StandOut (17 page)

• You’re sensitivity is double-edged. I can be vulnerable with you, but sometimes it’s difficult for me to give you challenging feedback. I can feel your defensiveness creeping in. Counteract this by proactively seeking feedback and staying curious as to what comes up.

How to Win in Sales

Provider
: Your strength is your compassion. Because you genuinely care, you act to serve the best interests of your client. Your protective nature will help clients feel secure following your counsel.

• Lead with your questions. Begin any relationship by finding out what I really need, and then make it clear that you are only selling me what I really need. From you this comes across as genuine and caring.

• If you hear me asking for something that you know isn’t going to work, challenge me with your questions. Because you advise out of genuine concern, you can demand the best thinking from me with tact and grace. You help me help myself.

• Always try to get in the room with me. You feel others’ emotions. Through your sensitivity, you pick up on the energy in a room and notice the subtle, nonverbal cues during a meeting.

• Your instinct is to give me a deal. This is fine—I like deals—but to save you from yourself, define in advance what your lowest limit is. Discipline yourself never to go below it or I may feel I can take advantage of you. (You might even want to bring along a partner to every meeting, someone who can hold you to this lower limit, who can save you from yourself.)

• After the initial call, allow me to be the one to follow up first. You want to begin our relationship in the manner you want it to continue, namely you listening and responding to my needs.

• If there is a product shortfall or recall, I know I will hear about it from you first. You care more about our relationship and ensuring I am set up to succeed than about defending your company. It’s a relief not to have to listen to excuses. Just fix it.

How to Win in Client Service

Provider
: Your strength is the sense of partnership I get from you. I know that you genuinely want me to be okay.

• You connect immediately to how I’m feeling, and you validate it. This calms me and helps me to be clear about what I’m requesting. Parrot my problem back to me so that I know you are also clear.

• If you see an opportunity to support me outside of the scope of our agreement/project, take it. You pick up on my needs and step outside the boundaries to ensure my success. I won’t forget your flexibility and resourcefulness.

• You make yourself available. When I call, you find a way to pause what you’re doing to help me. I have a hunch you do it for everyone, but somehow you make me feel as if I’m getting special service. This is one of your secret weapons. Sharpen it.

• I can count on you to follow up after the issue has been resolved to see if I am satisfied. You have no idea how much I appreciate this. To draw attention to it, set a time to do it and then do it at exactly that time. This sort of predictable and genuine follow-through is rare.

• Stay picky in selecting your team. You see the best in people and are more likely than others to give a break to someone who may not quite meet your standards. Be aware of this tendency. Do your interviews only with a team of people around you—they will help you keep your forgiving nature in check. And over time, they will help you maintain a reputation for attracting and retaining only the best.

STIMULATOR

The Definition

You begin by asking,
“How can I raise the energy?”
You are acutely aware of the energy in the room, and you feel compelled to do what you can to elevate it. You do this with your outlook— you are an instinctively positive person. You do this with your actions—you take a seat at the front of the room, you raise your hand to ask questions, you call upon others to contribute and volunteer. You do this with your humor—the smile in your voice.

Because you are an energy-giving person, other people are attracted to you. The world beats them down, but they know that in you they will find the power to lift themselves back up. You aren’t soft and gentle. On the contrary, you challenge people to unleash their own energy, and you become impatient when someone refuses to do so, sucking energy from you and generating none of her own. But others will continue to be drawn to you because they sense that at heart you cannot help being encouraging. They sense that your natural reaction is to celebrate all that is good in them, to illuminate their strengths, and shine a light on their achievements. Even on your darkest days, you know they are right.

You, at Your Most Powerful

• You naturally focus on what is right with people, on what is going well with them.

• You are an emotional person. Sometimes these emotions take you on a roller-coaster ride, but in the end they lead you back up. Your emotional tilt is always upward.

• You derive your strength from other people. You sense their feelings and you can’t help yourself: you are compelled to engage these emotions in some way and lift them up. Others call you fun, excitable, and—on your best days—inspirational.

• You are a natural host. Not of parties, necessarily— though you may be. But you are the host of other people’s emotions. You feel responsible for them, for elevating them. You are an emotional turnaround expert.

• You make your presence felt. In any room, you are present, focused, a force. The meeting doesn’t really start until you walk in; the energy sinks when you walk out.

• You have a magnetic quality. People’s emotional bucket empties out. You, they realize, are a natural bucket-filler. And so they are drawn to you.

• You like gatherings. Since you feed off energy, the more people at a meeting or event, the more energy there is and the more energized you feel.

• “All the world’s a stage” to you. You are acutely aware that other people are looking at you and are affected by you. So you pay attention to your appearance, your demeanor, how you show up in a room.

• When at an event or meeting, you pay attention to all aspects of the “show.” You like picking the theme, the gifts, the colors, all the elements that can inspire people and help them have a great time. You’ll dress up in the costumes. You’ll take the lead in the activities. Whatever it is, there you are, ready to go at the front of the line.

• You are exuberant. You can get carried away by the emotions of the moment. When you are teaching or training or selling, or anything really, you tend to go off-script. You break free from the prescribed material and allow people to follow where their excitement and enthusiasm lead.
When people are excited they learn more, create more, achieve more
, you think.
The curriculum will just have to catch up with us
.

How to Describe Yourself (in Interviews, Performance Reviews)

• “People tell me I’m fun to be around.”

• “I’m at my best when getting people excited about what they are about to do. There was this time when . . .”

• “I’m incurably positive. I believe you can find the good in virtually any situation, and I’m determined to be the one to find it.”

• “Some of my best times are when I can get people together so we can rally ourselves and cheer ourselves on.”

• “I think people surprise themselves by what they can achieve when they are energized. I’m the person who gets them energized.”

• “I need to be out with people almost all the time.”

How to Make an Immediate Impact

• You are a breath of fresh air to any team because your first response to anyone’s comment or point of view is to affirm it. You nod. You smile. You encourage.
Lead with this strength
. It will encourage people to become increasingly open around you. Of course, you may not agree with everything they are telling you, but because you begin by honoring their “truth,” you set things up for better collaboration in the future.

• You feed off being able to help people get what they want. So try to
put yourself in situations where you will receive immediate feedback on whether you have indeed given people what they want
. Their laughter, smiles, tears, transformations, realizations, these are your fuel. Of course, there is some risk here—maybe they won’t laugh or cry or be transformed—and most people shy away from this risk. But you don’t. So volunteer for this “high risk” activity and you’ll not only feel more alive, you will also earn the respect of your colleagues.

• Because you present such a positive front to the world, you might initially come across as light and fluffy. To counter this,
buttress your positive energy with facts and data that support your opinions
. These will help others realize that there is substance behind the flash— “brains behind the bronze”—and, as such, you will gain much needed credibility.

• You instinctively see the best in others. So take it upon yourself to
give detailed feedback to your new teammates
. Catch them doing something right, and then play it back for them. Tell them what you saw, why it impressed you, who benefited. You are not a fake flatterer. Instead, you are an attentive and generous audience. Your teammates could do with more of this kind of attention—it will stimulate them to repeat their best performances.

• Your energy builds momentum toward specific outcomes.
Put yourself in situations where there are already clear goals
. Guided by these goals, your energy will have a natural channel and so will be seen as instrumental in making something happen. Target yourself in this way and you’ll gain a reputation as a
productive
person, as well as a fun person.

How to Take Your Performance to the Next Level

• Over time people will come to lean on you for emotional uplift. This is a wonderful gift you offer them, and to ensure that you can keep offering it,
you must set clear boundaries for your friends and colleagues
. You cannot take on everyone’s full range of emotions.

• You are skilled at handling difficult people.
Volunteer for situations where success depends on you turning around an angry or obstinate person
. It’s not that you should necessarily seek out conflict—you are not, by nature, a conflict seeker. It’s more that you are driven to make everything right, and so you are at your best when you have to pull out all the stops to make this happen.