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How to Look Like a Leader (Even When You Don't Feel Like One)

A great deal of the time being a good leader is as much about perception as reality. How you present yourself and how you react to what’s thrown at you will determine whether or not those around you look your way for leadership.

Here are a few things you can do to look like you’re the one to turn to:

#1: Stay Calm
When surprises or disappointments arise, do not fly into a panic. Those who follow you need to feel like you have the situation in hand at all times so that they can have the confidence to do their best.

#2: Speak Authoritatively
...but don’t fake knowledge you don’t have. It’s not always easy to sound like you know what you mean without “making things up” along the way, but it’s never a good idea to try to make up answers you don’t have. Being honest, offering to find those answers you don’t have and sharing what you do know will prove your trustworthiness.

#3: Stay Calm
When dealing with struggling employees (or difficult clients), do not raise your voice or make threats or sling insults. Not only does a calm demeanor help keep everyone else calm and respectful, but it also keeps you from looking like you’ve lost control. Insulting or yelling at others only ever makes you look bad, no matter how “justified” you feel.

#4: Do not fight criticism
Know your worth and stand strong in it. When someone criticizes you or your decisions, listen thoughtfully, stand up for what you believe is right and learn from what might be wrong. Automatically arguing with criticism makes you appear insecure, which undermines your authority.

#5: Stay Calm
Know your mission and your values and do not make snap decisions when things start to heat up.

Are you sensing a pattern here? Good leaders keep their cool because they know their worth and their goals. Practice speaking in a calm voice, even when you don’t feel calm and learn to stop and think before anything comes out of your mouth – especially in high stress situations. If you can remain the calm in the storm, you will be looked to as a leader, no matter how you actually feel inside.

Dialogue & Your Brand

by Kimberly Bryden, Whole Foods Market

There’s nothing more valuable for a business than having your customers feel like they are a part of your brand. Fostering that relationship with your consumer base and maintaining a dialogue, through good and bad, is essential for a successful business and crucial for brand management.

Demographics
When creating marketing strategies, the most important factor is knowing your customer base and tailoring your tactics. In my previous store in Alexandria VA, the customer base was coming home from work in the city to their homes in Alexandria, or doing their weekend shopping for their 2-4 person households. Now my demographic in Foggy Bottom is fast-paced and is normally traveling to other parts of the city after work or after school. If they are from the area, they are shopping for 1 or 2. Knowing your clientele helps in creating appropriate and unique tactics.

Initiate
Initiate conversation with your customer base about your product or business. Focus on your differentiators and your messaging. What sets you a part from your competitor? Why should people use your product? People won’t engage in conversation unless they know about your business/product first. Upon opening the new Foggy Bottom store, I started a tumblr account to debut photos of the store being built. I needed to create excitement and anticipation for the new store so that once it opened, I already had a bond with the customer base.

Action
Don’t just sit by and wait for people to send positive or negative remarks to you. Go into the community and listen to what people want. At my store, since we are in the New Year, people are looking for value and healthy eating options. For me, it can be as simple as informing people of our sales while they are waiting in line. Other times, I’ll go to community meetings and have cooking demonstrations to introduce people to our Health Starts Here program. One must take action and go to the community rather than assume people will find out on their own.

Listen
Customers or clients will have no problem letting you know what you are doing wrong. Never ignore people’s concerns and always address the issue. Listen to the questions, concerns and respond professionally. Once a quarter, I have an Internet Customer Advisory Panel on Twitter where I dedicate an hour to listen to customers needs. Listening to concerns, addressing the issues and providing answers in a group forum and providing transparency does wonders customer relations.

Opportunity
Know your areas of opportunity. On my Marketing Team, I have a demo specialist who does food samplings throughout the store and schedules vendors to come sample. What better way to introduce customers to new products, than to taste it. Introducing customers to local vendors in our store shows how invested we are in helping local entrepreneurs and, in turn, those vendors get exposure in a new venue. There is always room for opportunity, and creativity, when it comes to new products. It’s your responsibility as a businessperson to acknowledge your areas of opportunity and set goals to reach them.

Grow
In this age, one can not be afraid to grow. Maybe it’s not growing in the sense of opening a new location, but perhaps it’s growing your online presence or growing your community outreach. This goes hand in hand with learning your areas of opportunity. Are you using Facebook & Twitter? What about Tumblr & YouTube? Have you thought about Instagram or Pinterest? A lot of businesses don’t invest in these inexpensive ways to build bonds. It takes time and energy to be consistent and innovative but it’s worth it.

Understand
Understand that your client might not get why you need social media. Perhaps they have the mentality of “if you build it, they will come.” Customers may come to your location or try out your business once because you have “the best product” or “the latest technology” but if they have a bad experience or have questions, you need a system in place to communicate. Understanding the necessity of outreach online is vital for full customer experience.

Evaluate
Always evaluate the programs you’ve set in place. A lot of people only want to hear best practices or success stories, but it’s equally necessary to measure failed attempts. Maybe no one came to your event or no one participated in your twitter contest. Evaluate your methods and return to assessing the marketing p’s: product, place, price, promotion.

There you have it, my DIALOGUE acrostic; no business can function without it. How do you create dialogue?

Kim Bryden is a Marketing and Community Relations Team Leader for Whole Foods Market. She has been with Whole Foods Market for almost two years and has tailored unique marketing strategies for both Whole Foods Market Alexandria and Foggy Bottom. Kim specializes in social media and community engagement while focusing on brand management.

Twitter: @kimchiquita & @WFMFoggyBottom.

Rethinking Happiness in the Workplace

by Greg Roth, Percy Group Communications

Happiness is the single most important thread running through our daily lives. It's also probably the world's most elusive concept. What exactly is it? How do we define it? How do we achieve it and more unclear, how do we make it last?

Over the past two decades, research into emotion and what makes us happy has grown by leaps and bounds. There are countless books on the subject, MBA courses, a World Happiness Database, a neuroscience of consumer behavior movement, and, maybe the truest indication that a concept has arrived, the inevitable backlash. After reading Scott Oser's post on this blog about information overload, I couldn't help but think of comedian Louis CK and his well-known riff on Conan a few years back, “Everything's Amazing and No One's Happy” (5 million hits, by the way). The explosion of social media has made happiness a steeper climb and more competitive game.

I've been reading Harvard Business Review this month because they have an entire package of stories related to happiness in their current double issue to open 2012; happiness as it relates to the economy, to intelligence, to performance, and to culture. (I was hoping there'd be something on the “Happiness of Happiness” but no luck).

In the area of leadership, one major finding is on focus. Thank God! How many of us have had managers that have stressed the ability to “multi-task?” I'll give you my answer: every single one. However, a new scientific research project called Track Your Happiness, developed by a doctoral candidate at Harvard, is asking more than 15,000 people in 83 countries to report their emotional states in real time via iPhone application. Wouldn't you know, one of their major findings? The more the mind wanders from thought to thought or task to task, the less happy a person is. And we all know, a happy employee is going to be more productive than an unhappy employee. What makes happiness possible is engagement, both physical and mental, and what makes engagement possible is focus.

The other nugget in the HBR story package I found intriguing was how managers can create work environments with two key factors: vitality and learning. Very simply, the equation would be “passion + growth = thriving employees”. You can go into a lot more detail than that, but to boil it down to its basic ingredients, the best work environments foster a sense of being alive and in control at work and match that with opportunity to develop their skillset. Those two factors need to work in concert with each other.

There's always been a moral reason for leaders to traffic in happiness, but more and more research is showing that there's a direct economic motivation as well. Do you have any happiness strategies to report from your workplace?

Greg Roth, IOM, is the Owner of Percy Group Communications, a boutique strategy, messaging, and content firm that works with both private and public sector clients such as the Pew Charitable Trusts, The William James Foundation, Potomac College, and the U.S. Department of State. Before launching his own practice, he spent 15 years working for the media, nonprofits, and startups.

Website: Percy-group.com | Twitter: @PercyGroupComm & @NonProfitFuture