Reading to Talk Story about

Are you running out of topics to talk about in your workplace huddles?

That will never happen to you if you cultivate the RTTS Habit:

1. Read something
2. Trigger new thoughts (question what you just read)
3. Talk-Story about it (with someone, or with your team)

Here are some articles well worth that first step – Reading. They are culled from the best of web-based links I have read over the past week, finding they gave me a torrent of idea triggers.

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Driving toward Success with Organizational Focus by Lisa Haneberg of Management Craft

Lisa suggests six indicators which will help you determine whether your team or organization is focused on what’s most important to your business.

"Bring this checklist into your next staff meeting for a lively and helpful discussion that will help you determine which improvements will most help you and your team focus. You can also use this tool to assess the health and focus of your customer/supplier relationships."

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Caressing You Softly with My Song by Karen Swim at Words For Hire

"We can hire people to sell for us or we can partner with others to cross promote products and services but none of this replaces the need for self promotion. Self promotion is sharing your capabilities with others. Whether you are a student, artist, CEO or employee, you must be able to tell others about your talents and abilities."

This is a great follow-up to the discussion we had on Say
“Alaka‘i” in regard to selling. We all struggle with self-promotion, and we all can toot sweetly and improve.

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The Tao of Marketing by Leo Babauta for Micro Persuasion

According to Steve Rubel, "The Power of Pull" refers to creating value-added digital content and utilities that people will find on their own online and engage. Why pull? Pushy marketing and advertising no longer works as well as it once did, and Leo shares his own story to explain why; he calls it "The Tao Way."

"Marketers must adopt an entirely new strategy — more than that, an
entirely new mindset. They must get away from trying to create new
desires in people, trying to push and force themselves on people,
trying to control people.

Instead, find a more natural way. Find out what people want,
and then give it to them. Offer them value, and they will appreciate
that. Be a resource. Give things away. Don't force — let them come to
you, because of all the value you offer."

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Battle of the Brands by David Armano at Logic+Emotion

Although I took my own writing in a different direction, this is a terrific example of reading as a catalyst for new ideas. This was an article which definitely got my mental gymnastics cranked up into high gear, resulting in the postings I did for Say “Alaka‘i” this past Tuesday and Thursday: I directed my writing to the work world in general, whereas Mr. Armano offers up a discussion targeted to the social web and its likely entanglements.

"Powered By People
Here's the simple truth. If you
are going to have your company play on the social Web, then you have to
be ready to play a full contact sport which includes unpredictable
scenarios. The latest evolution of the Web and the ways business tap
into this are enabled by technology, but fueled by real live people.
This means that hiring people like Scott means bringing his existing
network into your organization and your organization into his network.
On the flip side, individuals like Frank from Comcast, Lionel or
Richard from Dell or Tony from Zappos have put their company first in
their profiles thereby building equity through their jobs.

In
either scenario there is still common ground. The social Web is
personal, and dependent on people and when a person leaves your
company, at the end of the day no matter if their persona had
JohnatBrandX attached to them, the people they interacted with in all
that time will remember the person behind the brand. That person takes their equity with them while leaving the infrastructure they have put in place at the company they worked for. If it sounds messy it's because it is and will be. It's powered by people and people are messy."

Be sure to read the comments too: I keep checking back there myself to see if there is more!

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Learn to Finish Conversations Well Redux from the Talking Story archives:

I was reminded of this one during a great coaching session this week. Ever walk away from a conversation thinking, “What just happened there? Why did I even bother talking to him/her about that?” Worse, do you suspect that others might be thinking that about their conversations with you? There’s a pretty easy fix: Learn to finish your conversations well.

We managers can get ourselves into far too many situations where we unwittingly set others up for disappointment because we haven’t learned to finish our conversations well. Many times we will tell one of our employees we’ll look into something, and we’ll even thank them sincerely for bringing issues to our attention, but then we end our conversation in an open-ended way which places us squarely in the Land of Fuzzy Expectations.

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If you follow all the links in this post, you would have at least two weeks worth of new subjects to explore, and that only assumes one take-away for each link. Most of what we read actually will give us four, five, or six times as many ideas; we just have to capture them, and the RTTS Habit
helps us do so.

What have you read lately, starting your own torrent of idea triggers? If you share a link with us, do add a sentence or two about your new thought triggers too.