Solutions:  How

Our Domain

 
As with top athletes in the sports world, individual success in the business world is a product of well-developed fundamentals. Without mastering the fundamentals of human interaction, self-awareness and self-discipline workers cannot consistently perform as team players or perform at peak productivity.   This is our domain.  Simply stated, we work on a person's Attitude, Behaviors and interpersonal Skills - their ABS.  
 
Attitude: How one thinks, what they contemplate, where their focus lies, what perspective they choose in looking upon a situation, and how they come across to others.
 
Behaviors: How one acts based upon their thoughts. This is quite simply the domain of willpower, determination, resiliency, habits and action.
 
Skills: How one interacts with others, his or her interpersonal and conversational skills. Proficiency is evident in one’s ability to masterfully phrase questions and drive conversations that result in a targeted and desired outcome. Interpersonal skills are also core to developing rapport, trust and credibility and lasting relationships.  

Together, these fundamentals are key to all aspects of persuasion, influence, leadership and selling.  Obviously, everyone has these abilities to varying degrees. And yet everyone also has the potential to grow and improve upon them. Everyone. Like strength training or working out, the ongoing development of these fundamentals tends to make execution of the “game plan” or “strategy” seem natural.
 
Certainly, attitudes, behaviors and skills are molded over a lifetime. So, can fundamentals be taught later in life? Can attitudes and behaviors change? Can they be developed? Can we mentor around them? Who should learn these skills? Can an engineer learn to interact in a customer-focused rather than a product-focused manner?     Yes.  
 

Transformation, not Education

Learning attitudes, behaviors and skills is different. The goal is to change a person’s instinctive and engrained behaviors, and this does not come about because of an intellectual understanding of some information. The learning method is experiential, rather than didactic. With practice, the most effective attitudes, perspectives and responses become intuitive. Success is measured by the transformation of how individuals think and how they instinctively interact with colleagues and clients. It can be seen in visceral “fight or flight” types of reactions that an individual exhibits in very stressful situations.  In the workplace, it ultimately can be measured in the long-term success of a group of professionals who do not "sell” per se, but begin to see and make the most of opportunities before them.  The transformation our programs create is immediately tangible.
 

Creating permanent positive change

To help an individual to grow and strengthen his or her ABS, there are four keys:

1. An impetus to change
2. An agreeable solution (that fits the need and works)
3. Conditioning new behaviors
4. Ongoing support

 
An Impetus to change
Dealing with hypothetical situations doesn’t work. Talking about what you would do when you get tennis elbow is not the same as experiencing the pain and losing matches. Tennis elbow is the motivation to put on a brace and change your swing.
 
Real workplace challenges that happen frequently enough to matter and cause some degree of “pain” are the laboratory of change. Pain can be found in any setting or situation an individual considers difficult, uncomfortable or awkward, thus lending motivation and relevance to the change process.
 
The pain we work on is frequently one of intense interpersonal communication. It may be internal to a company or external; technical or business-related; pre- or post-sale. Whenever you put two or more people in contact with one another, at some level something is being “sold.” Somewhere in the interaction, you usually can find a pain point. Some “sales” are more critical to the corporation’s success and therefore a more important “laboratory.”
 
Learning opportunities arise in all departments, from Human Resources to Marketing to Engineering/Manufacturing to Sales to Consulting/Services.  Examples of relevant situations:

• Product teams debating the best approaches
• Engineers and technologists thrust into a pre-sales customer facing role
• Support personnel trying to resolve customer conflict
• People entering into their first sales role within the company
• Managers trying to build consensus and buy-in with their teams
• Consultants, project managers or account managers managing client engagements and contacts on a daily basis
• Internal corporate functional teams “selling” their service to other internal corporate teams

 
An Agreeable Solution
The proposed “solution” or change must be agreeable to the participants. It must make sense to them intellectually and fit or embrace their ethics and their sense of self.  The methods chosen by a salesperson to close a big deal may not be agreeable to an engineer trying to gain buy-in from peers. When speaking to Romans, speak Italian, not Greek.
 
Conditioning New Behaviors
You don’t learn to ride a bicycle or to ski by reading about it. Role play, using real life scenarios from a participant’s job, is a key part of practicing new skills. Effective role-play will engage a participant suddenly and unexpectedly with a question or statement that is both familiar and evokes an emotional reaction. For example: “Why are you unable to solve this problem? Don’t you know what you’re doing?” Sure, we could teach a person a scripted response, but in the heat of the moment they would never remember it.
 
Conditioning of new behaviors is more than scripts; it is a systematic approach to dealing with any question, both emotionally and intellectually, and it is very much about turning off the “autopilot” that is inclined to react immediately. Like the concept of balance when riding a bicycle, the information we present must be experienced before it is truly understood and must be automatic to be effective.
 
Ongoing Support
We include ongoing support with all of our programs and also encourage the management teams of our clients to be active participants in the programs we create.  Long-term change will require some environmental support to the employee - the organizational climate shouldn't burden or even prevent an individual’s personal development. Ideally, cultural change begins at the top, in the leadership roles. Ongoing support for personal transformation is a collaborative effort between Syntuity and the client.