Listening

Listening to the other’s point of view starts during pre-selling. Don’t switch off when you’re through talking, Listen. Understand. If you don’t understand, ask questions until you do. Then you can do a better selling job because you know more than you did when you started.

Listening is one of the best times to pick up sales points and disagreement between otherwise agreeable allies. Listen to the words and to the tone. You will be able to tell who is leading whom. You can’t learn without listening, and the more you know, the better your chance of obtaining your goal.

Don’t let your mind wander or focus on objections, and don’t spend your pre-selling time trying to develop responses instead of concentrating on what has been said.

Listen, listen, listen. There is no substitute for listening, especially during the pre-sell period

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Best Practices of Microsoft

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has credited his best practices or new rules of how to function in the new digital business infrastructure. They can be applied in other businesses. The rules include:

1. Insist that communications flow through email
2. Study sales data online to share insights easily
3. Shift knowledge workers into high level thinking
4. Use digital tools to create virtual teams
5. Convert every paper process to  digital process
6. Use digital tools to eliminate single-task jobs
7. Create a digital feedback loop
8. Use digital systems to route customer complaints immediately
9. Use digital communication to redefine boundaries
10. Transform every business process into just-in-time delivery
11. Use digital delivery to eliminate middlemen
12. Use digital tools to help customers solve problems for themselves.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Job Rotation

Job rotation means moving management trainees from department to department to broaden their understanding of all parts of the business and to test their abilities. The trainee—often a recent college graduate—may spend several months in each department. The person may just be an observer in  each department, but more commonly gets fully involved in its  operations. The trainee thus learns the department’s business by actually doing it while discovering what jobs he or she prefers.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Behavior and Organizational Strategies

A competency model can be an effective way of communicating to the workforce the values of the senior management and what people should focus on their own behavior. For example, a competency-based appraisal system helps to distinguish individuals with the characteristics that are required to build and maintain an organization’s values (teamwork, respect for individual innovation or initiative) from those who do not exhibit the behaviors that will support these values. In this way competency models can translate general messages about needed strategy and culture change into specifics. There are two principles that can be followed:

• Focus on the superior performers without making an assumption.
• Focus on what they do to perform the given role.

Following are various developed models that are used as a basis for selection, training, promotion and other issues related to human resources:

• Job Competence Assessment Method—this is developed using interviews and observations of outstanding and average performers to determine the competencies that differentiate between them in critical incidents.
• Modified Job Competence Assessment Method—this also identifies such behavioral differences, but to reduce costs, interviewees provide a written account of critical incidents.
• Generic Model Overlay Methods—organizations purchase an off-the-shelf generic competency model for a specific role or function.
• Customized Generic Model Methods—organizations use a tentative list of competencies that are identified internally to aid in their selection of a generic model and then validate it with the input of outstanding and average performers.
• Flexible Job Competency Model Methods—this seeks to identify the competencies that will be required to perform effectively under different conditions in the future.
• Systems Method—this demand reflecting on not only what exemplary performers  do now, or what they do overall, but also behaviors that may be important in the future.
• Accelerated Competency Systems Method—this places the focus on the competencies that specifically support the production of output, such as an organization’s products, services or information.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Job-Related Attitudes

Attitudes are an important consideration for managers. Employee attitudes may be related to behaviors critical to the organization: dissatisfied employees. Negative attitudes towards the organization can also spur employees to consider forming or joining a labor union. Theory and research on attitudes can help managers understand employee attitudes toward the workplace. In general, employees develop consistent and identifiable sets of attitudes toward job attributes, such as pay, working conditions, and the job’s tasks.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

The Aging Crisis

Not a company exists whose management doesn’t say, at least for public consumption, that it wants an organization flexible enough to adjust quickly to changing market conditions, lean enough to beat any competitor’s price, innovative enough to keep its products and services technologically fresh, and dedicated enough to deliver maximum quality and consumer service.

So, if managements want companies that are lean, nimble, flexible, responsive, competitive, innovative, efficient, customer-focused, and profitable, why are so many. Companies are bloated, clumsy, rigid, sluggish, non-competitive, uncreative, inefficient, disdainful of customer needs, and losing money. The answers lie in how these companies do their work and why they do it that way.

Corporations do not perform badly because workers are lazy and managements are inept. Just the same, the record of industrial and technological accomplishment over the past century is proof enough that managements are not inept and workers do work.

Inflexibility, unresponsiveness, the absence of customer focus, an obsession with activity rather than result, bureaucratic paralysis, lack of innovation, high overhead—these are the legacies of industrial leadership. These characteristics are not new; they have not suddenly appeared. They have been present all along. If costs are high they can be passed on to customers. If customers are dissatisfied, they have nowhere else to turn. If new products are slow in coming, customers will wait. The important managerial job is to manage growth, and the rest doesn’t matter. Now that growth has flattened out, the rest matters a great deal.

The business problem is that in 21^st century with companies designed during the nineteenth century to work well in the twentieth—we need something different.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Travel Stress

We travel to get to work, we travel during our work, and we travel to get to distant meetings. Travel comes in all forms: short and long timeframes and short and long distances. For most people, the commonest hurdle is the daily grind to and from work. This is most acute in large cities. The problems are truly international, but some of the ugliest and best-studied traffic jams are now everywhere.

The levels of stress that this brings are extremely significant. For those who handle it poorly, it can be damaging  to their health, and may even endanger the lives of others. Medically, we know that stress mechanisms all fire at once when the body identifies a crisis. Adrenaline pours out, the stomach shuts down, the pulse races, and the hair stands up on end. The blood pressure soars, muscles clench in spasms around the shoulder tips and jaw,  and primal aggressions rise, ready for fight or flight.

With immediate flight brings out of the question, more and more frustrated drivers are turning to the fight option—either inside their cars as they tip at the heels of slower drivers, or outside their cars, where they may stomp up and beat a dent into the roof of an offending vehicle. Even the mild and polite become aggressive when they strap themselves into their bumper cars to drive to work. This means they usually arrive late, enraged and spent before they even start to face the day’s stresses on the job.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Disharmony in Top Teams

Enormous animosity and rampant, mutual dislike exist in management teams charged with cooperating together for the good of an organization. No one can choose their own family and you don’t always get the opportunity to choose your colleagues, but when you accept a job within a team you have a responsibility to put personal animosity to one side for the good of the organization.

In some organizations, personal vendettas are allowed to bubble to the surface non-stop and the amount of both personal effort and organizational resource that is wasted as a result can be frightening.

The issue with many of these managers is of course that the memory they are wasting is not their own: it belongs to shareholders or comes as a grant from some government pot or other. If it were their own money they might not behave in quite the same way, even in owner-run organizations where pretty bizarre and wasteful behavior can be found.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Business as a Way of Life

For those who own or manage businesses, work is not simply a job—it is a life style. The decisions they make, the people they deal with, the ideas they have are not confined to a 9 to 5 day. Faced with great demands and responsibilities, the challenges and rewards can be great. The different types of businesspeople that work within society’s framework to make a business successful are the entrepreneur, the professional manager, and the functional specialist.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Employee Rights

This issue actually spans a wide range of controversies. For example, issues have surfaced regarding the individual’s right to smoke in the workplace. As more and more organizations limit or ban smoking, this issue will continue to be somewhat controversial. Broader controversies involve issues associated with job ownership and individual rights while at work. A popular (albeit not entirely correct) assumption about Japanese organizations is that their employees have lifetime job security/ to the extent that US firms adopt this practice, the question becomes one of due process and the right to appeal in instances of dismissal or reassignment.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.