Zugunruhe: Helping great people get [good] things done: Zoog.un.roo.ee

Brand Yourself Solid

I have to admit that I’m somewhat turned off by websites that have people’s pictures plastered all over them. Coaches seem to be especially bad about this. When I get to one of these sites, and am suddenly faced with a stiff, ugly photo of a not very attractive looking person who seems to take him/herself very seriously, I always wonder: Why?!? Why would you want to put your ugly mug out there? On everything???

We had the good fortune to land an interview with Michael Port, author of Book Yourself Solid this week. It was a great conversation that we’ll talk about in detail in our May newsletter which comes out one week from today. [If you want a copy, you gotta subscribe.] One of the burning questions we had for Michael was about building a personal brand.

Not that Michael Port is unpleasant to look at--he used to be an actor on the soaps (Guiding Light, All My Children, Sex in the City) but if you’ve looked at the Book Yourself Solid website, you’ve probably noticed that Port’s picture is everywhere. It’s on the book cover; it’s on every page of the website. When I receive his promo materials by mail, I got a double dose (he’s on the front cover twice: him holding the book cover). But I wonder, why brand the guy?

When I founded Zugunruhe, I was very intentional that I was creating a company, not a vehicle for self-promotion. The company is not me; I have never had a “personal” branding effort in the sense of branding Tara Robinson. The branding effort is about the company. That’s one of the reasons I named the company Zugunruhe. It’s a weird word, with no predefined meaning (in English, that is). Weird company names are often associated with highly successful endeavors. Google. Amazon. Apple. Caterpillar. Yahoo.

Yeah, so very few people know how to pronounce Zugunruhe (it’s zoog un roo  ee, emphasis on the zoog). I  kind of doubt people knew how to pronounce  Xerox when they first came on the scene either. Zugunruhe means “migratory restlessness.” It’s the feeling and behavior birds have before taking off on migration. Nice metaphor for change. Practically every single person that hears it says the same thing, “Cool!” Everybody “gets” it, immediately, with little explanation. Often, I hand people my business card with no preamble and no explanation of the name. Almost every time, they look at the name, make a stab at pronouncing it and then ask, what’s the word? Great conversation starter.

In other words, Zugunruhe creates curiosity, interest, and a little confusion. Is that a good thing? What do you think?

Should the brand be the company or the people?

Segmenting Services to Increase the Fit Between You and Your Client

Few if any of us appreciate when someone suggests a solution to a problem that we have already tried. Additionally, as someone offering advice to clients, nothing makes you look less like an ‘expert’ than to suggest a "been there, done that" strategy. As a consultant, one of the best tips I learned was to ask about what the person had tried before, and if any of these seemed to work at all. Being clear on who you are and what you have to offer is the first step in increasing the "contextual-fit" (Albin et. al., 1996) between you and your client.

The next step is to provide those services with flexibility to adjust to the changing needs of your clients. Finally, ensuring that co-workers and clients are treated with respect increases the likelihood of establishing long-term relationships. To that end, we have decided to segment our services to reach the individuals we feel passionate about supporting.

Segmenting is one way to specify which individuals would be interested in your services and/or what issues you can help them work through. For Zugunruhe we are choosing to focus on five areas. While these are listed as separate topics we feel strongly that they are interrelated:

Leadership – Effective leadership provides the foundation for any organization. Effective leaders establish productive environments that foster success of the organization and the individual employees.

Organizational Culture – Creating predictable and positive work environments will increase the ability to recruit and retain talented and dynamic individuals.

Customer Relations – As important as treating employees with respect, customers need to feel that they are getting a quality service from an organization with integrity.

Social Responsibility – A final extension of an organization is to reach out the community through volunteerism, philanthropy, donations, etc.

Career Change – Finding the right organization that fits your passion and that supports and respects your personal and professional development is key to creating your own quality life. When you think about your current position ask yourself: Do I look forward to going to work everyday? Do I believe in what I do? When I interact with co-workers, clients, etc. do I slow down and respect their needs and interests?

For more information about any of these topics please visit our website  as well as create a profile or update your existing one.

Albin, R.W., Lucyshyn, J.M., Horner, R.H., & Flannery, K.B. (1996). 
Contextual fit for behavior support plans: A model for A Goodness of 
Fit.  In L.K. Koegel, R.L. Koegel, & Dunlap, G.  (Eds.), /Positive 
Behavior Support: Including People with Difficult Behavior in the 
Community /(pp. 81-98). Baltimore: Paul Brookes.

Why do people do what they do?

Recently I was reminded of a organizational consultant who worked came to work with the leadership team of an educational organization where I was a coordinator for the in-school consultation group. The outside consultant quickly pointed out to us that our clients, school and district administrators, wanted to escape conflicts. None of us wanted to hear this because our goal was to support students and teachers so that students were academically and behaviorally successful. The point for us was that we were not overtly marketing what our clients were interested in and needed to change our approach. We maintained our services, we just modified how we described the short term benefits of working with us.

The second chapter of Book Yourself Solid by Michael Port shifts the focus from identifying your ideal client to defining your target market. One of the exercises involves identifying your client’s urgent needs and compelling desires. Port defines urgent needs as what the client is moving away from and compelling interests as what they are moving toward. This was a concept that resonated with my core philosophy on understanding why people do the things they do and how to use this information to increase their success.

In general I am not a jargon person, but am going to define a few terms because of the precision they provide when trying to understand behavior. From a behavioral perspective, people do and don’t do things for complex reasons that involve their skills and preferences, the environment and their past experiences. The key is to be able to step away from our perspective and understand the situation from their perspective. Also, if a behavior happens, it is for a reason and we need to understand that reason before we can figure out what the person could do instead. We would call this reinforcement, or put another way, behavior happens because it works or meets a need. So what kinds of needs are there?

As Port points out, there are two kinds: the need to move away from things, or negative reinforcement, and the need to move toward something (positive reinforcement). Why did someone decide on positive and negative reinforcement? I have no idea and really wish they hadn’t because the terminology confuses a lot people. If it helps, think of these words as mathematical – positive means to add and negative means to take away. So why does it matter? As leaders (managers, executives, administrators, etc.) we are responsible for creating and maintaining productive environments. Understanding our employee needs allows us to create better environments that will increase recruitment and retention of talented individuals and support these individuals so they can do their best work – the long term result, increased productivity and revenues.

The good news is that most people (about 80%) do well almost regardless of our ability to understand their needs. However, these people could do better. If you have particular individuals or groups or even settings (tasks, areas, etc) that are not going as you would like, it may be time to take a new look from the employees perspective and ask “are they interested in moving toward something or moving away from something? More importantly, how can I take this new perspective and provide effective support in the way of training, technical assistance, acknowledgment and/or redesigned environments? 

For more information on how to understand employees, clients, or cultural environments, give us a call.

Focus on Finding your Ideal Clients

When Jim Collins looked at businesses that made the leap from good to great, one of his key findings was that the highly successful endeavors started with “who.” That is, these businesses crafted their success by identifying who the right people were and focused on getting the right people on board first before determining mission, goals, or anything else. To create dynamic, profitable, or sustainable organizations, the right people come first. This is true not only of who runs the organization and does the work, but also as part of the process of defining who you serve.

Lately, the so-called law of attraction has been getting a lot of press. The idea is that you get what you ask for, more or less. How that works is debatable, but the bottom line is simple: focus on what you want more of and you’re far more likely to get it.

To determine the identity profile of the ideal client (aka the recipient of your services), you need to look for the qualities that are absolutely essential. For Zugunruhe, the ideal client is professional, smart, funny, and has tons of initiative. He or she is a leader, either in action or in the making. These are people with vision who aren’t afraid to innovate and are not afraid to take some risks. Most important of all, these are people who intend to make a difference in the world, who are living their lives with purpose and meaning. They talk about solutions and have the characteristics that Jim Collins identifies as “level five:” unassuming yet strong willed, taking responsibility, giving credit, convinced of success, but cognizant of what the harsh realities are.

Your profile of your ideal client may look very different from ours but one thing is sure, if you work with people who lack the qualities you find ideal, your work will suck the life out of you. I know, because I’ve been there and done that. Working with the right people is a clear-burning fuel source, an experience that makes work feel more like play and has the days flying by.

The last part of the process of the identifying who you want to work with is learning how to spot the ideal people in a sea of choices. Granted, you may feel that you’re not in a position to be choosy. That’s understandable. There’s an interesting paradox at work here, though. Have you ever noticed how opportunities seem to mushroom? Take advantage of one opportunity and it leads to another, related opportunity.

Given the known tendency of opportunities to propagate, you get to decide: what opportunities do you want more of? By focusing you efforts on identifying the people you are meant to serve, your ideal clients or customers, and relentlessly seeking opportunities to serve those people, you will build a organization that is both profitable and sustainable along with a life that is satisfying and fulfilling. What could be better than that?

Where is your boundary?

Branding a business is really tough. First, you’ve got to decide what you want to be known for. Then, you’ve got to create a brand identity, something that makes your business really stand out from the rest of the herd. Blogging can be a powerful branding tool. A blog lets you create an identity through the language you use, the subjects you tackle, and the voice your write in. Not only that, but a blog allows you to reach people all over the world.

The problem is, not everybody will like you, your blog, and your brand. As I pointed out in an earlier post, that may be exactly the point. In fact, that’s almost exactly what Michael Port tells you to do in Chapter One of Book Yourself Solid. He says you need to develop a “velvet rope policy.” In other words, you need to define, very explicitly, what your boundaries are, especially in terms of the clients you want to attract and work with.

To create your boundaries, the first thing Port asks you to do is to consider what your deal-breakers are. What behaviors are beyond the pale? What irritates you, drives you crazy? These are the characteristics of the clients you do not want. These traits define your “red velvet rope that protects you and your business.”

From a branding perspective, this is where things get a bit itchy. Do you set your boundaries in public say, on your blog? Responses to this question are mixed. If you believe the authors of Made to Stick, the answer is probably yes. In their recent piece in Fast Company, Dan and Chip Heath argue that polarizing your audience is a good thing. Drive away the ones who don’t like you! But being controversial (or even different) can be pretty darn scary in light of some of the recent nastiness that some bloggers have been subjected to.

On the other hand, if you really dislike arrogant, lazy, stupid people who lack initiative, can’t problem solve, and have the personality of a wet dishrag, wouldn’t it save a lot of time, money, and mutual frustration to just tell them so? The flip side is to focus on what you do want, which is probably safer but maybe not as effective. Either way, you’ve got to be mentally prepared to be disliked, maybe even attacked. One thing I know for sure is when you’re successful, somebody will hate you for that reason alone. Sucks, but true.

The bottom line is I honestly don’t want to work with certain kinds of people. I may end up stepping on some toes to make sure that I don’t have to deal with people whom I’m not meant to serve and who would be better off working with someone else. Port says that you have a moral obligation, a duty, to serve people who need you. To do otherwise is to play yourself small and to deny “your” people the opportunity to reap the benefits that only you can provide to them. To me, running off the wrong clients to open up room for the right ones seems a small price to pay.