THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MANAGING YOUR PROFESSIONAL SCHEDULE
As a real estate professional you have an important task of keeping your clients satisfied. One of the key factors in keeping your clients satisfied requires you to be available to your client when they are available. After all, they've chosen you to work for them. (I know, I should be nicknamed "Captain Obvious"!) However, there is a fine line that can be crossed, and that's the line between your personal and professional life. When that line is crossed, it can eventually cause small sparks that lead to a fire in the relationship between you and your clients down the road.
It's important to clarify your professional schedule with your clients, immediately. Let them know exactly when you are available for receiving and returning phone calls, emails, text messages and appointments. Breaking your own rules can lead to the following:
1. If you communicate with a client outside of the schedule you initially gave them (or didn't give them for that matter), they may expect you to be available at all times. People become comfortable with routines. If even once you communicate business with a client outside of your set schedule, it can set the expectation that it's acceptable for them to continue that and builds a routine for them. When routines are broken, people often become frustrated and discouraged.
2. If clients make a special request for time outside of your set schedule, clarify with them that although you normally don't make appointments during that time, you would be happy to do so in this particular circumstance. Although it may sound a bit harsh at first, if you word it the right way, your clients will respect your time and know that you are going above and beyond your duties.
3. Giving clients "optional times" to meet, similar to as a Dr's office would do, gives them the feeling you are busy; aka successful. This can be a struggle to manage. If your schedule is perceived to be TOO full, they may think you aren't giving them enough attention and you are spreading yourself too thin among other clients.
3. Telling clients your schedule is "wide-open", gives them the perception you may be desperate, have no other clients to deal with and you are at their beck and call. Maybe your schedule isn't so full right now, but remember, you need to make yourself time to do some prospecting and listing presentations as well! Imagine if you were to drive past two restaurants every day; although never have been to either. Every day Restaurant A is packed with cars; whereas Restaurant B never has more than 2 cars in the parking lot. You feel like stopping for a nice meal on your way home from work one day. Are you going to choose Restaurant A or Restaurant B? Restaurant A; you might have to wait a while, but obviously people like it a lot more than Restaurant B! This also goes back to rule #2. It may cause clients to expect you to return their correspondence much faster, since you obviously have nothing else to do.
4. Feel free to tell your clients you may be checking emails while on vacation, but also tell them you may not get back to them until you return. As your clients are your business, you do have to work at a time that fits for them, but that doesn't mean ALL the time. It can burn you out and give you a negative perception on your job, ultimately driving your will to work into the ground. After all, that's why you're on vacation! You know those "Out of the Office Notifications", they work a charm :) Be sure to tell your clients ahead of time you will not be available, but you have found a person to fill your shoes while you are out.
5. Don't pack your schedule so full that you don't have a minute to spare. Let's face it, things happen and get in the way or take longer than expected. Give yourself some time between appointments. It's better to have a few extra minutes in a day than show up a half hour late to an appointment! Make yourself block off a couple of hours here and there that you DON'T make public to your clients but that you still consider work hours. It gives you time to catch up if you have gotten a bit behind in paperwork; the fun stuff that can sometimes lead into all hours of the night. If you have an unexpected client emergency, this is a great time to help them out without interrupting something else.
Everyone has a personal life. Keeping it real with your clients can only lead to gaining their respect for you managing such a demanding, yet efficient schedule.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MANAGING FOR INNOVATION
There are many reasons why new knowledge and innovation techniques fail to take hold in organizations.
Similarly, a continued failure to employ psychological techniques to implementation will create a continued cynicism about new implementations and reinforce feelings of initiative fatigue.
Truth in jest
Jokes can contain deep insights into organizational reality. There are two old jokes about consultants that offer deep insights into the hidden psychology of managing knowledge for innovation.
The first joke is in the form of a question: How many consultants does it take to change a lightbulb? The answer is that the number of consultants is irrelevant - the key point is that the light-bulb must itself want to change!
The second joke is about the nature of consulting in organizations. It's often said that consultants are paid to look at your watch and tell you the time. This apparently cynical truism hides something much more profound: that the questions the consultant uses to gather data within organizations, with which they are to make recommendations about the future, actually trigger a thought-process that generates "emergent knowledge" (see sidebox, below) within individuals, so that the content of the consultant's report becomes recognizable and understandable to their customers by the time it arrives, which explains its apparent lack of novelty.
Similarly, our knowledge will lose its freshness or novelty, become over-ripe or obsolete, and will need replacement by something apparently fresher. It's better for us to control customer expectations by managing the decay of value and the timing of novelty than to be surprised.
Put simply this means that if we want to gain the maximum return on investment in the form of knowledge needed to drive innovation, we have to create a hunger in our customers for a new type of knowledge and deliver it to them at the right time and in the right form so that it's easily recognizable as the answer.
Timing and recognition are key and we must understand:
* our evolving context in a dynamic environment;
* the reality of that situation;
* where we are in terms of our ability to innovate and the productivity of the knowledge upon which that ability is based; and
* the possibility that as our context changes we may have to redefine our purpose.
Not invented here (NIH)
While we talk about the social phenomenon of not invented here syndrome(NIH) in groups and organizations, it's often with an air of despair, as if we were discussing the rain: a natural phenomenon that we just have to accept and work through. In my days as remedial TQM consultant I was often sent into organizations after the first two implementations of a system had failed and was tasked with making it work. In these situations the system in question was usually and officially claimed to be a success but actually nothing was happening. It became clear that NIH was always the key issue that was ignored.
Similarly, when implementing lean production techniques in automotive and aerospace plants, there was a reappearance of the traditional 70 percent failure rate in implementation, and the tendency for the new knowledge to stick only on the third implementation. Why?
Variations of NIH behaviors
There are several distinct problems involved with trying to work with highly-educated technical experts in knowledge-intense situations and these are often categorized as NIH behaviors. The following describes four forms of NIH and methods for overcoming using psychological techniques.
NIH-1
When experts will not Mow a problem to be expressed in a language or form that is outside the language of their particular expertise or experience.
NIH-I leads to the intellectual catch 22 of audience alienation through the language of the solution. This is because the language of the solution or the name given to the technique quite literally comes from "another place." It's alien by virtue of the fact that in order for the solution to exist, the problem that it was connected with had to be acknowledged and understood, and a solution developed from that particular context.
It's this "otherness" around the language of the solution that means that a solution from another context or business sector can take up to three implementations before it sticks. Hence the difficulty of transferring good or what appears to be "best practice" from one organization into another even when it's an obvious life-saver.
There are at least three approaches to consider:
1. a fast "invented-here" partial solution;
2. the linguistic torpedo; and
3. solution value deconstruction.
Solutions
1. Invented here: A fast "invented here" partial solution that often works is to facilitate a team from a recipient organization into building a prototype solution to the problem, and only afterwards exposing them to the generic solution that you already had in your back pocket. It does seem as though experts cannot visualize, recognize or understand a solution until they've gone through the pain of trying to invent it for themselves. The technique of a master at this point is never to talk about KM (unless invited to do so), and to deliberately fail to give your generic solution a name, so that they can name it for themselves and thus own it and act as ambassadors when they begin to spread it around the organization.
2. The linguistic, torpedo: If you have the time and the patience, the second approach, the "linguistic torpedo," can be applied. This involves packaging the solution by giving it a snappy name that embodies its purpose, then deliberately positioning the solution at three key meetings. At each meeting, you must mention the name you have given the solution at least three times and briefly explain it once. The reason for this iteration is that people come to key meetings to present and not to listen. You must be prepared, like the submariner, to wait for the explosion and echo to come back to you in the form of a request to deliver or explain the packaged knowledge or technique. This process can take between a year and 18 months in a global corporation
3. Solution value deconstruction: This third approach involves deconstructing your solution in terms of the forms of value that it enables and constructing a diagnostic where you invite your audience to weight and score an unspecified solution in terms of a list of value criteria. By offering a baseline weighted score threshold, you arouse their interest (forcing them to focus on the potential value of the unspecified solution) and invite their participation at an introductory event that will satisfy the interest that you have aroused.
Knowing when to use structured conversation
Trying to work across technical boundaries involves leaders in attempting to work in the midst of a linguistic war between specialists. In the absence of a shared, overarching meta-language for framing problems, the leader needs to consider creating a shared space in which this linguistic conflict can be overcome. This is where applying techniques that support structured conversations to bring emergent knowledge out into the open - for example, moving from the K (know) in KUBD to the B (believe) and hence closer to the D (do) in the KUBD continuum - can be a big help.
RESEARCH AND STUDY METHODS
OBSERVATION
Observation is either an activity of a living being (such as a human), consisting of receiving knowledge of the outside world through the senses, or the recording of data using scientific instruments. The term may also refer to any datum collected during this activity.
The scientific method
The scientific method requires observations of nature to formulate and test hypotheses. It consists of these steps:
1. Asking a question about a natural phenomenon
2. Making observations of the phenomenon
3. Hypothesizing an explanation for the phenomenon
4. Predicting a logical consequence of the hypothesis
5. Testing the prediction in a controlled experiment, a natural experiment, an observational study, or a field experiment
6. Creating a conclusion with data gathered in the experiment
"Observer" personality trait
People with "Observer" personalities are motivated by the desire to understand the facts about the world around them. Believing they are only worth what they contribute, Observers have learned to withdraw themselves, to watch with keen eyes, and to speak only when they think they can shake the world with their observations. Sometimes they do just that. However, some Observers are known to withdraw completely from the world, becoming reclusive hermits and fending off social contacts with abrasive cynicism. Observers generally fear incompetency and uselessness; they want to be capable and knowledgeable above all else.
Observational learning
Observational learning (also known as: vicarious learning or social learning or modeling or monkey see, monkey do) is learning that occurs as a function of observing, retaining and, in the case of imitation learning, replicating novel behavior executed by others. It is most associated with the work of psychologist Albert Bandura, who implemented some of the seminal studies in the area and initiated social learning theory. It involves the process of learning to copy or model the action of another through observing another doing it. Further research has been used to show a connection between observational learning and both classical and operant conditioning. [1]