Evaluating from your audience, customer or potential client perspective can be overlooked all too easily.

How to cope with rejection:
Find someone you can trust to be independent and ask them to evaluate your offering, discover where your holes are and address them. It’s all too easy to get caught up in the enthusiasm of ‘it’s-great-because…’

Certainly hold on to that feeling and do some bench testing before you ‘go-live’ with a real, potential customer. Better still ask someone you don’t really class as a supporter; the feedback may surprise you.

Practice makes perfect? maybe; more accurate to say, change becomes less scary the more you experience it, and by default, easier to deal with.

Homework: do one thing each day which scares you; let me know how you get on.

-
-

Ok, so the economic position is tough, few would disagree, however, spare a thought for those responsible for managing others, they too are under incredible and sometimes conflicting pressure to “grow the business” often, at the same time as “control costs.”

Inevitably this pressure spills over into managers’ behaviour and affects how they interact with members of their team.

My client, we’ll call him John, resigned from his job because he was experiencing intense pressure from his line manager which resulted in headaches, sleepless nights and a general state of “dread,” his words.

It’s tough out there, the working environment is probably more pressured than it’s ever been and prospects are, at least in the short-term, uncertain.

All the more reason to employ managers who are skilled in leading others; managers who understand how people tick.  Failure to have the right people in leadership roles will result in: resignations, a talent drain (good people have options elsewhere) and, this should focus the mind: employment tribunals!

Employment tribunals will:
1. Require time and effort;
2. Cost money (win or loose the case);
3. Affect the morale of those who remain;
4. Damage the employer’s reputation;
5. Affect how customers feel about the organisation.

So what’s the solution?
Make sure the people who manage others are up to the job. Identify the critical skills needed to do this in your organisation, define them, test for them and in a way which is reliable (do not rely on ‘gut-feel’ alone.) Not sure how to do this then talk to someone who does.

* You could feel good about yourself all of the time;
* You felt comfortable saying “no” to people;
* You could talk in front of people without feeling silly or nervous;
* You could control that negative voice in your head;
* You could communicate with confidence;
* You had the confidence to change careers;
* What other people said didn’t get you down;
* You could act, walk and talk with confidence;
* You lived life as if you couldn’t fail.