effective listening

Jul 28, 2016

Why getting in touch with your ‘feminine side’ is good for business

 

for Ken

 

Originally published on July 5, 2016 as a Guest Column in The Globe and Mail: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-business/sb-managing/why-getting-in-touch-with-your-feminine-side-is-good-for-business/article30675493/

Sorry, men. But it looks like we are going to have to work a lot harder if we want to be successful in this new age of entrepreneurship. As the voice of the customer speaks louder and louder in the marketplace, the sound of “male authority” in choosing and driving opportunities to market seems likely to give way to better observing and listening skills.

Case in point: I sit on the Conference Board of Canada’s Council for Innovation and Commercialization. When we meet each quarter for two days of innovation talk and learning, we invite an entrepreneur into the room, to listen and learn alongside us, and also to share his or her inspiring story.

Just last month, when we were being hosted by 3M Co. at its Innovation Center in St. Paul, Minn., we were captivated by the passion and energy of Alicia Woods, chief executive officer and creator of Covergalls Inc., from Sudbury, Ont.

You may recognize Ms. Woods’s name and story from Dragons’ Den. Designing and selling coveralls that suit women’s needs and physiques, Covergalls began by serving the mining industry. In no time, Ms. Woods’s understanding that women had different needs – and tastes – from men led her into other products, from bibs and shirts to gloves and tuques. Now, her firm has also moved into forestry, energy, construction and manufacturing – and even ergonomic men’s workwear.

The first time Ms. Woods appeared on Dragons’ Den, in the fall of 2014, she slayed all five dragons – and secured a $75,000 deal from three of them (although two later dropped out during the due-diligence process). Two subsequent appearances on the show chronicled her company’s continuing growth and probably made the reluctant dragons regret their failure to ante up.

Ms. Woods similarly won over the Conference Board’s innovation experts. Picture the scenario: We were at 3M, one of the world’s consistently most successful and innovative corporations. Its innovation centre offers high-tech interactive presentations that both demonstrate 3M’s history of breakthrough products and promote the benefits of partnering with the company’s scientists and innovators.

So why did we find Ms. Woods’s presentation so compelling? She demonstrated the power of simple, observation-based innovation. You don’t need technology and science to create breakthrough innovations – just the vision to see a gap in the marketplace and the determination to keep iterating until you find a winning solution.

In short, she demonstrated three of the most important qualities of the modern entrepreneur: insight, passion and empathy.

* Insight, the ability to clearly understand a situation or opportunity, is paramount. Every marketplace is crowded. A great entrepreneur looks for the cracks and crevices where opportunity is hiding, where the goliaths of industry either missed the signals or were too encumbered by process and bureaucracy to respond. The humiliation of having to wear men’s coveralls in an underground mine – unsafe because of the lumpy fit, and poorly equipped for bathroom breaks – didn’t just make Ms. Woods angry. It opened up a world of opportunity.

* Passion, of course, is the hallmark of every successful entrepreneur. It’s why you so often hear investors, such as those on Dragons’ Den, talk about investing in the person, not the company. If you are not totally engaged in your venture and ready to push through every obstacle, then the long, winding road to success will probably end in a massive sinkhole.

* Empathy is the ability to understand other people’s feelings and needs. To me, the old cliché, “I feel your pain,” is the X-factor for business success today. And as psychologist Dan Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, noted in a Psychology Today article, “Women tend to be better at emotional empathy than men.”

Empathy is foundational to both innovation and entrepreneurship. To find opportunities, we have to be looking with our ears and listening with our hearts. I disagree with the critics who play down market research by saying customers don’t know what they want until we give it to them. Clients may not know how to create the actual product or solution that will ease their pain points, but they are certainly the best equipped to articulate their challenges – for anyone who is willing to listen.

People who are highly attuned to the voice of customers, through emotional empathy, will feel their pain best and are most likely to solve their problem first.

Note to the guys: Instead of scoffing the next time you’re told to get in touch with your “feminine side,” it’s time to take it to the bank. If, that is, you want to remain relevant in this age of empathetic opportunity and emotion-driven entrepreneurship.

 

 

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Category: Entrepreneurship, Spyder Works

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Feb 24, 2015

You don’t have to be creative to be a brilliant innovator

Originally published on February 13, 2015 as a Guest Column in The Globe and Mail: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-business/sb-managing/leadership/you-dont-have-to-be-creative-to-be-a-brilliant-innovator/article22914969/

I take pride in the fact that I’ve never had a creative idea in my life.

You might think that’s an odd thing to be proud of, especially for an innovation advocate. But it’s just good sense.

Why am I so candid about admitting this apparent shortcoming? Because I see far too many business leaders who shy away from introducing initiatives simply because they think they have to be creative to be an innovator. It’s simply not true.

Creativity is defined as ‘thinking of new ideas.’ Innovation is the translation of new ideas into a market-ready product, process or service. Nowhere in the definition of innovation does it say that you need to be the one who is doing the ‘thinking.’ I recommend something far simpler and much cheaper: listening.

I rediscovered the importance of the lost art after reading an article by Dianne Schilling. She says that listening has become “a rare gift — the gift of time. It helps build relationships, solve problems, ensure understanding, resolve conflicts, and improve accuracy. At work, effective listening means fewer errors and less wasted time.”

Another benefit of listening is that it can provide you with the raw material of innovation: ideas. By listening to your customers and to prospects you meet in formal presentations, tradeshows and industry functions, you’ll hear the best ideas possible: those expressed by people with pressing challenges and the money to fix them. By asking a few questions and actively listening, you’re learn about their problems and unmet needs. Once you truly understand the details of their challenges you’re halfway to solving them – and that’s what innovation is all about.

After mastering the art of listening, there’s one more tool to adopt so as to really master the innovation field: empathy. This isn’t just about feeling someone else’s pain. It’s about sharing that pain, and ultimately finding ways to take it away.

As Ms. Schilling notes: “To experience empathy, you have to put yourself in the other person’s place and allow yourself to feel what it is like to be her at that moment.”

What’s your motivation? Sales, of course. The better you become at understanding your customers’ challenges and frustrations, the more effective you will be at innovating solutions for them. And isn’t that what customers pay you for?

Understanding people’s real problems and needs requires special talent or effort. In Daniel Pink’s book To Sell is Human, he discusses a California high school teacher named Larry Ferlazzo, who uses a research tactic called attunement. “It’s about leading with my ears instead of my mouth,” says Ferlazzo. “It means trying to elicit from people what their goals are for themselves, and having the flexibility to frame what we do in that context.”

As entrepreneurs and business leaders, we can use listening skills and empathy to drive teams or entire organizations to continuously produce new products or services. This is where my strengths and those of many other business leaders, come in. We turn thoughts into action. We may not be especially creative, but we know how to mobilize a team and apply resources to get things done.

Some of the world’s most successful products derive more from listening than from blank-canvas creativity.

Consider the smartphone. The first mobile phones were big and clunky and did just one thing – send and receive phone calls. Making them smaller wasn’t creative genius, but the product of vigilant, ongoing improvement. Mobile phone makers didn’t invent clocks or cameras, but they saw an opportunity and incorporated both into mobile phone handsets. When was the last time you saw a teenager wearing a watch or carrying a camera? Another smart person listened to teens and realized they don’t do much talking on their phones. The innovative solutions were instant messaging and texting, Twitter and Instagram. Presto, a simple product designed for talking has morphed into a ubiquitous appliance that allows people to stay in touch with each other without talking.

I would argue that creativity had little to do with this evolution. Mobile phone innovation owes its success to the people who listened to the marketplace and understood enough to say, “If we add a clock and a camera and a keyboard, everyone will buy this.”

Listening carefully is the soul of innovation and the reason I take some pride in not being creative. I’m good at listening to customers, empathizing with their problems and project-managing a solution. They don’t pay me to make stuff up.

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Apr 22, 2014

Five ways to generate ideas for your business

Originally published on April 16, 2014 as a Guest Column in The Globe and Mail.

22_04_2014-Five-Ways-To-Generate

I was recently asked what I considered the best practices a business owner can adopt to stimulate growth. Full disclosure: I struggle with the term ‘best practices.’ It seems so absolute. For any of us who have been in our own businesses, we know that there’s nothing definitive about the best ways to get things done.

So instead of best practices, I like to think of these as the five steps that I have found helpful in stimulating ideas, change and growth in my own businesses, and those I have worked with. Let me frame these steps with one overriding thought: “Great ideas aren’t found in your screensaver. If you tilt your head up, just a little bit, there is a world of opportunity right in front of you.” Stimulating growth is a proactive, everyday activity involving all your senses.

1. Get out of the office. It’s tough, I understand. We all get caught up in our business’ front-burner issues. But you need to make time to regularly break away, get out of the office and get inspired by what others are doing. It’s simple. Attend conferences. Not just those for your industry, but those serving other industries to give you fresh perspectives, go to a workshop or join a peer mastermind group. If you manufacture consumer goods or are a retailer, look for clues about what consumers are thinking, saying and doing. Walk, don’t cab, when visiting another city. Take time to window – or mystery-shop, to see what product leaders in other categories are doing. Above all, join relevant LinkedIn groups and read the latest industry news and comments. This torrent of industry intelligence provides immediate inspiration and feedback, as well as resource experts and potential prospects to exchange ideas with.

2. Listen more, speak less. When I shifted from running a manufacturing business to being a consultant, I was told that if I was speaking more than one-third of the time, I wasn’t doing enough listening – and that meant that I was going to miss the challenges and pain-points my clients were expressing. Learn to do the same thing in your business. Listen to your customers. Take them for lunch every quarter or so, just to talk. Ask them what’s keeping them up at night and what they are worried about six, 12 and 18 months down the line. There’s no better way to grow your business than to solve your customers’ challenges before your competitors do.

3. Realize that you are not an island. Most entrepreneurs start their businesses as one or two people, often out of their homes. But as business grows, you must recognize that you have a team – employees, advisers, friends who see and hear things different things on a daily basis. They generate ideas and from these ideas come opportunities. Make sure you have a system to solicit and capture their input. Remember, when you choose your advisers (or set up a formal advisory board), make sure that some of them represent industries other than your own. You can always benefit from additional perspectives.

4. Don’t forget to change the oil. You wouldn’t change the oil in your car once a year. The engine would sputter and die. Ditto for a business. Its engine needs to be continuously primed with ideas for new, better and improved products, processes and services. These keep your customers engaged and buying (more) from you. The days are long gone when you could make the exact same product for years, or confine innovation to once-a-year corporate retreats.

5. Set up an ideas board in your office or business meeting room. As ideas come up, don’t write them on the back of napkin, put them up on the board. Monthly, run these ideas by your internal team and your advisors. Choose a couple that you believe make the most sense. Then run the ideas by your customers at your next quarterly lunch. These are the people who buy what you sell. Let them weigh in. If they like your new ideas, you might just close your first sale.

Keep your ears and eyes open. Stay engaged. Listen. Relevant opportunities are being offered to you every day. They are your next step forward.

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