Hope you enjoy this guest blog from the great Bob Dickman, co-author of The Elements of Persuasion.

Conflict through Common Ground
By Bob Dickman

What do you do when your boss asks you to lead a meeting filled with angry distrustful people and you feel like you’re going to be pushed out of a plane without your parachute?

Here's a story. When I was in Boston at a Pegasus Systems Thinking conference I met Maggie Herzig, of the Public Conversations Project. Maggie is a transformational leader, who, with her team, came up with a powerful strategy to dissolve prejudice and build bridges. She was asked to work with anti and pro abortionists with the goal of lowering the hostility and animosity in her community. She had them meet over lunch or dinner in small groups. The topic for discussion was “What keeps you up at night worrying about your kid’s future?” Participants didn't know who was pro- or anti-abortion. They weren’t allowed to mention anything to do with their positions on abortion. After six weeks of weekly meetings, they had found so much in common that they were now able to discuss the hot topic of abortion without demonizing each other. They still disagreed, but they didn't hate.

If pro- and anti-abortionists can discover their common humanity and learn to cooperate then there's hope for the rest of us. In tough situations, remember to stay grounded and look for the deeper human issues that connect all of us.

Here's some specific suggestions for dealing with that difficult meeting:

1.    Take three slow breaths and say to yourself “relax” each time you exhale. This will slow the release of adrenaline in your blood stream. Large release of adrenaline makes you want to fight or run away or both. And it stops the brain from thinking creatively

2.    Frame this as an opportunity rather than a suicide mission.  Re-framing will help you focus on positive outcomes for the entire team; rather than your fear of failure

3.    Seek common ground: It's an easy trap to focus on what separates people. Usually it's a set of ingrained beliefs and opinions. Dig deeper and find what human concerns are shared and can bring people together.

Bob Dickman is an executive coach and author,  who holds up a mirror to his clients who have the courage to look at themselves and improve their cutting edge.

1 comment // In Conflict Resolution

Meghna heads up the High Impact Teams consulting practice at Ferrazzi Greenlight with Keith. She is based in New York City. If you have questions or want to increase your team's impact, contact her at mmajmudar at ferrazzigreenlight dot com.

As a consultant, I’ve been discussing accountability with executives for a while. When it comes up, I join everyone in the room as we nod our heads and agree to its importance and the need for more.

But to come clean, I had a limited understanding of what accountability truly was and how to increase it until recently.

Accountability, in my new and expanded definition, is about taking enough ownership of a situation to get the results you want. It's about refusing to be a victim of circumstances.

The following three steps helped fine-tune my accountability at work and at home:

1. Identify the areas in your life where you're not getting the results you want – chances are, you're not taking enough accountability for the situation. That's good news, because it means you have the ability to create change.

2. Once you’ve identified these areas, list the steps you could take immediately to move one step closer to your goal. For example, most people agree it is difficult to find a new job in the current economic environment. Instead of being a victim to this situation, list the people who could advise you and who are likely to have inroads to opportunities, and send them an e-mail asking for coffee.

3. Take it slow! Accountability is messy stuff. If you’ve been passively acting the victim, realize that you're going to have a lot of work to do as you take more ownership in different areas of your life. Going back to the job example, don’t expect your upcoming coffee dates to produce immediate job opportunities – chances are, your mentors will give you all sorts of advice and suddenly you'll be deep in the work of updating your resume, improving your elevator pitch, and so on. Just take one bite at a time, and go at a speed that makes you comfortable.

It’s powerful stuff – I’d love to hear how you’ve taken more accountability in your life!

0 comments // In mindset

What’s the worst testimonial I ever got? The one I forgot to ask for!

Asking for testimonials – and getting great ones – makes a lot of people nervous, especially new business owners. And so they avoid it altogether. That’s a problem, because testimonials are one of the best ways to build trust in your brand, particularly online.

Here’s four tips so that you never miss an opportunity or get a vague, lukewarm testimonial again.

1.    Don’t be afraid to ask. All they can do is say no! No matter what, the more you ask, the more you’ll get. And if over time you have trouble finding people their name behind a positive experience of your brand, you may need to take a hard look at your product or service delivery.

2.    Build a personal relationship. Some clients may have built-in resistance to using their name in any kind of marketing context. But the more they care about you and your success, the more likely they will be to get over that initial inhibition – especially if you make it clear that their testimonial will truly make a difference. Be transparent about where you are with your business and ask for their support.

3.   Build feedback into your process. If you build regular requests for feedback into your process with clients, you’ll build confidence and build the relationship at the same time. Make asking for a testimonial at the end of an engagement a regularly scheduled practice, so that you won’t forget.

4.    Guide them. Even if your customer had a great experience, that doesn’t mean she or he knows how to communicate it to someone else. Help her out by giving her some sample quotes to work with – but make very clear that you want her to be honest. You might say something like, “I know you’re busy, so to make it easy, I’d be glad to give you some sample testimonials – the stuff I dream of my clients saying. Then you can adapt it as you see fit. Please be absolutely candid.”

5.    Know your value props. If you’re shaky about how to craft those brilliant sample testimonials, make a list of the key value props of your product. You want testimonials to speak to concrete, compelling results fulfilling each of those value props.

Go ahead – ask someone for a testimonial today!

And tell me: What's the best testimonial you ever got and why?

20 comments // In Entrepreneurship

My thought for the week: If you want to be relentlessly creative, stay in motion. I mean that literally, as in, get active, get outside, move around the world at a few different speeds and in many different places. And I mean it figuratively: milk every opportunity for growth that comes your way - especially the fun ones.

Now, this week's links:

• The Social Side of Innovation: Jeff Lindsay, author of Conquering Innovation Fatigue, uses Never Eat Alone to talk about how companies can feed innovation.
• How to Talk to Your Boss: Read Meghna's post this week on how to have difficult conversations with your boss. You have the power to improve your job, and your relationship. And while I'm linking our own blog, also check out Build Rapport Quickly with Mirroring. It was Keith's tip this week, but due to my goof it went out at 6:30 p.m. instead of a.m. so you might have missed it.
• 150+ Friends?: How many people can you maintain stable social relationships with - and can social media help you increase that number? Thanks to FGer/guest blogger @alisonbzz for the link.

Now, quick survey for the comments: How many Facebook friends do you have,  and roughly what percentage have you met in person?

0 comments // In Site News and Happenings

Here’s one of the missions from my forthcoming online Relationship Masters Academy:

Build rapport quickly with mirroring.

People like people who are like them – it's built-in to the most primitive parts of our brain. Here’s how to get past this reptilian tic: mirroring, observing your conversational partner’s body language, tone, and level, and mirroring it with your own behavior.

It works: In one Dutch study, an interviewer talked to participants and then dropped a bunch of pens. The participants who had been mirrored were 2-3 times more likely to help the interviewer pick up the pens! Mirroring increased their good will and their “pro-social orientation in general.” You could use that, right?

Your mission: Try mirroring today. As you speak with a colleague, friend, or stranger:

•  Watch their movements. Wait 10 seconds, and then shift your body to match theirs.
•  Use the same hand gestures they use, but only when it’s your turn to talk.
•  Match their facial expressions instantly. If they raise their eyebrows, raise yours.
•  When they nod their head, nod yours instantly to signal agreement or affirmation.

Whether you want to drop pens after you try this out is up to you.

11 comments // In Communication

Meghna heads up the High Impact Teams consulting practice at Ferrazzi Greenlight with Keith. She is based in New York City. If you have questions or want to increase your team's impact, contact her at mmajmudar at ferrazzigreenlight dot com.

Bosses are human. Sometimes they need help to give us what we need to be good employees. That means you've got to be prepared to ask for that help. Here's 4 ways to get prepped to have that difficult talk with your boss, get what you want, and strengthen your relationship.

1. Move past frustration and separate personal gripes from real workplace issues. Focus on getting what you need to do your job better. Try to approach the issue from a positive place - "I want to have a talk with you about improving my performance. I feel like we've fallen into some patterns that are limiting my ability to be effective and I want to get back on track."

2. Prepare yourself with 2-3 things specific requests of changes you need to be happier and more productive. If your requests are well-reasoned and not emotionally charged, it'll be easy to discuss the items and feedback, working from a collaborative space.

3. Find a way to end the call on a high note. If the call has gone well, or there's something your boss does well in general, tell him or her! People tend to forget that even bosses need encouragement.

How do you prepare yourself for those difficult conversations?

4 comments // In Communication

Pinging - a quick check in via email or text - is an invaluable tool to keep yourself on the radar of the people who you care about. Sometimes pinging needs to be one-on-one to build the relationship. Other times you can SCALE your outreach, sending a message to multiple contacts.

Group pings are a recommended practice, provided that you don’t make the NUMBER ONE MISTAKE IN PINGING: Lack of transparency! Don’t try to mask a group email as a one-on-one communication. Always be completely clear who’s receiving your message. That doesn't mean you should cc everyone; always be careful to keep other’s emails private by using bcc, with your own email in the "To" line. Just make the fact that you're writing to a group clear in your writing.

A couple more rules to make sure that your scaled pings are building the relationship, not damaging it:

•    Make sure the message is of interest to everyone who gets it
•    Balance this less personal outreach with a level of one on one contact appropriate to the relationship

BTW, pinging is covered in an entire course in my Relationship Masters Academy, launching soon.

Have you ever accidentally made a pinging faux pas? - or been on the receiving end of one?

2 comments // In Relationship Development Skills

The FG NY office's snowy window.

Greetings from snowy NYC. Keith's in town! He's here for an engagement at the NY Stock Exchange, and to spend time with the online Relationship Masters Academy crew. So many of you have signed up information on joining the charter class - thank you! Very inspiring and exciting for us. We'll be communicating with you about it soon.

This week in links:

• Don't deal with a job transition alone! From The NY Times, a wonderfully honest story about the importance of turning to trusting advisors when you've got big decisions to make. The author writes, "Everyone who’s laid off should find someone they trust and sit down and talk. You can’t think things through by yourself, especially when you have a family. You have too much going on mentally. You need someone who cares enough to listen, but is not in the thick of it the way you are."
• For Email Marketers: A creative, relationship-centric approach to getting people to rethink unsubscribing.
• Touch me! I've got to hit one more from the Times (when in Rome...): Students who received a supportive touch on the back or arm from a teacher were nearly twice as likely to volunteer in class as those who did not, according to one of the studies in this article on the power of touch.
• Technology works! I'm always amazed by technophobes who worry about technology isolating us. So I enjoyed relationship-savvy salesman-entrepreneur Andy Ellwood's story, on his personal blog, about using an iPhone app to bridge a language barrier.
• From the Lighter Side: An over-privileged business school student gets taken down.

1 comment // In Relationship Trends and Research

History remembers Thomas Edison as a lone genius. Wrong! He created his most famous invention with a team of 30.

Machines systematize; people innovate. And so it’s no surprise that relationships are a major factor in producing those innovative ideas that lead to better, faster, more elegant solutions. Remember, Thomas Edison didn't invent the lightbulb alone - he was part of a team of 30!

Why does innovation so often boil down to relationships? Here are a few reasons:

1.    Greater Risk Taking: Trusting, caring relationships help people feel comfortable taking risks. Without those relationships, people don’t open their mouths to voice potentially good ideas because they’re afraid of looking stupid.

2.    Creative Collision: When candid exchanges between people collide, the fusion generates entirely new insights, new ideas, and new approaches that might never have been considered independently. But people need to feel comfortable “colliding” with colleagues. That requires a deep base of trust and mutual respect.

3.    Less Rigid Hierarchy: Strong relationships help communication flow beyond traditional hierarchies. A boss who truly cares about and respects his employee is more likely to listen to new ideas, not reject them out of hand.

So leaders: Give employees time, space and structure to build deeper relationships! Individuals, make it your responsibility to make your work relationships deep. Don't wait for the company cocktail hour!

According to Tom Rath’s Vital Friends - great book by the way, I cited it in Who's Got Your Back - only 18 percent of people work for organizations that provide opportunities for social bonding in the workplace. And many of the companies who do provide those “opportunities” don’t structure them in a way that really serves the goal of deeper, stronger relationships. Throwing people in a room with chips and booze does not make for a productive event!

If I could wave a wand and change just one thing this year in the landscape of American business, that would be it. The results could be incredible.

3 comments // In Team Building

Meghna heads up the High Impact Teams consulting practice at Ferrazzi Greenlight with Keith. She is based in New York City. If you have questions or want to increase your team's impact, contact her at mmajmudar at ferrazzigreenlight dot com.

In the past week, I’ve asked a couple of close friends for a very difficult piece of feedback: Why am I having such a hard time meeting someone special? What could I be doing differently?

I wanted the truth - and boy did they give it to me!

And it stung. However, about 3 seconds after hearing the feedback, the sting wore off and I knew what I had to do differently. It would have been hard to swallow the feedback if ... well, if it wasn’t so right. I implemented some changes immediately and saw results.

I've asked for this kind of feedback before, but this is the first time I got real feedback, not feel-good cliches. What did I do differently?

1. I sought feedback without pre-judging the answer: Some of the feedback I had heard before, but this time I didn’t try to deny it. I just accepted it as objectively true, though my experience may have felt different. When we coach our clients on listening to difficult feedback, we tell them that the only correct answer is thank you and then you decide whether to act on what was said

2. I created an environment where candid feedback could be shared: I asked the question with an action-oriented mindset. I let it be known that I was going to move on their advice quickly, and I would not breakdown - so they felt comfortable giving me the real deal.

3. I chose people who are as committed to my success as I am: These were friends who want the same thing for me as I do – they won’t let me fail and I know they totally have my back! So I felt safe to really hear their advice, and act.

Have you recently received good feedback, acted on it, and got results?

6 comments // In Coaching