ANNUAL CONVENTIONS

Wed, 3 Mar 2010 22:08:14 +0100

One of the most effective and intense instruments of Emotional Management is the Annual convention, or Annual Sales meeting of the company.

Often I find organizations, affiliates of large companies, or smaller companies who believe that taking away a majority of employees to an annual meeting is not productive and a useless spending. They simply see it as one way of wasting corporate resources.

I think, though that it is a strong motivational tool that provides short-term yields. My experience within a venture capital environment, which is the typical organization seeking results in a very short timeframe and almost at any price, tells me that even in these cases, these tools are effective. The particular short-termism of these organizations would advise to cut costs. However, if a leader applies these tools from the beginning, the results will be a much more cohesive group, aligned to the idea that the company is pursuing.

Al the literature about Story-telling emphasizes the power of telling vivid, real stories, particular to the company that get to the emotions of the people. They also recommend having people together to create a higher level of empathy amongst the group. Mirror neurons work better when you can see in person the emotions and actions of others. All these effects can only take place if you gather people together and tell them these stories.

There are significant benefits in the short and medium term. I would almost discard the long-term effects given the accelerated pace of change, although there are plenty of them. You may be working on the long-term and a merger, a divestiture, or any major corporate restructuring takes place and you need to restart. The benefits of these meetings in the medium term are to build a collective memory, their own stories, creating the feeling of group, involved in a project. It also provides with a great opportunity to transmit direct information to an entire organization to aligned it to a single same strategic direction. It is a great opportunity to motivate, train, and lead.

For those who give little importance to emotions, of course they will not share this view. There are many alexithimic managers, lacking the sufficient mirror neurons to perceive the feelings and emotions of others. Alexithymia is the disease of those that suffer a disability to experience emotions. Many research is being made in this field by cognitive psychologists. They are trying to establish a link between mirror neurons neurological paths, and autism, which is an emotion disorder disesase. This is also true of postmodernism. I do not care about your emotions or feelings, I will just do what I think it s rational to do for me. It is as if all were Mr. Spock, the Start-Trek movie character. But if you think there is a place for emotions (there are many that just keep them for the intimacy), you’ll understand what I am trying to say.

Quite recently, a person from the finance department came to see me and in a clear sign of gratitude, told me that it was the first time in 32 years that any manager had invited her to a convention. This is another important point: First, this person feels the caring of the company for their employees. She also now understands better the reality and direction of the company. She heard from me what were the results, and what emotions I was showing in each point of my explanation. By explaining what worked, what did not work so well, and what we were going to do about it, she could discern amongst the various points that otherwise in a written communication she would not have gotten. She was empathizing with me each time I was talking to her, either personally or through an audience. She could ask, and talk with colleagues with whom she does not speak normally. Certainly she put faces to people for the first time, after years of only talking with them by phone.

One day I will discuss further about high performance organizations, and about their units: The high-performance teams. The need of generosity, coming from interdependence which arises as a group responsibility, from the sum of individual ones. I will relate it with the emergence of morality in humans. All circles around the theme of cooperation, and collective and individual interests. All this training is achieved amongst other by this type of gatherings.

We will see how group cohesion is especially important in those organizations that need to network in interdependence. The time they spend together and the activities conducted during the convention days, makes the team much more united. Sharing experiences establish broader and stronger links that those that take place in an office.

There are many specific tools that make a Sales meetings or an Annual convention effective. If you combine a small part of recreational activities, together with the more boring or mind-energy consuming working sessions, you will make your teams more likely to strive for the preparation of such event. Also, if you need your teams to travel long distances, during untimely hours, or even overlapping it with weekends; you certainly need to compensate the effort. An effort, which is much evident amongst the group of people who have dependent people, like children, disabled, or elderly people. They have to leave everything organized. Finding somebody that will take care of their children, parents, or other relatives and dependent people, is time consuming and needs lots of favors to be asked. And you need to be cognizant of this.

In terms of how one should structure a Convention, let me say that I usually plan an Inaugural session the very first day that we arrive to destination. The timing is crucial. All the bulk of the main corporate messages are given in the first day. The mood is high, and people have not exhausted all their energies in endless nights. As the next days working sessions unfold, Marketing Plans, Sales Promotion Plans (SPP) and workshops follow. I do like people practicing through role play activities what they just learnt. It is key that people just repeat with their words, expressing by themselves what they had just learned. And then correcting it. These are basic teaching techniques not always followed. After all these work sessions have finished, I let the fun part start. I do not like to mix the emotional part with the more rational thinking needed to understand the specific instructions expected from Sales reps or other employees. This euphoria that arises from people meeting old friends is quite explosive. These people interact in groups, in which they feel themselves as an important part of. For a while they have been constricted in an isolated territories. All of a sudden they meet these buddies and colleagues not seen since long ago! It does not match with the concentration required when you need to work. So I try to differentiate as much as I can, the fun part from the working session. I would no like to say, emotional part from the rational one. At this stage of my web, one should recognize that both are intimately intertwined. I use emotions to open the rational part, and people rationalize emotional driven events. For instance, I generally finish the Annual Convention with a gala dinner where Sales, Innovation and Seniority awards are given.

These prizes need to be given according to the values and priorities of each company. It is similar what Kaplan and Norton said in their articles about Strategic alignment. In our case, the values are: Results, measured by “Effectiveness of Sales representatives”; Commitment to the company. measured by “Seniority of colleagues”, and Innovation measured by “Proven Effective Innovative solutions”. Giving awards to different areas of the organization makes the priorities of the company visible. Conferring social recognition generally makes the motivation is much stronger. It rewards a higher step within the scale of Maslow. This recognition, as the social psychologists and behavioral economists like Dan Ariely have shown, is much stronger than an economic incentive. A monetary incentive is part of a commercial contract; it must also exist obviously, but the power of recognition belongs to the emotional contract. This was initially spotted by Herzberg but it is now only through people like Ariely, Kahneman that it is interpreted.

Then going back to practice, there are more emotional tools that you can use such as "teasers" before announcing the convention. Setting expectations, with you playing with timing is very effective. You set the desire, and you are in control of its satisfaction. Other tools: Competitions like a photographic contest may provide you with a nice sharing record of images lived in the convention. There may be times when you can budget for a professional photographer, Great! But I prefer the spontaneity, of snapshots taken by the participants. Working with the senses is important. Again we are tapping the emotional parts of the brain: Music, food, dancing, smells, colors and the props. All these plays a very important role in this equation.

You also must leave room for improvisation, to the spontaneity of people. This must be done to generate a group feeling. Small groups are to be avoided as well as the generation of fragments of the overall group splitting to do their own. In starting or not cohesive groups, management needs to organize activities in such a way that socialization is mandatory. Management needs to stress that trips, meals, cocktails and other social events are mandatory and not discretionary.

After several years organizing annual meetings and these sort of events, recently I have been lucky to see that quite spontaneously some colleagues across the whole country became organized as a "Committee parties and celebrations.” As an example they became responsible for facilitating the purchase of quite cheaply “Maghreb costumes” in a meeting at Marrakech in order to organize a typical ethnic dance. In an even more recent meeting they asked everybody who were to attend one Annual meeting in Lisbon to bring the appropriate habiliments for a masked ball. They prepared all the logistics with the restaurant for a sort of blind date dance. It wast just fun! There have been times that all the convention was themed, as the once celebrated in Paris with the film "Moulin Rouge". Or the one at the Barcelona Olympics...

Creativity has no boundaries, there are many possibilities. Thousand of ideas that can be provided by specialized companies. However, what is needed is the participation of large groups within the company. You do should not make your people as performance spectators but to performance actors.

These meetings provide a tricky additional advantage. When communicating company goals or the group's future, this environment facilitates a smooth acceptance.

Another crucial point if not the most important one: If you don’t feel it don’t fake it.

If you are reading these paragraphs like an actor, either you are Marlon Brando or you will fail to achieve the expected results. Emotions are difficultly faked. Only best paid actors, able to use using the Stanislavski method which tells use how to recreate personal experiences to represent emotions, can do this job. All organization leaders who are not professional actors, and this includes almost everyone except Ronald Reagan need not to fake emotions. When people perceive that the company and leaders that represent them have a genuine interest in their emotions the answer is wonderful. What we have to show in a smile, is our loyalty, a real thrill. Only then we will obtain a similar response. What you give is what you get. In a faked smile which is not real, everybody will perceive it as not being your feeling. I am not predicating: There are some facial muscles that only respond to the emotions, they are only connected to the Amigdala, the two cell glands in the limbic system which are like a hub of all emotions processed and memorized by our brain. When people see a true emotional smile they clearly recognize it. It’s like the enthusiasm of the child for a given project, the audience responds with equal gratitude and purity of heart.

There are many types of meetings where emotions work: I organize training meetings on topics like: Time management, Stress management, Generation of high performance teams, Presentation skills, and many others, where emotions also build in the same line. In shorter workshops techniques may be different, but you build the same attributes. I have experience in conducting Percussion workshops with groups, or laughing-therapy groups, Coordination abilities, etc. Any team-building activities you can think of, no one works stronger than live-together meetings. In all these meetings I have met people with whom not only commitments but also lasting friendships have emerged.

My recommendation to other companies or organizations with teams is to consider these emotional tools to improve productivity, and efficiency.

Kind regards, and talk to you at next blog.

Josep Valls

Emotional Networking

Sun, 4 May 2008 01:27:34 +0200

During my transition from Johnson & Johnson to Nutrition et Santé I had the chance to participate in one session of Outplacement in which I could debate with other participants the last techniques and trends of Networking in Business and Management.

We discussed the enormity of the power coming out from tools around the Web 2.0 technology. I personally use Linkedin as the most important one but also Plaxo, Viadeo, and some others. I also use Facebook very actively. One of my favorite books is Duncan Watts’ Six Degrees where the different aspects around social networks both from a scientifical and critical views are discussed.

One of the important benefits of Outplacement programs is precisely that one of teaching people on actively managing their networks in a way that result in a better employability. The majority of managers and employees that we send to Outplacement programs have never considered having a methodic aproach when managing their network. That’s when the Outplacement companies add value teaching them their methodologies, very structured, very systemathic, probably in excess, to my view. I do understand that for many people, network is not even a word in their vocabulary. Thus, teaching networking to somebody that has never practiced it conciously is something that generates the image in my mind like that of rehabilitation, like doing it step by step, quite slowly and sequentially. Learning to practice a new ability which was never wired in the brain, requires first using the rational prefrontal cortex, and then a lot of repetion to wire it.

Now, these type of employees that have not been much active in using tools such as agendas, Outlook, even less Linkedin, when confronted with them, they start to find friends forgotten since many years. They find colleagues from college, or from high school, and are extremely grateful to you for having taught them a few networking tricks. They are quite naïf, and despite they are trained in the methodological school, I am inclined to believe they also take a very candid approach as a way to move forward.

However, it is not about these people that I wanted to write about. During all my years in Business school and in Management, I have seen a Fauna of Networkers that sucked!. People that networked for pure selfish interest. No emotion attached. No interest in the other. And for some innocent people to distinguish these sharks, is not an easy task. This ability is not taught in any School not even in the Outplacement companies. But is important, because we as employers, and for all people that think alike, will not recruit people like those that behave in a way or fashion that made us think that are not acting naturally. I have had friends if I can use this word for them, that called me regularly, probably applying networking techniques that had learned in a networking course. Their full agenda probably reminded them that day that they had to call me to keep me fresh in the agenda. What the f...

Fortunatelly, Neuroscience has brought to us lots of techniques to help us identify between true and fake smiles. The limbic smile is that one generated by the orbicular and zigosomatic muscles connected to the amigdala (limbic system, hence limbic smile). Only when the smile is true and honest, only when is from one’s heart, those muscles can be activated. That’s why it is so difficult to force a smile in front of a picture. Somebody called it Mona Lisa’s Smile. Similarly, when somebody wants to fake a smile in front of a person, if there is little emotional feeling, that smile is going to spell disaster.

So what do I recommend? What do I use? I personally do a little it of funky networking. My life has been already too structured so I can afford to deconstruct it a little bit looking for a touch of color. But that’s responding to my own personal brief and objectives of course! Adding these bits of funky, it helps the emotion and the limbic system. It helps giving the attention to the adequate side of the network, the external side of it.

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ANNUAL CONVENTIONS

Emotional Networking