During a seminar I noticed some interesting language that was being used by one of the participants. When talking about other people, he would often use the word, “idiot.” A favorite phrase seemed to be, “people are idiots.” I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that he felt that most of his employees were, well “idiots.”  And some of the stories he shared could have been seen as backing up his point-of-view, but that misses the bigger problem. People tend to fulfill the beliefs we have about them. Robert Rosenthal and Kermit Fode tested this idea in a rather ...

When discussing dealing with dealing people in my seminars, someone inevitably says something along the lines of, “Well, they just shouldn’t act that way.”  My typical response is, “According to whom?” At this point the other person usually attempts to further defend their position about how other people should and should not behave.  A few people in the audience will immediately understand where I’m going with this question. Do you see the problem here? If you are dependent on other people’s behavior, you are doomed.  There’s just no way around it; I wish there were.  If a driver doesn’t use his turn ...

I once worked with a guy who was terrible at building self confidence in his employees. He prided himself on burning through sales professionals. And he had an interesting process that he would go through. First, he’d hire the best talent he could find. Second, he provided little or no coaching or feedback, because he figured you should be able to sell, right? Third, no matter how successful the sales professional was, if they didn’t sell “his way” he fired them. Can you even imagine what it was like to work in this environment? It was like a revolving door ...