Breakthrough To Live and Work A Level Up

Life is full of decisions but the most important one you can make is to choose who you will

be, not what, but who. Until you do you will live to your nature instead of to your potential and your nature will drag you down as it drives you to be comfortable, make excuses and listen to your doubts and fears. If you want to be your best it starts with the conscious decision of who you will be. This decision will enable, empowers and motivate you to live a level up fro your nature and be your best self.

Start Now...
To get started make yourself a 'To Be List' right now! Keep it small, 7 to 10 character traits you want to be. You are beginning to write your reputation with these traits as they will give you a compass to follow, a plan of action to take when making decisions in your life that will lead you to your best most extraordinary state.

Stay Focused...
Make your list, then be mindful, meditate and focus on making all your decisions to live to be that person. When you start living with these intentions you'll live a level up from your nature and stand out in all you do. Living with purpose and intention gives you the self-discipline, self-control and self-confidence to be the person you were created to be...An exceptional peak performer!

By Mike Moore

Overcoming our nature is the key to success!

Mediocrity Sneaks Up On You

Leadership Is An Act Of With Love

We often mistake love for a feeling...It's not a feeling, it's an action. In fact, it's many actions and it's leadership at it's finest! 

Before I get to the actions that make up love, let's define love...Love is patient and kind. It doesn't envy or boast, it's never proud. It doesn't dishonor others, it's not self-seeking or selfish, it's not easily angered and it keeps no record of wrongs. Love doesn't delight in evil or dishonest gain. Instead, it rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres...Love never fails.

Leaders need to love people...Yes, they have to care enough to want the best for those they lead.

It's even love that gives them the toughness and hard edge they need to challenge people to be their best, to set and raise standards of acceptable behavior. This is true in parenting, business, sports and religion...It's a leaders love that powers their belief and confidence in people. It's love that emboldens them to challenge people to learn, grow and improve. It's a leaders love that gives them the courage and strength to hold people accountable and it's love that helps them be open, honest and transparent.

It's a leaders love for people that causes those people to trust them and follow them in the first place. It's love that gives the vision a leader needs to know where they are going and how to help others get there with them.

When leaders fail it's because they didn't love people or lost their love of people. It's love that enables a leader to influence and inspire people to be more than they would be without them. 

If you want to be a leader...Love more!

By Mike Moore

What Leader Do To Lead

BE TRUSTWORTHY

Be accountable...Take responsibility! Create and support an open, positive, risk taking environment. Have the courage to be open, honest and direct. Don't send messages, say what you mean and mean what you say. Focus on solutions, not fault finding or assigning blame. See unwanted results as an opportunity to coach and teach to improve individuals and the organization. Don't be defensive. You don't have to have all the answers...Just help people find them.

BE EXTRAORDINARY...REJECT MEDIOCRITY

Set and raise standards...Keep raising the bar. The lowest form of behavior you allow defines who you are as a leader. Blur the lines between job assignments...The mission is everyone's job. Don't allow average attitudes, thinking or behavior. Assign and monitor all work to teach and coach using specifics situations. Hold people accountable...Starting with yourself!

BE CARING...DO WHAT'S BEST FOR PEOPLE

Coach attitudes, teach skills and manage actions to help people learn, grow and improve...Don't overreact! Make people more important than results and manage people's attitudes before they become actions that produce poor results. Don't accept or allow average thinking or behavior...Reject mediocrity! Care enough about the person to challenge them to do what they don't want to do, that will help them grow, improve and become the best they can be. Be a servant, do what's best for people don't just try to please them.

BE AWARE...PAY ATTENTION

Make people more important than things, results or accomplishments. Make taking time for people a priority to validate and show your respect for them. Ask people's opinions...Pay attention and listen. Reward extra effort...Pay attention. Make people feel important...Pay attention and pay complements. Don't avoid conflict, it will serve you and the people you care about, but be kind, compassionate and respectful. Listen to people to validate them and their efforts, growth and accomplishments. Did I mention pay attention? Be mindful that people will treat each other and your customers the way you treat them.

BE A CHANGE AGENT

Be a change advocate...Lead the change. Encourage others to embrace change! Ask people how they and the organization can improve. Question everything...Never except or settle for the status quo. Make learning, growing and improving the primary goal. Hold people accountable to change so they'll learn, grow and improve...When they don't or won't, then, change your people. 

By Mike Moore

Employee First Leadership

Improving Your Focus For Peak Performance

To Lead You Must Care

Leaders Coach, Teach & Manage

Never Stop......

Fear MediocrIty

5 Keys For Leaders Who Coach

Every leader needs to be aware of the traits and relationships that instill the attitudes, inspire the actions and increase the skills of the people they are responsible to lead. Below are five key traits of leaders that will unlock your people power and help you become a great

leader.

TRUST

It takes more than being honest to be trustworthy. Honest is a first step but being open and direct in your communication is also necessary. In addition, if you have to be asked more than once to get something done you aren’t trustworthy. If your people are going to trust you and therefore believe in you, they need to know they can depend on you.

STANDARDS

A leader needs to set high standards and then hold people accountable to meet those standards. People want to be part of something they can be proud of. When standards aren’t set and people aren’t held accountable, good people become discouraged and leave your company. Without high standards and accountability, you’ll be left with only mediocre performers who don’t like to be held accountable or take responsibility.

CARE

To lead effectively you’ll have to choose to care enough about your people to coach their attitudes, before they become poor actions, which produce unacceptable results. Stop focusing on things and focus on people. You cannot lead things, only people, and if you want things to improve, people have to improve first.

VALIDATION

Make time for your people. The excuse, “I’m to busy”, isn’t good enough. Pay attention and listen to them to validate them. In addition, they usually know more about your business than you think they do and often more than you do.

CHANGE

Don’t just embrace change! Be the champion for change. This will keep people motivated, energized and renewed. Managing change keeps veteran employees from becoming complacent, helps people keep learning, growing and improving and ensures your business will remain relevant to your customers.

By Mike Moore

Be A Dream Come True Maker

Don't let your dreams become a fantasy, turn them into your documentary!

Sales Leadership...A Coaching Position

Coaches understand if they want to win they can't focus on the score. Instead they have to identify the causes that produce the score they want and get busy coaching and managing those causes.

Are you running a sales organization or managing salespeople? Are you an executive who needs to improve your company's sales results? It's fairly simple, even easy, to identify the sales you want or need to produce. However, sales are a result, and results can't be managed anymore than the score can be managed. When you wait until the results are in, it's too late. Increasing sales requires identifying the causes that produce sales and begin coaching and managing those causes.

The first thing to acknowledge is that salespeople are performing artists.  Just like athletes, actors and musicians they need direction, leadership and coaching to produce their results. Once you acknowledge this, you can begin to understand the importance and priority coaching plays in your organizations sales success. In fact, you'll start to understand what's missing in most sales organizations. THE SALES COACH!

Here are some key areas and specifics you can get started implementing if you're going to stop being a frustrated traditional sales manager and become a successful sales coach.

Performance Culture
Instilling an attitude that sales is a performance art will be a key to your success. Building a team of passionate salespeople who care about customers and helping people while being an advocate for the profession of sales will require the full force of your will. Turning mediocrity into excellence always does. You'll need a firm belief that you are working to leave a legacy, not just working to produce sales numbers. The focus on making customers, instead of sales, can help make this possible by creating a higher purpose in your sales philosophy. I used to advise my clients to only hire people with a passion to be their best and an exceptional work ethic. This doesn't work any longer because you won't find enough people with these traits because we've experienced too much of a deterioration in what's considered average. Our standards have eroded.  You'll need to be prepared to inspire and develop salespeople to learn grow and become peak performers.

Recruiting
Do you know your next salesperson? Do you have a bench, feeder system or know where to look for your next salesperson? A sales coach's first action should be to recruit salespeople. This has three distinct purposes. First, performers should know if they don't perform they can be replaced. This will help instill a performance culture in your sales team. Second, you need to find the people you believe you can coach, teach and train. Third, you want to hire differently than your competition to increase your chances of coaching a winning sales organization loaded with top talent.

Coaching...Attitudes
Attitudes produce actions that generate results. Attitudes are dominant thoughts and beliefs that make up a person's state-of-mind. Salespeople need a superior state-of-mind to improve their ability to perform at their peak consistently. Sales Coaches manage attitudes that creates the atmosphere or culture of their sales team. This requires personal contact daily with your salespeople to check their attitude. This will give you the time to support the people with positive attitudes, coach up the one's who need it and make sure they are prepared to perform to their peak.

Teaching/Training...Skills and Knowledge
Sales Coaches are always teaching. They teach to improve the skills and knowledge of their salespeople. They train salespeople by holding them accountable to learn and improve. Training is what your salespeople do and it's a Sales Coaches responsibility to insure their salespeople train to stay in sales shape. Being a teacher and trainer is an ongoing part of being a Sales Coach.  So, Sales Coaches have to study, learn and grow constantly if they are going lead their team to success. Regularly scheduled sales education are a coaches responsibility. Creating a culture where change, learning and growth are a habit of all salespeople is the real requirement for sustained success.

Managing...Actions
Managing actions is the exercise of assigning and monitoring the work of your salespeople. The salespeople who don't want to improve won't like being held accountable and they'll often call this micro-management. It's not micro-management, it's responsible Sales Coaching. There are two distinct purposes for monitoring work. The first is accountability. The second, and most important, is to create real life opportunities to coach attitudes, teach skills and knowledge while assigning actions to be taken that you can monitor and do this all again. This is the circle of coaching, teaching, training and managing to coach teach and train that will produce the improved results you desire.

These are the actions of successful coaches first taught to me by my father Charles Moore, a successful football coach, added to and reinforced by John Wooden in one-on-one sessions with me. They have been implemented, developed and constantly proven in real life environments during my career for over 38 years. In addition, I have been successfully coaching, teaching and training sales managers and executives using these for over 20 years. They are the skills that successful sales coaches master and practice daily. Peak performing sales management and coaching are often the missing link in a companies sales organization. Get started Coaching today and don't let that be the case in your company.

By Mike Moore

Moore Motivation...Become The Master Of Your Emotions

Employee First Leadership

The customer is always right. How far off course did we go following this mantra? I think most people in business and sales can explain what this philosophy was intended to produce and yet we've all witnessed the unintended consequences and damage this has

done to the buyer and seller relationship.

This attitude came from our desire for instant gratification which never generates the best results. Do whatever it takes to make sales became the strategy in the, 'Just win baby! and 'Just Do It!' age of business. To win today, the mantra needs to shift to, 'Just Do It Right', but first let's look at the unintended consequences before we talk about how to become the leader who can reverse their effects.

The unintended consequences...

If the customer is always right, then the employee is always wrong. Imagine going to work and knowing you will always be wrong...Very demoralizing.

A dysfunctional relationship between buyers and sellers occurred during, 'The Customer Is Always Right' age. Buyers became much too entitled and salespeople focused on making a sale, not doing what's best for the buyer or making customers.

The focus on making new sales, not customers, caused buyers to feel that salespeople were more concerned about the transaction than they were about them or the outcome they wanted. Mistrust grew between buyers and salespeople. Both sides didn't trust the others intentions.

Salespeople, customer service and executives became afraid to tell buyers no, walk away or look for a better opportunity to do good business. Business is all about connecting with people who can help each other and it needs a healthy trust between buyers and sellers to grow and be profitable.

People were actually treated poorly. Employees were abused and buyers indulged to the point they became spoiled, non-compliant buyers who couldn't be satisfied, sold at a profit or become loyalty customers.

Employees began to not trust their own companies. The belief that the company really didn't care about them or the buyer grew. They started to feel that the company only cared about making a profit. Don't get me wrong, leaders need to make sure their company is profitable or they won't be around to care about people. However, if people are their company's greatest asset then they need to act like it.

The phrase 'Do what's best for the buyer' was, and in most cases still is, interpreted as, 'Do whatever they want' to get them to buy or go away if they are complaining.

We intended to improve customer service by pleasing the buyer.  Instead, spoiled consumers soon had no loyalty. This reduced their buying decision to the lowest price which usually didn't result in what was best for the them, creating more dissatisfaction. This became a vicious cycle and war broke out between buyers, sellers and companies.

We talked about customer satisfaction, spent millions on surveys and customer retention programs while our intention and focus to make new customers (sales), offended our existing customers.

None of this is part of a good business plan which created many unrealistic expectations that could not be met.

Business historians will surely look back and write about how foolish 'The Customer Is Always Right' age of business was and the mess we made of business relationships during this period. We chased short term gains and created long term disaster!

Now it is time for the 'People First Age of Business' and the good news is that the results can be the longest most sustainable economic boom in history.

To lead your business to a healthy, profitable and sustainable place your people will need to

be more important than your customers. That's right, 'Employee First Leadership' starts with your people, then you can create a 'Customer First Company'. When employees are happy, energized and challenged they are better prepared to make and keep customers by doing what's best for them, not just selling them, but truly serving them.

'Employee First Leaders' do what's best for the people who work for them, and then ask them to always do what's best for the buyer to make them a customer.

A 'Customer First Company' makes customers, not just sales. Doing what's best isn't always what the buyer wants but what's in their best interest. This holds true with your employees as well. What's best for them isn't always what they want but it's a leaders responsibility to serve people, not please people. Serve your people and ask them to serve others and make customers and your sales, revenue and profits will increase. In addition, you'll create long term sustainable growth.

I knew an uneducated man, a high school drop-out, who ended up owning a car wash.  He left for lunch one day and left his son in charge.  When he returned from lunch he found his son at the booth taking new customers money.  The line of cars to wash grew longer.  They seemed busy with lots of new customers and the son was happy.  The son felt good as he talked with the new customers waiting to get their cars washed and the line continued to grow. The father took the son aside and explained that it's easy to take people's money but the most important part of the business was to keep them coming back. He further explained that it only happens because of perfectly washed cars.

He made the point to his son to stay focused getting the cars washed and keeping the line moving. I said he was uneducated, I didn’t say he wasn’t smart.  The memory of this event comes to mind even when I am working with large corporations, industry leaders and multi-million dollar companies. 

He was explaining 'Employee First Leadership' without knowing it. It's always more important for a leader to spend their time with the people who make customers because customers come back and send other people to your business ready to become new customers. In addition, word of mouth spreads virally in the social age and allows 'Customer First Companies' to establish their brand and grow faster.

This is 'Employee First Leadership' and it works for all businesses and organizations. Make the people who serve your customers more important than new sales and your business will prosper and grow. 

By Mike Moore

Managing Your Enthusiasm

Moore Leadership Hall Of Fame

Click To See The Members

Moore Motivation...Why We Go To Work

Avoid Mediocrity By Overcoming Your Nature

How can you prepare to be at your best when your best is needed? To be cheerful, happy and prepared to handle the obstacles, adversity and hassles of a normal day? The answer to these questions will assure you of not being mediocre? Make no mistake, mediocrity creeps up on you when you aren't prepared. It happens to those who are to busy to learn, grow and improve. No one ever sets out to be mediocre, it just happens while they are seeking comfort and making excuses. There is a starting point if you want to avoid mediocrity...Peak performers all start by understanding and using the power of their intentions.

When you wake up in the morning you have an expectation or intention for your day. Your expectations and intentions are the first choice you make that begins to separate mediocrity from extraordinary. What are your intentions or expectations for the day ahead?  I've asked individuals and groups, large and small, this question over the past two decades and the overwhelming number one answer is, “I want to have a good day”.  When I ask people to define a good day, the definition is, “A day with little to no problems or hassles”.   When I ask them how many days a year this intention or expectation is met, they usually answer, “None”.  Yet, they wake up each day and repeat this behavior without changing their expectation or intention. The vast majority of people start each day with an unrealistic expectation or intention, that when not fulfilled, makes them frustrated, upset and unhappy. When we set expectations that aren't met, we are usually disappointed.

Managing your own intentions and expectations drives your daily emotions and state-of-mind. People who become mediocre focus on their circumstances and not their solutions. This makes their circumstances the driver of their emotions. This puts their emotions, or state-of-mind on a roller coaster ride of peaks and valleys that sabotages their ability to create the results or life they want. 

First, let’s look at why people set an intention or expectation of no problems, no hassles and no worries, and defined this as a good day.  When we wake up each day we have a choice to make, “Better or Comfortable”.  Our human nature seeks comfort before improvement and is satisfied to be comfortable. We don't want to be average but have to choose to do things we don't want to do if we want to be extraordinary. We don’t wake up each day driven to be better human beings or to make things in our life better.  So, the challenge is how to overcome our human nature and stop sabotaging our own lives. 

When we define a good day as no problems, no hassles and no adversity and then meet the first problem of the day, how do we react? If you said, “Frustrated” you'd be right.  Your expectation or intention has set you up to be frustrated. Not the best state-of–mind to handle life or work problems. This pattern of behavior begins a downward spiral of poor emotions. These emotions make you less capable of handling the next problem. Maintaining this emotional cycle may even make you avoid, withdraw or quit trying to overcome the obstacles in your day. The end result of this is mediocrity, at best.

How can you change your expectations or intentions to change your results? Remember, "Everyday the choices you make, make you".  When you start your day, change your expectation or intention by changing your definition of a good day.  Let’s revisit the idea or definition of a good day. If your choice is comfort you define it as “no problems”. Think about when you feel best about yourself. Your self-worth or self-esteem is best when you overcome adversity, solve problems and help others.  So to change your results, to develop the emotional state-of-mind to make a difference in your life, you need a new definition of a good day.

This new definition can help you make a better first choice as you wake up each day. Define a good day as one where you find, meet and overcome problems and adversity. Yes, you need to wake each day looking for problems.  Problems to solve that will help people.  Just a note...You shouldn't be looking to make problems...that won't make for a better life. You need to look for and find existing problems, and then help solve them.  If you are part of a problem, stop complaining and start finding solutions. This definition will help you to stop avoiding conflict and endure difficulties with the proper emotional state-of-mind.  Armed with this new definition, when you find problems, you will be eager to meet them head-on and won't become frustrated.  You'll become an overcomer and not a victim of your circumstances.

Adversity and problems are the obstacles that stand between where you are and the results or life you want.  The first step to overcoming adversity and problems is to develop an attitude or emotional state-of-mind that can overcome the obstacles. Our attitudes are most affected by our intentions and expectations that create our daily choices and allow us to choose to be better rather than comfortable. This thinking will even start to help you embrace change and stop fighting to hold on to a status quo that may be keeping you average as well. 

Redefine a good day, expect problems and hassles. Become an overcomer, a solution finder, and then you'll begin to experience a, 'Good Day'...everyday. This cycle of behavior will make your life is a journey of solutions that serve others and rewards you with the results and life you want.

A final thought for leaders...You are responsible to teach, prepare and help people set expectations that will allow them to live and work towards a better life. Helping people understand how their expectations and intentions are empowering them or sabotaging them is a good first step.

Change your expectations, to prepare for the hassles of life, to increase your happiness and improve your results. Expect more of yourself and less of others...These is one of the top traits of leaders, peak performers and the extraordinary.

By Mike Moore