/keepprogressing (in case you'd like to have a look or send me comments on Twitter).

Any idea how to get a 'following' there? Am still a very green newbie on Twitter.

2. Progress-U News

Am quite excited to share that we have two new colleagues at our Progress-U office in Hong Kong. As our assistant Rosanna Shek - who has been with us for almost exactly 3 years - has decided to expand her experience by working in a different company and perhaps different role, we had to look for a replacement and found one in Vanessa Lui who joined us yesterday. Rosanna will hand over her work to Vanessa and have her last working day on 31st August 2010.

Also, we eventually hired again a Business Development Director for Hong Kong. Owen Wong will join us on coming Wednesday (18th August). He has already experience in doing similar work with one of our competitors here in Hong Kong, so he should be 'up and running' within a short period of time due to his past experience.

I wish both of them a great start at Progress-U and all the success they and we wish.

3. Hot upcoming events

After a hot summer (which is still ongoing here in Hong Kong) follows a hot event season. We'll have 3 special events coming up:

August 26, 2010: Becoming a Professional Corporate Coach (half-day event)

facilitated by Charlie Lang

September 07, 2010: How to Successfully Use Coaching in Business (full-day event)

facilitated by Frank Bresser (flying in from Germany) and Charlie Lang

September 14, 2010: The Joy-Care Factor - with Easier Done than Said technology (full-day event)

facilitated by Lenny Ravich (flying in from Israel) and Avi Liran (flying in from Singapore)

Hope to see you at any of these events!

Keep in touch!

Charlie

The Fish Starts Smelling from the Head

Do you remember when you were back in school? How would you distinguish between an excellent and an average teacher?

A good test would be to see what happens when a teacher is called out of class at mid-lesson. If students still keep working, it means that the teacher managed to truly engage them in the learning subject. More often, you’ve probably seen the opposite - how kids behaved if the teacher wasn’t that effective.

If we look at the workplace, isn’t there a strong similarity between effective teachers and effective leaders? Have you seen teams that perform on a high level whether or not the boss is around? And other teams where performance takes an almost instant dip when the manager leaves the office?

Or does maintaining performance depend more on the kind of people working in the team?

That’s what Marty, Head of Finance of the Hong Kong subsidiary of a large American Media Company thought.

“We just can’t find the right people here who are really passionate about finance, accounting, and controlling. So I have to keep being after them, making sure the quality of reports is right and deadlines are being respected. 

It’s quite tiring, but it seems that’s the only way to make it work over here.”

Marty has been working in Hong Kong for the past two years. He was transferred by the New York headquarters due to a successful track record as Chief Controller there.

This is a quite common situation: executives who were able to successfully manage teams overseas struggle to repeat the same success in Asia. So is Marty right? Are there simply not enough people here who are passionate in his field?

In Germany, we have a saying that translates to “The fish starts smelling from the head.” Perhaps you can guess that the fish here stands for the team and the head stands for…the head of the team. So if the team ‘smells’, then there are good chances it started at the head, i.e. the manager of the team.

Getting people engaged in Hong Kong or other parts of Asia might not work exactly in the same way as it does overseas. It turned out that Marty tapped into the limiting beliefs trap.

When his leadership style which successfully worked in the US failed to produce the same results in Asia, he simply put the blame on his Asian team members. He replaced a couple of them which hardly improved the situation.

When this was not working, he changed his leadership style from an empowerment to a controlling approach. Now his results improved somewhat but he felt quite exhausted from continuously checking the work of his team members. What he didn’t realize – as we eventually found out – was the fact that his Asian colleagues were used to a directive style from his predecessor. They needed first to be prepared for a more empowering leadership style.

The paradox here is that on one hand, his people actually wanted to be more empowered which in turn would make them more engaged and at the same time, when Marty tried to do exactly that, it didn’t work because they were not used to this leadership style.

So what to do?

First, Marty agreed that his current style of managing the team is not what he really wanted. So he was willing to make yet another change provided that there would be good chances to achieve what he wanted to achieve: to build a highly engaged team.

Second, Marty needed to open up to his team and share his frustrations without putting the blame on anyone but himself. He decided to run a facilitated offsite half-day event with his team. He agreed to apologize to his team members for his recent directive style. This was difficult for him to do because his own frustration with his team members was still emotionally affecting him.

Third, during the offsite event, after airing his frustrations and offering his apologies, he shared his vision of how to work together and solicited comments from his team. Since the trust level was not yet sufficiently high for his team members to feel comfortable enough to confront Marty directly with their views, the facilitator asked Marty to leave the room and collected their comments.

It turned out that there was actually a close match between Marty’s vision and what his team members wanted. In order to feel more comfortable with taking more ownership, however, they needed better clarification of his expectations. Initially, they felt that he was simply dumping work on them without explaining exactly what the expected outcome was. As a result, they were hesitating which way to go, and this lead to delays and eventually suboptimal results.

Marty was happy to learn that his initial and actually preferred leadership style would only require some modification to work in the same way it did back in the US.

As it turned out, his Asian colleagues could get equally, if not more, passionate than his previous colleagues. All that was needed was confidence in them and a slight but important modification in his approach to leading his Asian team.

Back on BLOG

Dear readers, dear friends,

Wow, it has been 5 years since I've been last posting here, so if you want to read some really old stuff about me, just scroll down.

Things have massively changed since then, but some things haven't: I'm still passionate about coaching and leadership development and I still love writing though in the past couple of years the frequency of my articles has significantly reduced. But I decided to change that and spend more time writing again.

A short update what I'm up to:

• Finish my second book (a business fiction on corporate coaching culture) - first draft completed, being revised now
• Start writing another book "Business Coaching in Asia" together with Sebastien Henry
• Write again at least one article every month
• Help my colleague Asha to get our subsidiary in India started (we already got a major deal from Apollo-Munich insurance) and help our other subsidiaries in Singapore, Shanghai and Tokyo to further develop
• Keep writing very regularly (at least once a week) on this blog
• Get started with Twitter (still no idea how this works)

What are you up to?

Hope to hear from you!

If you have any suggestions what I should write about, let me know here.

The first article in this new series will be published in a moment.

Keep in touch!

Let's keep progressing!

Charlie

Progressing with Progress-U

The past few weeks have been quite exciting for me and my company:

a) Stop Selling! and First-Class Leadership programs now available in Chinese

I found two new associates, Tan Chew Yen and Diane Chan who will help me develop Cantonese and Mandarin versions of our First-Class Leadership and Stop Selling! programs. At present, we work out the association agreement and I've started with a train-the-trainer program for them.

With Chew Yen, I'll be able to provide bi-lingual (English/Cantonese and English/Mandarin) versions right away as Chew Yen is a qualified translator.

Being able to cater for the Chinese speaking market, will enable us to take Progress-U to the next level.

b) Website Update

Please visit our re-designed home page http://www.progressu.com.hk and give us your comments

c) New Strategic Partnership with SGS

The Hong Kong / China branch of SGS, a world leader in testing and certification, recently started to expand their offers to include soft skills training. Progress-U started a collaboration with SGS in this area and will provide leadership and sales training services for programs organized by SGS.

d) Manuscript Evaluation

The first two experts have given me their feedback which is quite encouraging:

1) Marshall Goldsmith

In his email to me he said that he liked my book and allowed me to use the following endorsement:

"A great guide for building collaborative leadership in today’s rapidly changing world."

Marshall Goldsmith, considered by Forbes to be one of the five most-respected executive coaches. He is co-editor or author of 19 books including "The Leader of the Future" and "Coaching for Leadership".

2) Mick Bennett

"I enjoyed the book and the anecdotal style. There are lots of suggestions and distinctions that leaders will find useful. The Groupness Factor may well create a stimulus for them to look at themselves, their behavior and quality of leadership."

Mick Bennett, Managing Director of Hewitt's Asia-Pacific operations. He is co-author of "Leadership & Talent in Asia - How the Best Employers Deliver Extraordinary Performance".


My further schedule for publishing seems now quite fixed. If nothing important goes wrong, The Groupness Factor should be readily available in the market in the course of August 2005. I'm excited to be so close to the target. Thanks to all who supported me so far in this special project.

Winning Experts

Sorry, haven't been posting for a while, perhaps I was too busy with my upcoming book, developing my still young business, etc.

Talking about my book, things got a bit delayed (any surprise?), unfortunately. I hope to get it published by July 05 - let's see how that works out. After having received very valuable input from my friends and business partners for improvement of my first draft, I finally completed the second draft some 2 weeks ago.

Luckily, I could find 4 internationally renowned leadership experts (click on their name to learn more about them) who are ready to give me their evaluation of my 2nd draft.

1) Marshall Goldsmith (considered by FORBES to be one of the top 5 executive coaches in the US, co-author of several books on leadership)

2) Mick Bennett (co-author of "Leadership & Talent in Asia" published in 2004)

3) Jean-Francois Manzoni (co-author of "The Set-Up-To-Fail Syndrome" published in 2002)

4) Roz Usheroff (leadership coach and author, known in N-America for her expertise in leadership etiquette)


I hope to get their feed-foward by the end of May so that I can finalize the manuscript in early June. Publishing could follow a good month after.

You might wonder how I got these rather famous people to do this for me? It seems too simple to be true: by asking. Last year I engaged Herbert Lee, a professional public speaker to help me improve my presentation skills. He kept saying: "Don't be timid. Ask in a friendly and respectful manner and you'll be surprised how people are willing to help you. This is even more true for many of the very successful people." So I did. Did everybody I contacted offer their help? No, of course not. Those who didn't, were either too swamped with other obligations, or had health issues or whatever. Did anybody brush me off? Not at all. All responses I got were extremely friendly and polite. Did everybody respond? No, but I have the impression that the response rate was much higher than when I send 'cold' emails to potential business partners.

If you are interested in having a glance at an excerpt of this book, visit "The Groupness Factor - How to Achieve a Corporate Success Culture through First-Class Leadership". Your comments are always welcome! Email me at charlie.lang@progressu.com.hk

Perhaps the most exciting journey in my life

Having traveled to over 60 countries, it is easy to imagine that I was lucky enough to experience quite few exciting journeys in different parts of this world.

Well, the journey which I have been embarking on today is indeed special, it is the exciting adventure of authoring my first book which I am determined to complete this Spring only.

The Book Title will most likely be "The Groupness Factor" plus some subtitle I am not sure about yet. It will be an unusual book about leadership for several reasons. First, I discovered the key concept of groupness in a book which has basically nothing to do with leadership. It is in fact a book about the effects of different rearing styles applied on children. While reading about the concept of groupness it struck me like a lightening! I realized that groupness is so very present in our adult life and we are simply not aware of it.

What I found is that first-class leaders subconsciously create groupness in a productive way while less effective leaders either let groupness happen randomly with a big risk of being unproductve or unconsciously distroy existing positive groupness.

Ever since I read about this concept, I am greatly amazed that - to my knowledge - no-one ever came up with this concept to be applied to leadership development. And yet it is so obvious, once you are aware, that making proper use of the groupness factor can make a huge difference in any organization.

Besides my own corporate experience and experience in coaching executives, I will use other trustable research results to further validate my findings. I also plan to give a clear description of what it takes to achieve successful change, knowing that understanding it and doing it certainly are of different qualities.

My target is to complete the first manuscript by mid-February, then get it edited and critically read by 5-10 test readers. Using their feedback, I'll work on an improved version which I hope to get ready by mid March 05. Then I hope there will be only some fine-tuning left so that I could go for publishing in April 05.

With a little luck, I'll have my first own book in my hands by the end of April 05.

Let's keep the fingers crossed that I will achieve my ambitious goal. The journey has begun! Contact me if you want to join me.

In Coaching, is experience useful or dangerous?

Last Wednesday I facilitated a discussion on this topic at the Hong Kong Coaching Community. You are probably curious about the outcome. Well, the answer to the question whether experience could be dangerous in coaching other people is, yes, if you use it in the wrong way.

What does that mean? Our discussion lead us to the equally important question as to how is coaching different from consulting. The point is, if we use our experience or knowledge to recommend to the client what to do in a given situation, that is not coaching, but consulting. Nothing wrong with that, this is especially appropriate where the client has a clear deficit in expertise.

However, usually we handle people's issues in coaching and we could say that everyone knows something about people, especially about him- or herself. In fact, no one knows better about one-self than we ourselves. The only problem is, we often lack awareness. Here is where the coach can become very valuable, if he manages to raise our awareness, expand our horizon, etc. The masterful coach does that by asking the right questions, by provoking through exaggerated statements, by a process of clarification and discovery. Needless to say that excellent rapport between client and coach is a precondition for this process.

Also, experience can be very valuable for the coach to 'smell' where the issue could be and then tap into that area and see whether something valuable comes up. Someone with out experience, may not be able to get to the point so quickly, if at all. So here we go, experience can be very powerful in coaching as long as it does not lead the coach to consulting where it is not appropriate.

During that discussion I also shared some results from my research on outstandingly successful coaches. If you want to know more about it, don't hesitate to contact me.

How many countries have you traveled?

Today I got an interesting link to a website where you can create a map of the countries you have traveled. You get even the html code to post this map on your website or your blog (like I did).



It was interesting for me to see that I've already been to over 60 countries. This is due to the fact that my previous positions in International Management required me to travel considerably. Also, I always like to explore new places when I travel for fun.

When you tick the country boxes on the above mentioned website, memories are triggered and I realized how much time I had been spending in Asia even before I moved to Hong Kong three years ago. This is perhaps one of the reasons why I felt at home almost instantly once I arrived here.

Karate & Coaching

I was 17 years old when I started learning Karate (traditional Shotokan Style). Until that time, I had never been a very sporty person. Hence, it took me a couple of years of intense practice before I was able to join the first Karate competitions.

I was in a way lucky to have a great trainer despite of living in a small German city, famous for its jigsaw puzzles: Ravensburg. The trainer of our Dojo, Guenther Mohr, was at the same time national team coach, won numerous titles such as Vice World Champion (1 time), European Champion (5 times) and German Champion (12 times).

Our junior (age 18-21) team won in 1983 the State Championship of Baden-Wuerttemberg and in 1984 the National Championship of Germany. I was proud to be member of this winning team. In the same year, I completed high-school and went to the army for a bit more than a year.

Being away from Ravensburg during the army times, I had little opportunity to practice Karate. Having returned for my mechanical engineering studies, I picked it up again, however, due to study-related work, I would only go once, max. twice a week to the Dojo.

After completion of my engineering degree in Ravensburg, I went to France for post-graduate studies in International Marketing. That was the time when I quit Karate...

...until August 2004, approx. 16 years later...

It is amazing how much the body (yes, the body, not the mind) remembers. Of course, it took my quite a few lessons to catch up to come even close to the level I have been 16 years ago. And I still didn't reach this level after 3 months of not very regular practice. But I can see that I make great progress every time and it reminds me of catching up with a language not practiced for a few years.

How is all this related to Coaching?

I realized during these training sessions that I had a truly great coach some 20years ago and that I benefit from the great learnings of that time even today. Would I have progressed at that time with an average coach? For sure. Would I have become a member of the winning team at that time with an average coach? Rather not. Would I be able to pick up things so quickly now, after a pause of 16 years if I had an average coach? Unlikely.

Executive Coaching basically has the same target as Sports Coaching, that is, to help the coachee to reach peak performance. Average coaches may help you to improve faster than you would without the coach, masterful coaches may help you to be the best you can - be it in Karate or in Leadership.

Talking to Top Executive Coach Marshall Goldsmith

Yesterday evening I had the unique opportunity to talk to Marshall Goldsmith who is considered by FORBES to be one of the Top 5 Executive Coaches in the US.

I was quite excited and somewhat nervous when I dialed his number. I guess he sensed that and suggested immediately to introduce himself first and then I would have the chance to introduce myself. This approach immediately broke my nervousness and the talk was very relaxed from that point.

I prepared a long list of questions, however, only approx. 50% of them I needed to ask, for the rest of them he gave the answers without me asking. I learned how he got into coaching and a few secrets of his outstanding success.

After talking about his work, I asked him whether he had a chance to have a look at my website which he confirmed. Then I asked him what he thinks about it and he said “It’s good.” Hmmm, I thought, this is a bit short, let me dig deeper and so I asked, “What do you think I could improve?” And then he took off and basically confirmed some thoughts I already had and that is that I need to become much more focused in what I am doing. He said that you will be considered as a top expert only if you narrow down your expertise to a few areas, even though you might be competent in a no. of other areas. The point is that you won’t get the credibility unless you clearly focus.

It is a leap I was hesitating to make but I realize more and more that this is a necessity to progress to a new level.

Also, I was asking him what he thinks about networking and he said that one can make a decent living from working within a network. However, you will be somewhat limited to this network. If you want to get broad exposure, then you must expose yourself. Good ways to do this are to get published (articles, books, etc.) and to do a lot of public speaking. A couple of months ago I started with such activities and very recently I even started writing a book about leadership which I plan to launch in Spring 2005.

After this phone conversation I am even more determined to follow my vision and to do the necessary. Marshall acted as a true ‘coach’, that is, he moved me forward faster than if I would have ‘walked’ by myself.

How to turn prospective clients into real clients

Last week I met a recently trained coach who responded to my article about mentor coaching. She told me that she is stuck with her coaching business and that she does not know how to find and win coaching clients. We first discussed different possibilities to attract prospective clients and she has to figure out which of the possibilities are most suitable for her.

Then, I asked her, why would any of the prospects hire her as their coach and she gave me some general arguments which did not sound very convincing to me. I think that this is a big problem for many coaches who have little experience in sales & marketing. Eventually, I got her to figure out what is unique about her, her background and her experience and how that could benefit her potential clients.

She was quite surprised to find out that she has something unique to offer which could be very beneficial to prospective clients. I helped her also to understand the 14 buying motivators and how to align the unique buying proposition with the key buying motivators.

This principle works with practically all products and services and is part of my Innovative Sales Program. If you want to learn more about it, contact me at Charlie.Lang@progressu.com.hk or call me at +852-9199 2019.

How to Retain and Develop Talent

According to the following article which I found at Egon Zehnder International , development of top talent becomes more and more important. At the same time, corporations are reluctant to invest in training due to low effectiveness experienced in the past. This is also my experience and that's why I highly recommend to combine training with an initial psycho-metric assessment and with follow-up coaching as this drastically increases the effectiveness. I even provide a results guarantee when this approach is being used. Now read the article:

TOP STORY Talent Management:

Skills shortage makes talent development top priorityWhile poor performance is often blamed on the skills shortage, many companies are reluctant to invest in training, reports Gill Plimmer in the Financial Times. Companies often prefer poaching top players from competitors or overseas as an alternative to developing existing staff. Despite pressure from policymakers to promote professional development, estimates suggest that corporate spending on formal training has dropped 10 percent in the last two years. High employee churn and the difficulty of assessing return on investment have discouraged some companies from investing in training, explains the author. Continuing professional development was sidelined by many companies during the 1990s in the quest for shareholder value, say experts. However, with downsized, flatter organizations, companies are now realizing that getting more out of their staff is the key to competitiveness. Increased regulation is forcing companies to invest in professional development in areas like accountancy and law. Companies are also under pressure to show shareholders the impact of training on their results, which should help them to justify bigger training budgets in the long run. Firms seeking to attract top talent must realize that the best people want professional development, concludes the author.

Full story. Gill Plimmer: “Emphasis on more skills investment” in Financial Times (October 11, 2004). Search archive on title to retrieve article. Subscription required.

Urgency in Japan

This Monday I got a call from one of my clients, a medium sized European Hi-Tech company with their Asian headquarter being in Hong Kong. I have been working for this client already for some time doing consulting and coaching work. I was also working with their regional country managers in Asia in order to support their organizational development.

The general manager of this company sounded quite disturbed and asked me whether I could fit in a short trip to Japan still in October as he was really worried about what’s going on there.

My schedule this month was already quite packed and the only possible time for me to squeeze in such a visit by moving some appointments was to leave the very next day in the afternoon and meet with the Japanese country manager – let me call him Pete - today.

Since last Monday was a public holiday (National Sports & Health Day, which was established upon the start of the Olympic Games in Tokyo on 11 Oct 1964), I could not reach the person I was supposed to meet today. Nevertheless, I made the flight reservation and luckily, Pete could spare the time to meet with me.

To cut a long story short, it became pretty obvious during our 6 hours meeting today that Pete is overwhelmed with all the tasks at hand. He is an outstanding connector and doubled the business for this company in Japan within the first 6 months after his arrival and is likely to increase it by another 60% this year.

Even though he possibly has the required general management capability, he faces a no. of problems;

* lack of time to drive the business AND develop the company
* lack of competent co-managers to support him with the operational tasks
* lack of patience with his co-workers leading to high staff turnover (some key persons already indicated that they won’t take that for very long anymore – and most Japanese employees have a rather high tolerance for suffering)

Of course, all these problems are interlinked and we came to the conclusion that the only way around this problem is to search for a competent chief operating officer who takes off the burden of handling all the daily operational tasks at hand. Due to the strong growth of the company, it will be possible to afford a 2nd strong manager. The benefits to be expected are:

+ Pete can focus better on what he is really good at, and that is to bring in new business

+ the morale of the other employees is likely to considerably improve leading to less turnover and higher productivity – Pete is normally a quite relaxed and funny person but turns into a rather cynical and dominating boss under high pressure

+ the headquarter can feel more secure because it is safe to assume that reporting will be more regular and they don’t need to fear anymore that the operation will depend only on one key person

For me it was again interesting to experience how people often can’t see the forest anymore because of all the trees around them. Being not directly involved in their day-to-day business, enables me to look at the forest from outside and see the dynamics which lead to the current problems.

Meeting Dan Harrison, Creator of Harrison Assessments

Last Friday and Saturday I had the privilege to join a workshop in Hong Kong facilitated by Dr. Dan Harrison, creator of Harrison Assessments. The target of this workshop was to learn how to make maximum use of Harrison Assessments in a coaching situation.

The participants were from quite a variety of backgrounds, such as HR directors, Consultants, Educators, Financial Controllers, Factory Managers and Coaches (incl. myself). During the first day, Dan mostly introduced us to his approach to coaching and made us coach each other. There was little new for me in that approach, the greatest learning was to focus more on the strengths highlighted by the assessment reports rather than on the weaknesses.

This makes perfectly sense because
a) it helps to improve the rapport between client and coach
b) it helps the client to open up, to take down any possibly existing defences
c) it is more successful to enhance strengths rather than focusing too much on weaknesses

On our second day, Dan gave us deeper insights in the design of the assessment reports and how to better interprete them.

What was most amazing for me was the energy we had in the room. Despite the variety in backgrounds, literally everybody opened up in no time and after these 2 days many of us felt as if we knew each other for a long time.

Overall, it was an interesting and useful workshop and it was certainly great to get to know Dan personally.

What do you think about Tele-Classes with Video

In order to make my coaching and training services available at a lower cost to a broader audience, I thought of various ways how to accomplish that. One of the ideas I had for some time is to arrange for Tele-Classes (TC's). I've participated in quite a no. of TC's before and though I found them useful, I always felt that something is missing. Reflecting more on what that is, I realized that I actually would have liked to see the person who is facilitating the class.

Hence my idea to arrange for TC's combined with video. How could that work? I thought of setting up a webcam at the place from where I facilitate the TC and put it up on my website or on Yahoo. I would wear a headset and the participants in the teleclass could talk to me through the phone (dialing into a bridge) and at the same time see me talking.

What do you think of this idea? Did you ever participate in a workshop organized this way? Anything I need to consider (besides looking good, of course)? Shoot at me with your comments, please!!

Interested in First-Class Leadership & Innovative Sales?

Yesterday I gave a public full-day training on Innovative Sales in the Excelsior Hotel in Hong Kong. The attendants were from such different backgrounds like Human Resource Management Outsourcing and Merchandising. All were very interested in my concept of "Stop Selling! How to Help Your Customers Buy" which is an approach going clearly beyond the so-called consultative selling method.

In this training I figured out again how difficult it is for people to let go of their old habits and to adopt an entirely new approach.

We created role plays which we tried to make as close as possible to the real life situations the participants face every day. This way, the trainees could actually experience a new sales approach which is on one hand very smooth without any pressure on the prospective customer or client and yet very straight forward as this approach reveals very quickly whether a business is possible or not.

During my 13 years in Sales and General Management (before I started my own company in 2002) I continuously made the experience that sales people waste way too much time with prospects they won't do any business with at that point. The unique strength of my approach is that the sales person figures out in no time whether a further follow-up of the project makes sense or not. And this while truly serving the customer in his buying process.

The feedback at the end of the day was overwhelming, one attendant said that she finally got the answer how to sell with integrity, i.e. how to sell AND to feel good at the same time.

I am not sure whether I will do this kind of public workshops again because my experience tells me that people have difficulties to implement such entirely new concepts without follow-up coaching. That's why I prefer to provide complete packages consisting of training and follow-up coaching to corporations. This way it is assured that the new concepts are actually implemented. I realized that the effectiveness of learning of a full-day training without follow-up is between 0-20% depending on the quality of the trainer and the trainees. However, if coaching is being added to the training the effectiveness is increased to 70-100%.

If you want to know more about my Innovative Sales Program, visit http://www.progressu.com.hk/SalesDP.htm or contact me (Charlie.Lang@progressu.com.hk).

If you want to share your opinion about effective training and innovative sales, I would be happy to hear from you!