To speak gratitude is courteous and pleasant, to enact gratitude is generous and noble, but to live gratitude is to touch Heaven. ~Johannes A. Gaertner

Whether you celebrate Thanksgiving or not as a holiday, please take the time to appreciate the blessings, challenges, and people who make you special everyday.

Thank you for being an important part of The Sykes Group in 2008. We are looking forward to bringing more success techniques your way in 2009.

Have a Great, Safe, and Happy Thanksgiving!

Warmly,

Ed & Joy

Leadership starts with tough decisions. Let me share with you my recent leadership challenge and the leadership secrets you can use in any team building situation for great leadership results.

I have the honor and pleasure of volunteering for many groups and causes. In many situations, I am called upon to lead as chairperson or co-chairperson. Recently, I had the honor of co-chairing an event that involved leading and motivating a team of volunteers to work together for a successful result. Overall, the team volunteers are leaders in health care, education, business, media, the arts, and faith-based organizations, etc. In other words, this team of volunteers consisted of very motivated and accomplished people who wanted to make a difference.

One committee member became increasingly negative in her communication and actions at the expense of the other committee members. She behaved in a manner that was not in line with our overall mission. After a coaching session agreeing on what was expected from her in relationship to our mission, her behavior became increasingly worse. The final straw was a very negative e-mail that stated she was the only committee member who was doing anything and personally attacked the other committee members.

After consulting with the event organizers to gain agreement on a plan of action, I called this person to let her know that this was not acceptable behavior and invited her to meet with me to discuss how we could bring her behavior more in line with the mission of our project. She rejected my invite, and I let her know that by not excepting my invite, she was no longer a participant in our event. I followed up with an e-mail and letter reiterating my verbal statement. She made the choice to "fire herself."

As leader of the event, I made telephone calls to committee members to explain the committee change, let each committee member know the wonderful job they were doing, and shared with them where we were in relationship to our mission and goals. While making these calls, I soon found out that some committee members were not as involved in the project because of the one negative committee member.  Some members had stopped attending meetings, stopped communicating, and weren't giving 100% for the event. After assuring them that they were valuable team members of the project and that this "negative member" would not be involved in the project's going forward, we experienced a new level of motivation and participation that took our event to a new level of success and broke a record for attendance.

You may be in a similar leadership position whereby the success of the organization, project, or team depends on how well and how fast you make decisions when faced with challenging situations. The following five leadership skills will keep you on the leadership track during challenging situations, no matter whether your organization is for profit or non-profit, so that you can achieve your goals:

1. Live the Mission When Making Leadership Decisions
   Live the mission by constantly communicating the mission so that everyone of the team understands the mission and acts to live the mission. Ask team members the following question, "What did you do today to live the mission and achieve the goals of the mission?" Develop clear and concise team member descriptions so that everyone understands how they make a difference. Motivate and reward team members based on how well they lived the mission.

To read the rest of the article, go to Leadership.

The way we handle stress is always a factor in our success in challenging times. Unmanaged, stress can hold us back from being successful Once managed, stress propels us to new levels of success.

When you learn how to manage stress, you benefit in the following ways:

• Improved health and decreased incidence of disease

• Improved mood

• Improved memory and thinking

• Improved sleep

• Improved relationships

• Reduced absenteeism

• Improved productivity

• Improved workplace environment

The following are five stress management secrets that will allow you to fulfill your career, business, and life ambitions while living a happier life:

1. Set Realistic Goals
   Many times, I ask people, "What do you want in your career?" Frequently, I receive an answer stating what they don't want. They do not realize that this is not the same as focusing on what they want to include in their career. If you don't have a clear, concise vision of what you want in your career, business or life, you can easily be lead down a path which will cause stress for you in the future.
   
   Set clear goals in several areas of your life: family, health, career, finance, and spiritual, among others. By setting realistic goals in each area, you will create balance in your life, have a clear direction of what you want to accomplish in each area, and reduce your stress level because you will have purpose.

To read the rest of the article, go to Stress Management

What a beautiful day! I just finished speaking and Joy finished volunteering at the American Cancer Society's (ACS) Making Strides Against Beast Cancer Event in Norfolk, VA. With over six thousand participants (including cancer survivors), the American Cancer Society was able to raise $350,000 to fight beast cancer and provide services to those in need.

The participants were excited and my job was to keep them excited and motivate them to get involved in other events throughout the year. You see, cancer won't wait to our next event! As I spoke to a sea of faces, I could feel the positive energy in the crowd knowing that they had made a difference. And you can too!

Please take the time to go to http://www.cancer.org and read about the wonderful work ACS is doing everyday to help your families (possible your mother, sister, aunt, grandmother, etc), your friends, and your community members beat this terrible disease. I challenge each person reading this post to give your time and/or money so that possibly someone you know and love can beat this disease.

Go to http://www.cancer.org today and make a difference!

You may never be in front of Katie Curic of CBS News answering questions like Sarah Palin, but there will be opportunities in your life where you will be asked questions on the spot. How will you handle those situations? As you can see in the above video, Sarah Palin had a difficult time being clear and concise in her answers.

You may never find yourself on national television, but you may find yourself in a similar high pressure situation at work, in business, or in the community. Simply follow the below link for five techniques you can use to master impromptu speaking so that you can master your thinking on your feet skills:

Thinking on Your Feet

You don't need to be fourteen time Olympic gold medal winner Michael Phelps to achieve your goals. However, you can learn the goal setting secrets Michael Phelps used to achieve his success by reading the following article:

Recently, Joy and I had the pleasure of speaking at a conference of Educational Office Professionals in Baltimore, MD. The other speakers included Ms. Deborah Phelps, mother of six-time gold medalist (Now fourteen-time goal medalist) in the 2004 Summer Olympics swimmer Michael Phelps, and Agatha von Trapp, the 91-year-old daughter of Captain and Maria von Trapp, the family on which the movie "Sound of Music" was based. To say the least, there were a variety of subjects discussed that day.

As I listened to Ms. Phelps describe Michael's achievements, I realized that his story had many of the secrets of success mentioned in my September article, Five Secrets to Creating a 'Goal' Medal Life.

Let's go over these goal setting five secrets again and see how you can apply them:

1. Create Passion with Goal Setting
   Ms. Phelps mentioned that Michael, after competing in the 2000 Summer Olympics, was excited about the experience. Michael told her he wanted to compete again in the 2004 Summer Olympics. He had that burning desire to compete and win. So they sat down, developed goals, and mapped out a detailed plan for his success.
   

   What do you have passion about in your career, your life? Have you put pen to paper and developed goals to achieve what you want in life?

To read the rest of the article, go to "Goal Medal Success."

One of the important keys to employee motivation is to empower your employees to be successful. An empowered employee leads to the following benefits:

• Increased creativity

• Increased productivity

• Increased teamwork and motivation

• Increased initiative

• Increased ownership of work

• Reduced employee turnover

• Reduced human resources situations

• Better work environment

• Increased results for your organization

• Increased career opportunities

The following are ten motivation techniques to jumpstarting your employee motivation and empowering your team to outstanding results:

1. Motivate Your Employees to Find Solutions
   Encourage your employees to be solution creators instead of problem creators. When employees communicate a problem to you, look at it as an opportunity to empower the employees. Ask the employees how they would solve the problem, express your confidence that they are the person to solve the problems, give them the tools to solve the problem, and follow up with them. You have just empowered those employees to find ways in the future to create solutions and made your team more productive at the same time.

2. Motivate Your Employees by Soliciting Opinions
   Many times during our busy work day, we find it difficult to ask for opinions from our employees. But just the act of asking for their opinions tells your employees that you value their input and motivates them to accomplish more. Just imagine, it may be the first time that an employer has ever asked them for their opinion, and they appreciate it.

3. Motivate Your Employees by Managing to Their Level
   Learn your employees' skill, experience, and motivation levels for performing workplace tasks. Then assign the task and follow-up based on your findings. For example, you may need to follow up more frequently with an employee who is fairly new to the project or organization as opposed to the "veteran" employee who doesn't need much follow-up. Remember, the most skilled employee may not be the most motivated for performing the task you request.

To read the rest of the article, go to Employee Motivation.

Outstanding customer service is the key to creating a successful organization during any economic time... but especially during challenging economic times.

It's amazing how most organizations will invest millions, if not billions, of dollars on new computer systems, new displays, new phone systems, and new marketing campaigns to try to acquire new customers. The moment of truth comes, however, when the new customer has first contact with these organizations. If the customer is ignored, disrespected, and disappointed with the customer service experience, that customer may never come back. When this occurs, these organizations apparently haven't heard the old saying, "You only get one chance to make a great first impression."

What about the present customer base? Many times these customers are treated with indifference and, in many cases, quietly go away to do business with a competitor.

Why not jumpstart your organization's success with outstanding customer service? It doesn't matter if you are involved in retail, restaurant management, consumer products, or even the government, customer service is being recognized as the key to increasing productivity, decreasing employee turnover, and increasing an organization's bottom line. Especially during challenging economic times, the quality of your customer service determines if you remain in business to serve customers or cease to exist.

The following are eight secrets to giving outstanding customer service so that your organization will be successful:

1. Hire Right for Outstanding Customer Service
   Organizations that give outstanding customer service invest in hiring right each and every time. They realize that they want the best employees interacting with their customers. Who is the best customer service employee to hire? Hire for attitude, not for aptitude. Hire the employee that has a great customer service attitude and has a great personality, takes initiative, has great communication skills, can show empathy, and has an eye for detail. If a prospective customer service employee has a great attitude, you can always train that employee to learn the skills. Also, the employee should be a solution creator, not a problem maker.

2. Make Outstanding Customer Service Your Mission
   What is your organization's mission statement? What does the mission statement say about how you should treat your customer? Are you communicating this to all your employees, no matter what position they have in the organization? Take the time during meetings, e-mails, phone calls, and other communication opportunities to express the mission statement and how it relates to giving outstanding customer service. Ask during your meeting, "What did we do this week to live our mission statement and its customer service values?"

Go to the following link to read the rest: Jumpstarting Customer Service