Management Training Thailand - Talent Technologies » Latest News

9 tips to defeat stress at work and home

admin — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 06:21:20 +0000

Stress is a ‘silent killer’ with numerous symptoms.

If you have time over the Thai holiday it’s worth taking a few moments to read this article with 9 useful tips on overcoming stress.

Or why not consider Talent Technologies’ training programmes including Emotional Intelligence and Productivity Factor which offer a comprehensive approach in getting control of your life and managing negative circumstances and emotions!

We hope you find the article useful!

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Talent Technologies :: Management Training Programmes in Thailand and South-East Asia

Carlos Ghosn at Sasin – main points

admin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 07:00:52 +0000

Yesterday featured a talk by the ever-effervescent Carlos Ghosn at the Sasin Graduate School of Management.

As we have come to expect from Mr Ghosn, it was a great talk, lively, with some probing questions from the floor. Titled Managing in a Time of Crisis the good news for those of you who missed the talk is that we have the main points for you here:

1. Great managers get people to do what they don’t want to do with enthusiasm. This is especially true during a crisis.

2. Going through crisis or change, the key is to have limited priorities and objectives. Too often management bombards its people with numerous, often conflicting, priorities. The more priorities you have, the less impact they will have.

3. Don’t have a plan B. Plan Bs tend to invite complacency as the workforce fails to commit wholeheartedly to plan A, because it may hope there is a fallback option. Instead, says Ghosn, say There is no plan B!

4. Crisis is a great opportunity to transform your organisation. And always remember: every crisis has an end. In the middle of a crisis we often forget that.

5. In a crisis, conflict is not the worst thing: indifference is. With conflict, at least people are buying in emotionally. With indifference, they have not!

6. The more complex the change is, the more simple you need to be, leading to the key point that…

7. A manager’s job is ‘out of complexity to make things simple, and out of chaos to make things clear’.

Our Take

Ghosn’s management philosophy chimes closely to the approach we like to take with our clients, which includes the ’3 S’s’ of:

Simple. Any initiative, message or change you are trying to deliver must be as easy for a front-liner to grasp as for the CEO
Specific. Any initiative, message or change must also be specific to each role or individual for which it is intended, and concepts must clearly relate to the contexts those individuals are in (as opposed to the contexts the CEO or strategist finds themself in!)
Strategic. The initiative must, of course, deliver the strategy and that must ideally be measurable. Too many initiatives have elements that are not strategic!

We hope the above is a useful summary for those of you who missed the talk, and strongly recommend you seeing Carlos Ghosn the next time he comes to Bangkok!

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Talent Technologies :: Management Training Programmes in Thailand and South-East Asia

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Talent Technologies in Big Chilli Magazine

admin — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 05:14:18 +0000

Great to see our article Encouraging the Heart featured in the latest issue of the Big Chilli magazine!

If you didn’t catch the article, we’ve uploaded a pdf of it here

What are the ingredients of a high-performing team?

admin — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 03:02:34 +0000

It’s official! High-performing teams really are the result of individual differences, not similarities.

This study of 144 short-term project teams has discovered that ‘maximising differences in types of knowledge, skills, and abilities, while minimising differences in job-related beliefs, attitudes, and values might create especially effective teams’, as concluded by the study’s author Dr Harrison from Penn State University.

Yet – time and time again – as we are still finding in Asia’s high-growth market that companies are doing the opposite: selecting and forming teams based on similarities, not differences – and that this is creating serious performance issues down the line in vital areas such as innovation, collaboration, leadership and initiative.

First things first – get the roles right

It’s not difficult for companies to rectify this. But first they need to have clarity not only about not about what they are trying to achieve but how they are going to achieve it.

This ‘how’ happens through people. Yet only rarely do companies think about the composition of their teams in terms of trying to get people to ‘stand out’ as opposed to ‘fitting in’.

As Jim Collins pointed out in his landmark book Good to Great, ‘standing out’ is not about knowledge, intelligence or skills, but Talents, specifically our ‘innate abilities’ that make us unique.

These talents include such abilities as concept organisation, idea productivity, spatial relations visualisation and tonal memory, among the 19 key talents as assessed in the Highlands Ability Battery.

Teams that try to diminish differences in their talents will underperform, as Dr Harrison’s research has demonstrated.

The Behavioural Dimension

Dr Harrison found the following were the greatest barriers to team effectiveness:

An inability to agree on strategic goals
Personality Conflicts
Different levels of commitment

The first is common in teams, and often takes place because the team members don’t discuss, or aren’t allowed to discuss (by, say, the team leader) the strategic objectives.

Personality Conflicts are often an effect of not knowing our talents, and ways of problem-solving and working (which is why a tool such as the Highlands Ability Battery is so valuable).

Different levels of commitment are usually an effect of the combination of the above.

So by starting at the root, teams can develop effectively into high-performing units. But there needs to be a team consciousness of how to do this.

Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Patrick Lencioni has provided a great framework for this, based on his research, in Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team, a programme also facilitated by us here at Talent Technologies.

Simply contact us here if you would like more details!

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Talent Technologies :: Management Training Programmes in Thailand and South-East Asia

From Good to Great

admin — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 02:42:32 +0000

It is now eight years since Jim Collins penned the results of his research into what causes ‘mediocre’ companies to make the leap from Good to Great.

Taking over five years to complete, the research project is perhaps one of the most in-depth ever conducted in business.

One of the most interesting findings of the study is that the key difference between ‘Great’ companies and their ‘Good’ counterparts lay in ‘intangible’ factors – areas such as ‘talent’, ‘leadership’ and ‘discipline’: areas that companies in Asia typically struggle with.

How Good to Great relates to you

The conclusions drawn are not only relevant to companies, but can also be used by people in their careers. Take the Hedgehog Concept, for example.

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‘Great’ organisations are those able to engage their employees ‘bottom up’, with a keen awareness of their talents and natural abilities:

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Whether someone is the ‘right person’ has more to do with character traits and innate capabilities than with specific knowledge, background or skills.

(First Who, then What)

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Working with his research group of over a thousand multinational companies, Jim Collins discovered that the ‘Great’ companies attached huge significance to an individual’s natural abilities (as opposed, say, to the unnatural demands and expectations many companies make, for example through competencies).

On an individual level, this makes sense. To be effective, it’s essential for us to be clear on:

What we are most deeply passionate about
What we can be best in the world at
What drives (or can drive) our economic engine

Where these three intercept, lies our ‘Hedgehog Concept’.

Discovering your ‘Hedgehog Concept’

Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, there lies your vocation

Aristotle

There are many ways (including by experience!) that you can discover your ‘Hedgehog Concept’. But by far the quickest, and arguably the most effective way, is through the world’s ‘gold standard’ talent assessment: the Highlands Ability Battery.

The Highlands Ability Battery helps you identify your talents (natural abilities) objectively through a ‘battery’ of worksamples. Over 90 years of research by the Johnson O’Connor Institute using MRI machines have shown these to link to the ‘hardwired’ synaptic connections that identify our talents and the Hedgehog factors such as ‘what we can be best in the world at’ and ‘what we might be deeply passionate about’.

In other words, the Highlands Ability Battery helps us identify our strengths – the number one factor, as discovered by huge surveys incorporating hundreds of thousands of employees in different companies and countries, that drives our engagement at work.

Good to Great starts with you!

If you would like to find out more about the Highlands Ability Battery, and how it can help you make the leap, feel free to contact us here!

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**Talent Technologies :: Management Training Programmes in Thailand and South-East Asia*

What retailers can learn from latest UK consumer survey

admin — Fri, 28 May 2010 07:03:27 +0000

“My daughter… is a brilliant customer service assistant and was recently reprimanded for spending too much time with customers!!! Not much else to say really is there?”

That’s just one of the comments made by a parent whose daughter works in one of the ‘worst retailers’ as voted by over 14,000 consumers in a recent Which? magazine survey.

One interesting finding from the survey is that all those companies rated the worst for customer service have large customer-facing workforces – while all those rated the best have small ones.

The conclusion from the article is that ‘small chains good, big chains bad’. However, the author then goes on to add… ‘Which is fine… until you start to ask how the big chains got to be so big and profitable in the first place.’

A conclusion not shared by us here, as we shall see…

**Retail has Sunrise and Sunset industries too!**

The first misunderstanding made by the author is that those at ‘the top’ – the ‘smaller scale’ operators – are less profitable than the ‘big boys’ at the bottom. But looking at the data, this is simply not true.

The top six retailers in customer hearts include Apple, Richer Sounds (selling audio equipment), and Lush (specialist soaps).

Of these companies (and arguably of every international retailer), Apple is the most profitable when you take into account the operating margins it commands on its finished products (not though the profit margins at the point-of-sale). At a time when Apple has overtaken Microsoft in company capitalisation, it can hardly be called a ‘small player’ in the retail space. But it does have a laser-like focus, as we shall see, on the one difference that counts.

Richer Sounds, meanwhile, regularly tops Profits per Square Foot, a metric we would say is a good indicator of overall retail effectiveness, while Lush is not far behind in both metrics.

Now let’s look at the companies nearer the bottom – big supermarket chains like Tesco, Electronics retailers like Dixons (ironically little different to Apple in terms of store staffing), and magazine and stationery retailers like WH Smith’s.

One characteristic these ‘big players’ (many employing 12,000 frontline staff or more) have in common: operating profits approaching half that of the top players.

The ‘big players’ may have been ‘big and profitable’ for a decade or more, but in the world of retail, this is changing – fast.

The One Thing the top players do to succeed

So what is this ‘One thing’ that the top players are doing that others – lower down on the list – are not?

In a nutshell – they deliver a branded customer experience.

Branded does not mean bland. It is clearly defined. Look at the photo of the Apple store above. Does it look familiar to you? Probably not. Because not all Apple stores are the same. Yet when we visit an Apple store, we know what we are not going to get – a visit to an electronics store. And we know what we are going to get – an experience unique to Apple.

A customer experience also means just that – an experience for the customers. Yet so many multinational (and larger) companies spend their time figuring out ways how to ‘standardise’ their offerings.

When you think about it, what they’re really trying to do is to make their own experience of managing the company and delivering profits easier… but in so doing they are really mediocritising their own customer experience, and destroying their company’s long term profitability as their brand is commodified!

This in turn usually leads to a low profitability ‘doom cycle’ where concepts and contexts reinforce each other in endless rounds of costcutting until all value is finally destroyed.

Instead, an effective ‘customer experience’ means localising your brand, understanding your customer on a local level, and working Outside-In (not Inside-Out) to create an emotionally-rich customer experience based on their preferences.

What you can do to become a more profitable retailer

Creating an emotionally-rich customer experience is a long-term investment worth making, as the payoff from doing so is returned in higher sales, higher customer loyalty, and higher customer Word of Mouth (or Say – Stay – Spend as we call it).

The process begins with identifying the emotions you need to evoke in order to solicit the above behaviours. It does not matter how big your company is. What makes the difference is being able to personalise at every touchpoint.

Would you like to find out more? Then simply check the ‘customer experience’ box of our feedback form here.

Talent Technologies helps Thai and Asian companies create outstanding customer experiences, in a way that can be empirically linked to top-line sales.

Encouraging the Heart

admin — Sun, 23 May 2010 09:11:31 +0000

It’s almost surreal to see Bangkok returning to normality, with the smoke already cleared, the roads free of checkpoints, and buildings once besieged and inaccessible, open for business.

With the exception of the ruins of Central World Tower & Siam Theatre, it’s almost as though nothing has happened.

But while the repair efforts kick into action to restore Bangkok to its former glory, there is no question that more damage has been done than meets the eye.

While what we can see may be easy to repair & replace – infrastructure like buildings and roads and facilities – there is no question that the foundations of people’s spirits in Thailand have been very seriously damaged – and that it will take time and much deliberate effort to heal these wounds.

The Feelgood Factor

The first week back to work is usually the easy part. There’s typically a ‘feelgood factor’ as employees get back into their old rhythms and catch up again with friends.

But this feeling is likely to wear off before long. All the old ‘societal’ problems will return – politicians renewing old rivalries… people in public office not observing the law… and tensions within families. No matter what political sympathies your colleagues may hold – all these factors are likely to weigh on their spirits and morale again when they eventually happen.

During the month or so of the ‘Thai crisis’, admissions to hospitals on stress-related illnesses soared by over 40%. This is the ‘real damage’ which can’t be rectified easily, and will take time to heal. And if your colleagues are suffering from stress, there is little doubt that it will impact their performance at work.

As always, it’s what we ‘can’t see’ that matters most. But there’s plenty you can do to help promote a vibrant workplace.

**3 things you can do to ‘Encourage the Heart’**

There may be little that we can do to change Thai society. However, doing a little may do a lot to life inside our companies.

Why does this matter? Because the reality of modern life is that, second to sleeping, our place of work is where we spend most of our time.

These first two initiatives (below) are examples taken from Talent Technologies’ The Leadership Challenge – the world’s bestselling leadership training programme.

Initiative #1: Get a Bragging Board going!

It’s often offputting when people brag about themselves. But one sure way to ‘Encourage the Heart’ is when you hear someone else bragging about you – about your efforts or actions, about something you did – in a positive way.

It’s typical to see companies focus on results. This may include sales, reduction of downtime, or project milestones being met.

But too often they ignore the cause of those results. They fixate on the golden eggs, but forget the goose.

Those results may be made up of many infinite events – most of which we can’t see. So a great way of Encouraging the Heart is by setting up a Bragging Board, where your employees can ‘shout out’ their thanks to their colleagues, in a very public way.

Starbucks has bragging boards in its customer area – why don’t more companies have them in their social areas too? Inside a company, bragging boards are far more authentic than customer bragging boards ever can be!

Initiative #2: Be a Friend

As Daniel Maeder, of the Department of Economics of Labour in Switzerland, has said, ‘Organisational diagrams don’t matter at all. Be sure to treat employees as human beings and not as functional workers.’

There are fewer places in the world where this is evident than Thailand – a culture with a collective spirit and where ‘affiliation’ is highly important.

But how does ‘working among friends’ impact results?

In a study featured in the Harvard Business Review, ‘Does Friendship improve Job Performance?’ J.A. Ross found that, even working on the simplest of decision-making tasks, groups of friends were over 20% more effective than groups of acquaintances were.

We would hazard a guess that friends working together are more than twice as effective than mere acquaintances in Thailand.

One way you can promote friendship among your colleagues is by becoming more vulnerable – opening up your heart by disclosing things about yourself, your hopes & your dreams, your family & friends, & your interests & pursuits.

When we’re open we become more vulnerable – and this vulnerability makes us more human and more trusted. If neither person in a relationship takes the risk of trusting, at least a little, the relationship remains stalled at a low level of caution & suspicion.

So go out for lunch with your colleagues, not just to ‘shoot the breeze’, but to open up, and disclose some of your deeper feelings, as well as discover theirs.

Initiative #3: Discover your colleagues’ Talents

The one thing any manager can do to get instant results from his staff is by discovering the person’s innate talents and putting him or her in a role that matches it.

From separate studies of hundreds of thousands of employees in different workgroups worldwide, both Gallup and the Corporate Leadership Council have found that this is the #1 driver of workplace performance.

Yet, as Gallup have also found, fewer than one out of five employees have the opportunity to work to their talents!

The result: disengagement, stress and bahaviours that negatively impact corporate performance.

Talents are not ‘intelligence’, ‘experience’ or ‘competencies’. They are our innate abilities which cannot be learned. So if you are in a job that grates – the likelihood is that you’re not working to your talents (or playing to your strengths, which is when you identify and maximise them).

Yet there is only one tool in the world that scientifically identifies your talents: the Highlands Ability Battery.

One great way to Encourage the Heart then, is by identifying your colleagues’ talents using the Battery, and then making sure they are working in their most effective roles. Is a person naturally Strategic or Tactical? Is a person more of a Specialist or Generalist? How well does a person Connect at Feeling Level (because of his or her tonal memory) and which role in the company maximises this?

Answering these questions delivers long-term engagement, as the above studies have found, and now is a great time to do that!

‘Together We Can’

Following the terrible stress of the last weeks and months, there is now a groundswell of feeling which is resulting in genuine shows of altruism, community spirit and comradeship.

But this feeling always needs to be encouraged, otherwise it will fade, and ‘Together We Can’ or something similar become just an empty slogan.

This is why, at work, we always need to be looking at new ways of Encouraging the Heart.This not only happens through what we say but, more importantly, through what we do.

I hope the three ideas above are a start, and offer two small steps (and one bigger one) which can be readily implemented!

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Talent Technologies offers management training programmes in Thailand and South-East Asia. The above initiatives come from The Leadership Challenge and Talent Factor. Please contact us here if you would like more information.

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Talent Technologies :: Management Training Programmes in Thailand and South-East Asia

Make your management training CONNECT by following this approach

admin — Sun, 09 May 2010 11:56:07 +0000

Rarely has training been as important to companies as in today’s booming Asian economies. As businesses experience an unprecedented talent crunch, coupled with a workforce that has, mostly, been schooled in traditional learning methods, many employees are simply ill-equipped for the challenges of the modern workplace.

It’s for this reason that companies which get their training right consistently can expect major competitive advantages in the marketplace. They will be able to deliver on their desired customer experience, and meet internal quality standards more easily.

For this reason, we thought a quick summary of the elements of effective training would come in handy for our readers, many of whom we know struggle training concepts, attitudes and behaviours to their staff.

No matter what you want to train, whether it’s time management, leadership skills, emotional intelligence or technical skills, these are the steps you need to include to make sure your training hits home:

1. Engage Emotionally

Before you even start the session, it’s essential you engage the learners emotionally. This means via their Head, Heart and Hands.

The first step is always to bridge from where they’ve just come from, to where thay are now. As the trainer, you are trying to arouse a sense of curiosity, interest and activity, without loading in any ‘learning’ as such as this stage.

This can include more physical activities where participants discover parts of what you are going to present, e.g. using index cards to present a puzzle, or where particapants carry out a fun team activity which channels their concentration.

2. Present the learning item(s)

Once the learners are engaged, you can move on to the next section of the learning, which is to present the information you want them to use.

Often, briefings only feature this element, but the sad reality is that something presented is usually something forgotten. As the Chinese saying goes: ‘Tell me, and I’ll forget. Show me, and I’ll understand, but involve me, and I’ll remember.’

There’s only so much you can do to involve the learners during the presentation stage, which goes to show how overrated this stage is as part of the learning process.

Nonetheless, to maximise the effectiveness of this stage you want to make sure that what you are presenting is:

Visually stimulating
Concise, and
Delivered as a dialogue

3. Check for understanding

‘Checking for understanding’ isn’t a case of asking one or two questions which, if satisfactorily answered, prove the participants have learnt the subject matter.

Instead, it’s better to assume that the learners haven’t understood and you can further use this stage to help them clarify the concepts being taught.

This stage may take the form of fun exercise or activities which they can perform as part of pairs or small groups, which promotes communication and peer learning.

4. Drill

Following this, you may want to carry out a high-tempo drill. This moves what the participants have learnt to the front of the mind, ready for…

5. Controlled Practice

This is an activity with clearly defined objectives and/or parameters which the trainees need to perform or follow.

Here, they prove that they can turn what they have learnt into action – which is, after all, the acid test for the training.

The likelihood is that they will still make mistakes, and a key to effective training is to encourage mistakes! Because ‘mistakes,’ as James Joyce said, ‘are the portals of discovery.’

6. Action Plan

Lastly lets not forget what our ultimate objective in training is: that is to achieve a change in practice or behaviour, so anything accomplished in the training room is worth little if it is not replicated in the workplace. For this reason we need an action plan or template (no more than one page) where participants carry out what they have learnt over 28 days. This is because it takes 28 days to change a habit or behaviour.

The Action Plan needs to be:

Simple – not more than a page and easy to follow and execute on
Strategic – delivering real value to the company or its customers
Specific – specific to the learning that has taken place

Summary

In our experience, management training is vastly underrated and misunderstood. Yet when it is delivered effectively and strategically (in ways that will benefit the company), it’s not difficult to see the value it can add.

If you want your training to be more than ‘death by powerpoint’ and lead to a real and tangible change in behaviours, then be sure to include the above elements in all your training sessions!

Talent Technologies ensures that all the above elements feature in our training programmes, meaning that learners can expect i) high engagement, ii) high retention rates and iii) high transfer to the workplace. For management training programmes in Thailand and Asis, look no further than Talent Technologies.

Talent Technologies :: Management Training Programmes in Thailand and South-East Asia

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How customer experience drives shareholder value

admin — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 02:35:48 +0000

‘How can offering a superior customer experience add value to my company’s bottom line?’

Asked questions like this by our clients, we thought it would be useful to demonstrate how companies can link their customer experience to customer equity, and from there to shareholder value.

When embarking on initiatives companies, after all, need to be sure those initiatives will drive value.

For a long time companies have been vaguely aware of the importance of the customer experience, yet may be hesitant to embark on a realignment of their business around the customer experience when the benefits – financial at least – may be equally hazy.

This post will hopefully demonstrate beyond doubt that the customer experience not only impacts companies’ financial performance, but also does so in a big way.

Two views on customer behaviour

There are two views when it comes to the ‘customer experience’.

For one group of people, the view is that the customer experience is nothing more than a ‘nice-to-have’.

Customers buy on value (usually governed by the ‘4Ps‘) and that is that.

In this view, what matters is that companies simply deliver on the value proposition(s) and do so consistently. And that is the ‘customer experience’: getting something to customers as conveniently as possible, for the lowest price (and highest margin for the company). In this assumption, man is an ‘economic being’ who acts in his own self-interest.

Unfortunately for proponents of this view, an increasing body of research is showing that numerous customer segments aren’t behaving consistently with this definition!

Among these segments, many value ‘the journey’ more highly than ‘the destination’. And, given that Aristotle held that ‘man is a social animal’ all those centuries ago, this kind of makes sense too. People of course value the interactions on their way to the destination equally or more than the destination itself. It’s quite natural to expect that customers will turn their back on a service provider if they feel they have been poorly treated, no matter how much they want (or need) the product on offer.

How to reward your shareholders… and your customers

The US-based firm Watermark Consulting conducted a study of whether customers’ perceived experience (based on Forrester’s methodology) had any impact on a company’s stock market performance. Their results are below and are interesting, to say the least:

From the scores above, it’s clear that a pattern has emerged, in the US at least: companies offering ‘top-quartile’ customer experiences generally deliver double the shareholder returns in a year than their bottom-quartile counterparts.

This has recently been brought up to date by Usable Markets and the results are not dissimilar.

What this means in $ terms

If the above charts make the value of customer experience clearer in terms of shareholder value, we must bear in mind the value to the enterprise itself.

Over on the Forrester blog, Bruce Temkin has calculated that a 10% increase on their (very simple) customer experience score equates to a near 3% increase in sales.

This is useful because it can help companies calculate whether investing in their customer experience makes sense.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that (as Temkin himself accepts) this is not a precise science. From the data it’s clear that there is also a ‘tipping point’ where customer experience increases and decreases magnify themselves in terms of stock market performance.

Is Asia different?

We could take the view that Asia is somehow different, but our work with companies in the region indicate otherwise.

If anything, because the focus of most companies is to ‘roll-out’ into these fast-growing countries, the customer experience gets left behind.

Companies taking this approach are paying a huge amount in terms of loss of customer equity when they do so.

Because of this, companies that take time to design and deliver deliberate customer experiences will discover a huge competitive advantage in terms of:

• Pricing power and profit margins

• Reduced costs of customer acquisition (driven by ‘Stay’ and ‘Say’)

• Innovation to meet customer needs (driven by customer and employee engagement)

Talent Technologies offers you a simple solution

If creating an outstanding customer experience sounds like hard work, it needn’t be.

We offer companies a simple solution that combines the strengths of your organisation, people and product or service offering so that your brand can consistently deliver a stand-out experience.

Simply contact us here and we will be delighted to send you more details!

Talent Technologies :: Taking your Talent to a Higher Level

The Face of Leadership today

admin — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 11:16:26 +0000

How important is your face to other’s perception of you as a leader?

Very, says recent research conducted by Dan Hill of Sensory Logic into the effect individuals’ faces have on their communication and relationship with others.

Those familiar with Professor Mehrabian’s research on the impact of body in communication (specifically face) will be aware that while words and voice account for 7% and 38% of interpersonal impact respectively, body and facial language make up the remaining 55%.

It may not come as a great surprise, then that there is increasing interest into the effect leaders’ facial expressions have on their audience.

Dan Hill has taken up the challenge (started by Charles Darwin) to catalogue the effect these facial expressions have on other people.

Using his methodology, grouping facial expressions into being either positive or negative based on five human characteristics, he studied the communication styles of eight business leaders including Bill Gates, Donald Trump and Larry Ellison.

The findings, below, may surprise you:

Warren Buffet (Berkshire Hathaway) -- 69% Positive, 39% Negative
Jeff Bezos (Amazon) -- 51% Positive, 49% Negative
Michael Dell (Dell Computer) -- 47% Positive, 53% Negative
Bill Gates (Microsoft) -- 73% Positive, 27% Negative
Steve Jobs (Apple) -- 48% Positive, 52% Negative
Rupert Murdoch (News Corp.) -- 17% Positive, 83% Negative
Donald Trump (Trump Organization) -- 16% Positive, 84% Negative
Larry Ellison (Oracle) -- 0% Positive, 100% Negative

Poor old Larry Ellison… not even able to muster a single positive expression!

As Hill puts it:

“Ellison is really grim, nervous. He’s driven and determined. He shows anger and arrogance on his face,” Hill says. “I would not consider this an open person, the opposite of an Oprah (Winfrey). See how his eyebrows are pulled together. This is someone who is not very comfortable in his own skin.”

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Facial Communication is Global

Following decades of reseach, Dr Paul Ekman has discovered that facial expressions are not cultural but global (there are by his calculation over 10,000 combinations of facial expressions!)

This is important for any professional working in Asia as nonverbal communication is clearly an important component of leadership effectiveness.

Dan Hill has shown the significance of this in the news clip below comparing the impact of facial expressions by Barack Obama and John McCain in their presidential campaigns.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRwIn4ZeJ5A

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Learn the Face of Leadership today… with Talent Technologies!

If nonverbal communication is an important part of leadership, how can we improve our skills in this area?

Talent Technologies offers two programmes in our Communication discipline.

Communication Factor takes participants through the theory of communication and trains them to develop their communication skills in key areas of their work including meetings, presentations, and face-to-face conversations.

Emotional Intelligence is a one-day programme (with an optional 28 Day Later follow-up) where participants learn to know themselves, choose themselves, and give themselves.

An awareness of our own physical energy and facial expressions is central to this.

If you would like to find out more, simply contact us here for details.

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