When you are in meetings you need to be in control if you want a successful outcome.

All Change – Will Skill Balance

All Change – Casualties

Selling Face to Face – Needs and Desires

Selling Face to Face – Features / Needs / Benefits

How to keep in regular contact with customers.

Forgetting customers’ names can be reduce your chances of getting the deal. In this clip we look at a simple process to remember names.

Focus your communication on the needs of the audience.

How to make quick decisions.

Employees need to develop their potential for leadership because it will be required in many of the contexts in which they find themselves – not only in business and the professions, where organisational change is fast and furious, but in the wider community and family contexts, where interpersonal relationships matter so much.

For decades, leadership was perceived as something that only those with certain backgrounds, qualities and capacities possessed, or could possess.  However, leadership is now seen as something that many can develop, given the opportunity and appropriate context or situation.  Much current literature on leadership argues, for example, that:  “Leadership qualities and skills can be learned and developed. Today’s leaders are made, not born.  Leadership effectiveness begins with self-awareness and self-understanding and grows to an understanding of others…Learning about leadership and developing as a leader is a lifelong process involving preparation, experience, trial-and-error, self-examination, and a willingness to  learn from mistakes and successes.”

Komives, S., Lucas, N., & McMahon, T.R. (1998).  Exploring Leadership:  For College Students Who Want to Make a Difference. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, p. 5 and p. 30.

For some people, however, ‘followership’ rather than leadership is more comfortable.  There can’t be leaders without followers, just as there can’t be followers without leaders.  The two are inseparable.  It is common for people to be leaders in one context and followers in others, as Lee and King (2001) argue:  “Leadership in family and community situations may allow you to try new skills, styles and levels of responsibility.  It often allows more flexibility in terms of the length of time you hold a leading role and how long you choose to do so.  For some individuals who love to lead, the best expression of their values may be to remain primarily individual contributors at work and leaders in a non-work setting.”

Lee, R.J., & King, S.N. (2001).  Discovering the Leader in You:  A Guide to Realizing Your Personal Leadership Potential. San Francisco:  Jossey-Bass & Center for Creative Leadership, p. 9.

The terms ‘leadership’ and ‘management’ are often used interchangeably, but they are two different things. It is important that students recognise the difference between the two:  “Leadership is different from management, but not for the reasons most people think.  Leadership isn’t mystical and mysterious.  It has nothing to do with ‘charisma’ or other exotic personality traits.  It is not the province of a chosen few.  Nor is leadership necessarily better than management or a replacement for it.  Rather, leadership and management are two distinctive and complementary systems of action.  Each has its own functions and characteristic activities.  Both are necessary for success in an increasingly complex and volatile business environment.  Management is about coping with complexity…Leadership, by contrast, is about coping with change…”

Kotter, J.B.  (1990). What leaders really do.  Harvard Business Review, 68(3), pp. 103-104.

Further, leadership and management are distinct, but complementary.  For example: “The manager asks what and when; the leader asks what and why.”

Bennis, W. (1989). Quoted in Sheldon, B.  Leadership in the Workplace.  Retrieved from the World Wide Web on 30 October 2006: http://www.txla.org/pubs/tlj75_4/work.html

“The function of leadership is to create change while the function of management is to create stability.”

Barker, R.A.  (1997). How can we train leaders if we do not know what leadership is?  Human Relations, 50 (4), p. 349.

It is crucial, then, that trainers and employees are very clear about what it is that is being learned – whether it is management, leadership or followership.

If you are interested in learning more about leadership and up-skilling check out our Leadership and Motivation Course

Ref: The Griffith Graduate Site .

Good problem-solving skills empower employees in their educational, professional, and personal lives. Nationally and internationally, there is growing recognition that if education is to produce skilled thinkers and innovators in a fast-changing global economy, then problem-solving skills are more important than ever. The ability to solve problems in a range of learning contexts is essential for the development of knowledge, understanding and performance. Requiring students to engage with complex, authentic problem solving encourages them to use content knowledge in innovative and creative ways and promotes deep understanding.

Employers in small, medium and large enterprises identified the following aspects of problem solving as crucial to success in their organisations:

• developing creative, innovative solutions;
• developing practical solutions;
• showing independence and initiative in identifying problems and solving them;
• solving problems in teams;
• applying a range of strategies to problem solving;
• using mathematics including budgeting and financial management to solve problems;
• applying problem solving strategies across a range of areas;
• testing assumptions taking data and circumstances into account; and
• resolving customer concerns in relation to complex project issues.

Solving problems effectively requires students to identify, define and solve problems using logic, as well as lateral and creative thinking. In the process, students arrive at a deep understanding of the topic area and construct new knowledge and understanding on which they are able to make decisions.

There is an important distinction between solving ‘exercises’ and solving ‘problems.’ The former usually have predetermined solutions, with “a well-defined route to the solution and students must simply follow the formula” (Woods, 1985, p. 20). The latter, however, are often fuzzy, open-ended, unstructured and ‘one-offs,’ with no predictable outcomes:
“While these exercises make an important first step in helping students bridge the gap between theory and application, they do not provide the depth and complexity necessary to master problem solving skills… Students who train mostly in exercise solving tend to develop a serious handicap. They rely heavily on solutions they have seen before, rather than working from first principles. Thus a problem with brand new context presents a formidable challenge to them.”

To learn more about problem-solving skills and up-skill, check out our Creative Problem Solving Course.

We need to write effectively to communicate with their peers, lecturers, professional colleagues and employers.  Good communication skills are at the top of the list of what potential employers look for in new entrants. The vast majority of business transactions involve written communication of some kind. Employers often express concern that employees have inadequate basic written communication skills. It is generally expected that university graduates have good literacy skills that can transfer into various work contexts, but research shows that this is not always the case.

Written communication is the ability to use the conventions of disciplinary discourse to communicate effectively in writing with a range of audiences, in a variety of modes (e.g., persuasion, argument, exposition), as context requires, using a number of different means (e.g., graphical, statistical, audio-visual and technological).

The six ‘C’s of effective writing

“Effective business correspondence yields results because it achieves two basic objectives.

First, it conveys a clear and unambiguous message to the reader and second, it produces goodwill in that reader. To achieve these two objectives, the writer must write:

• clearly:
• coherently;
• concisely;
• correctly; with
• courtesy; and
• confidence.

These characteristics are the result of careful planning, writing in plain English, and critical editing.”  Dwyer, J. (1993). The Business Communication Handbook , (3 rd ed.). New York: Prentice Hall, p.186.

For those of you that would like to learn more about written communication simply click on the courses below from Griffith University.  You can also expand your knowledge of communication skills by trying our Business Communication Course.

Griffith online writing skills course:

This online course was developed by Dr Marilyn Ford to improve students’ writing skills. The course is broken into three self-paced components, which cover basic grammar and writing skills.

Ref: The Griffith Graduate Site