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Making A Difference – Thoughts, Observations and Opinions
This is Dave Brock’s Blog.
It offers my views on a variety of business, sales, marketing, and leadership topic. My goal is to make a difference for you, the reader, in both your professional and personal lives.
Latest Posts
Stop Talking!
So much of our training and our engagement strategies involve our talking. We’re taught how to pitch our solutions. We’re given scripts outlining what we should say to our customers. As managers, we too often get into “tell” mode. Even when we ask questions, they are carefully constructed to elicit the answers we want. Alternatively, we listen for triggers to talk more. The problem is that talking crowds out our ability to listen and truly hear. Duuggghhhh! It’s obvious, we know when we talk we aren’t listening—and perhaps that’s really our goal. Perhaps we don’t really care about what the […]
Reflections On 9/11 In 2020
Pardon me from diverting from my normal writing on sales, leadership and business to reflect for a moment on September 11, 2001. It impacted and impacts each of us in very different ways. First, on the evening of September 10, 2001, I arrived home from a 3 week business trip to Africa. I had been touring major cities throughout Africa with my client. We were setting up a major new distribution network, helping the distributors develop richer business plans, training them, positioning them to more effectively grow their and my client’s business. Over the course of 3 weeks, I met […]
On Culture, Values, Beliefs
There’s always a lot of talk about corporate culture, values, and beliefs. Too often, these are treated as “PR.” Annual reports, analyst reports, communications to customers and communications within industry, espouse the culture of the company—and every once in a while, the companies actually demonstrate these in the way they work. Every company has a culture, values, beliefs—though those may not be what they claim them to be. We can understand the “real culture, values, and beliefs,” by the behaviors and actions we see demonstrated every day, at all levels. For example a company may declare itself to be customer […]
The “New” Onboarding
I was speaking with a niece who’s a school teacher. She is entering the school year with a challenge she hasn’t faced. Her school district will, through at least several months, be teaching virtually. We talked about her biggest concerns: “Last year, when we shut down classrooms in March, I had been working with my students for the entire school year. I knew each of them, I knew how to reach out and engage them, so the challenge of remote teaching wasn’t that bad. This year, I have 120 new kids. I don’t know them, I don’t know their strengths […]
Coaching The Uncoachable
Today, I had the honor of participating in a webcast on coaching, with Lori Richardson, Jason Jordan, and Mike Kunkle. A question that rarely comes up was, “What do you do if a person is uncoachable?” This is one area of coaching where I tend to be pretty hard-nosed, but I believe the following: If a person is uncoachable, it is not a question of IF that individual is terminated, only When! Let me explain myself. The uncoachable person has made the decision to stop learning and growing. We’ve all encountered people like this. They refuse to take feedback (or […]
“Do As I Say, Not As I Do!”
My parents were core in establishing my values and helping me grow as an individual (my Mom still teaches me lessons every day). They were phenomenal role models for my sisters and me. But I was a bit of a “challenge” to them, particularly to my father. I was very precocious–actually I was an ass. My father would talk to me about some critical behaviors and what I should do. Every once in a while, I’d catch him, I’d say, “But Dad, you aren’t doing the things you are telling me to do……” Finally, after whining about a bunch of […]