Are you an engaging leader or is control more your style? While a strong leader uses both styles, the engagement approach normally generates the best results.

When it comes to leadership styles, the Control Model is the most common. The Control Model places the focus on the leader’s needs as opposed to focusing on participant needs.

The challenge with the control model is that it mirrors the traditional classroom lecture situation. Adults, and especially Gen Y’s, dislike lectures where they they’re expected to listen and defer to an expert’s superior wisdom. The shift from control to engagement is important because it lays the foundation for creating trust.

To illustrate this point, imagine that you are leading a meeting where you must announce a fee or dues increase. You know that there will be serious resistance.  What would you do to best handle the situation?

The person who uses the control model will take the position: “Just live with it. It’s raise the fees or close the doors.” This often creates resentment because most people want to have a say in this type of decision, even if they can’t change the decision.

In contrast, the engagement model allows the leader to surface concerns and alternative solutions.

“We had to make a difficult decision between making major cuts in our services or raising our fees by 10 percent. We are going with the ten percent fee increase. What are some ways that we could trim expenses or increase revenues so that we can avoid future fee increases?”

When participants engage in the process, they own it. Best of all, this approach may surface new ways to improve your organization’s effectiveness while reducing costs as well.

Need more tips on how to lead effective meetings? Visit www.LeadGreatMeetings.com for more ideas on how to improve your leadership skills.

The thought of a real estate agent or broker investing in powerful marketing and not reaping the maximum benefit is disturbing. But most of us tend to get quite excited about things that show great promise. We initiate programs and nurture them to a certain degree, then, besides the few who follow through to amazing success, somewhere along the way we drop the ball.

For the typical agent this could mean a stale website, an outdated listing or two, a dead blog or an email campaign still in draft mode after two or three months of painful contemplation and work. Together these shortfalls undermine the desired outcome and in cases compound into a sense of despair or failure. Not good for business, as what we seek is positive momentum.

How we go about setting our goals can have a huge impact on our results. To those who actually take the time to set specific goals for their marketing, hats off. Goal setting is paramount to success, because it sets our mind on a specific course and subconsciously guides our activities, decisions and focus.

You’ve heard this one before: To set sail with no target leads to the land of nowhere.

Step number one. Set clear goals for your marketing — whether it’s number of buyer leads you want to generate, number of future potential clients you want to add to your contact database, number of listings you want to secure, the frequency at which you want to blog or update your site, your advertising plan, and so on.

Here is the clincher. We often set goals and put them away. Away from sight, these goals get more vague by the day. Before long, other ‘priorities’ find their way into our busy days and eventually take over. The noble effort has been short changed.

Step number two. Keep those goals visible.

And here is the ultimate tip to success in goal setting. Put your laptop, iPad or tablet away, and get that old fashioned pen or pencil out.

The deeper we internalize our goals, the stronger they get engrained into our subconscious mind and being. To achieve this level of deep engagement with our goals, the goal setting exercise needs to be as immersive as possible. A process that would engage as much of our body and mind as possible.

Typing goals on a computer keyboard engages or requires only eight physical movements, hardly the engagement needed to firmly cement ideas and goals into our mind. Writing the same goals by hand however (yes, the old fashioned way), requires ten thousand movements. Yes, you read it right. Ten thousand versus only eight. This makes hand writing the only way you’d want to go about taking down goals and important notes.

The difference is significantly deeper engagement and assimilation of the goals into our subconscious mind. With that, we benefit from much stronger understanding and adoption on where we are headed, and much more vivid and conscious awareness of where we need to spend our time and efforts. Needless to say, chances of success when engagement is this deep increases exponentially, because focus is at a completely different level.

In practical terms, for example, does your website today reflect the vision you had for it a year ago or when you first launched it? Have you executed the marketing campaigns you planned on and started to consistently attend the community networking functions you decided on? Evaluate these and other opportunities then set some new rules and goals. Using pen and paper of course. You just might surprise yourself.

“I am at the airport.” “I am eating a burger, and I’m wearing a red shirt.” “I’m here, there, seeing this or that, and planning a trip to Hawaii.”

If you’ve ventured into Twitter world, you’ve surely come across meaningless tweets. Who cares about what you do minute to minute? Unless of course you’re Kim Kardashian or George Clooney and have a ton of followers who care less about the quality of what you tweet and just want to be in on – I don’t really know what.

On the other hand, as a business communication tool, Twitter can be extremely useful and powerful.

Twitter has gained tremendous acceptance and adoption, possibly because it is also easy to put to work. In its own right, it is a far more effective tool than many other media for the dissemination and collection of information. Because people are increasingly on Twitter, it is becoming a force to reckon with and should be seriously considered as part of your communications arsenal.

To put things in perspective, as at August 09, 2011, 100 million users were reported active and logged in daily to Twitter, with many doing so on mobile devices. The mobile use of Twitter is increasing by 40 percent each quarter, and 400 million unique visitors pop into Twitter each month. That’s up 60 percent from just the start of the year.

Question is, how do you best use Twitter in your business? Today, public relations and marketing are some of the most obvious opportunities. Even within this realm, the room to deploy the tool more widely is huge.

Perhaps the most important takeaway from this article is that Twitter should have a far more substantial role in any business. While it’s virtually certain that no one can yet claim absolute expertise in the application of Twitter in business, there are a lot of opportunities to consider, if we go beyond the obvious and ask the right questions. In fact, Twitter has it’s own fantastic resource for businesses, which can be found at: business.twitter.com

Let’s take marketing for example. Depending on how your business is structured, a few sides of marketing could include publicity, product promotion, member / client communication, market research, product research, competitive intelligence, and customer care. While it is straight forward to think of Twitter when considering external announcements, such as to promote a new member benefit (if you are an association), an event, a technology roll out or announce a new listing, it is only by looking at the business from a holistic fashion that we can discover new areas where Twitter can help. If you are in a highly competitive business and need to monitor the competition, Twitter can help to more easily track competitors’ moves. It’s not only smart business, but a significantly more efficient way to go about it. New information comes right to you. You can also forward any new findings of substance to your teams, by email, with a couple of clicks. To see a great example of an organization putting Twitter into action, check out the account of the California Association of REALTORS® (CAR).

Customer care and product / service improvement is another area that may not be a very obvious candidate at the outset. Create a track to follow your customers. You’d be surprised at the feedback you can gather. Information that can reinforce and highlight the right areas for improvement, or unveil serious issues with ample time for you to initiate corrective action. It also allows you to gather data for presentation to your management, which helps to back up your recommendations with actual market feedback. You can also tap Twitter to deliver useful information to your customers, to make their experience more meaningful and satisfactory. Tip-of-the-day anyone?

A good approach is to examine business pains and objectives from a macro point of view. Don’t limit yourself to parts of the business that come to mind first. Have you considered human resources (HR) for example? It’s another important part of business that can have its own Twitter account to help with things like recruiting, tracking local events and announcements, and disseminate useful messages and re-tweets to staff. How about using Twitter to enhance your positioning and finding out who you’re really up against? Try tweeting “What name and traits first come to mind when you think of hiring a Realtor in ‘neighborhood name’?”

If you are a real estate agent, Twitter is surely one of the tools you want to be able to publish information through, directly from your website. Let’s call it more free, easy advertising, at the very least.

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Public speaking ranks at the highest levels of all things feared by humans, period. Whether presenting on stage to a thousand people, at the office to your team or management, or offering your services to a prospective client, certain success denominators if mastered can make a big difference in your results.

This subject is deep and far reaching. My aim from this article series is to impart some of the more fundamentally important tips that you as a real estate professional can start to apply right away and that can make a significant difference in your performance.

One BIG ‘Don’t’ that, in my personal opinion, warrants we open the series with are ‘Non Words,’ also known as ‘Fillers.’ Non Words fall into what is technically described as Speech Disfluencies.

From Wikipedia: “Speech disfluencies are any of various breaks, irregularities, or non-lexical vocables that occur within the flow of otherwise fluent speech. These include false starts, i.e. words and sentences that are cut off mid-utterance, phrases that are restarted or repeated and repeated syllables, fillers i.e. grunts or non-lexical utterances such as “uh”, “erm” and “well”, and repaired utterances, i.e. instances of speakers correcting their own slips of the tongue or mispronunciations (before anyone else gets a chance to).”

Did you know that a whopping 20 percent of the words many people use in a sentence are Non Words and Fillers? That is shocking.

You have great tools at your disposal. For example, you click a button or two in Point2 Agent and out comes a gorgeous listing presentation and you rush out the door for your new client meeting. You now look phenomenal on paper. But how much would some more power and confidence in your speech and personal presentation skills go to get you the deal? How about your impact in a video recording for posting on YouTube or your blog? Wouldn’t you want to come across as more professional and assertive.

Many of us may have picked up the ‘Filler’ habit as kids at school, or at the office from some rising hot shot, thinking that must be one of the reflections of success. You’ve surely heard kids – and adult professionals – spray around words and Non Words like ‘um’ ‘uh’ ‘like’ ‘oh my God’ ‘sooooo’ or ‘you know’, like there was no tomorrow.

How about those who can tag several fillers to each other, literally saying an entire short sentence without communicating anything. Try this for size: ‘let’s seeeeee, uuuuuh, now, wait a minute, ehhhh, yes, it’s like …

The bottom line is that if someone pitched their services to you and packed one or two eh’s and um’s in between every few real words, they have an obstacle they just don’t know about. As a buyer, your perception is affected. With that, while not the only parameter in your consideration, your decision.

Fillers are distracting. They diminish your impact and show hesitancy and uncertainty. They annoy listeners and directly affect their perception of you and their decision about your services or products.

Remember this. Fillers are Killers. They hit your credibility and potential right in the heart no matter your domain and level of expertise, or your message. As delivery and presentation makes up around 90 percent of a presenter’s impact on an audience, Non Words simply do not belong. As an exercise, try to listen to your own voice in your next conversation. How many unnecessary words can you count?

For those who may think fillers give them the right to the next speaking spot (uuuuuhhh don’t interrupt me I’m not done speaking yet), think again. Especially on the phone, your listener might also think you keep getting distracted by other things like people, text messages or email. Tells them they are not the most important thing on your mind right now. Not very professional.

One of the keys to getting rid of Fillers is focus. Focus on your audience and your message. Use pauses between sentences to catch your next thought (or for effect). The silence, which may seem to last a lifetime when you’re on stage, or when trying to rush an idea past someone, seems only that long to you. To your audience, the pause emphasizes the importance of the message. It gives them time to assimilate the point and take better notes, and you come across as more confident, more assertive and more knowledgeable.

1) Management is a TEAM effort. It’s not all about the manager at center stage, merely assigning the blame and accepting the credit. A good manager knows this, and a good manager uses this knowledge to ensure that they have the best possible team behind them. If a member of the team isn’t up to par, a good manager either re-assigns the employee, or has to contend with letting them go. There is not much room for sympathy in the world of business—a good manager needs to be able to make the tough calls and get the wrong people off the team before it affects overall performance. While it is always hard to make such decisions, someone who doesn’t take their job seriously or simply is not able to perform can put strain on other members of the team, often bringing down the morale or turn away the rest of the team.

2) As a manager, you MUST lead by example. Just because you are now a “manager” doesn’t usually mean you stop doing your old job. More than likely you still have most of the responsibilities of your old job, with a few added responsibilities (and benefits). If you asked your employees to run through the mud, would they? Without a proper leader, they probably wouldn’t (unless this is part of their normal job description). However, if you, their manager, directed them to follow you through the mud, most would follow without question. You took the lead by not only assigning directives, but you also led the team through the task. This can work the opposite way as well. If you, as the manager, leave the office at 2:00 PM every day, would you expect your employees to continue working until 5:00 PM at full speed? You shouldn’t expect your team to work any harder than you do. If you demonstrate commitment and work hard and long, so will they.

3) It is YOUR job to make sure your team has the proper tools and resources. If your team doesn’t have what they need to accomplish a task, it won’t be done the right way in the right time frame. What’s worse is that the extra work required to complete the task with imperfect tools will not only waste the time and energy of your team, it will also de-motivate them. If you were handed a shovel and asked to sweep a driveway, you could probably figure out how to get the driveway swept, but it would probably take hours longer than it had to. Meanwhile, with the proper broom, you could have started your task without having to question anything, and you’d likely complete the task in a small fraction of the time it would have taken you using the shovel. Ideally you want tasks completed, as perfectly as possible, in the shortest amount of time possible—so invest in the right tools. It pays off in spades.

These simple rules can help everyone become a better manager—even if you only manage yourself .

If you’re asking yourself this question, you’re not alone. In fact, you would be pleased to know that some ‘professional’ marketers often don’t know what it really means.

A Unique Value Proposition is your market edge. It’s a sentence or paragraph that captures and describes the unique benefit your solution offers to a target audience and that ideally addresses a pain point or opportunity they face.

A proposition that includes a competitive bite stands to be more successful in the marketplace than one that does not. Meaning, a solution that delivers something better than other solutions (and you need to be able to prove that), is more powerful than one that does not benchmark against anything. While we’re on this aspect of a value proposition, the benchmark you compare against in your communication may even be your own ‘older’ solution that is now being replaced, if yours is the leading solution in the market or, if you cannot actually compete with others’ solutions.

Let’s also not confuse a Unique Value Proposition with a selling proposition or, selling line. We’ll make that a separate discussion in the future.

You might want to start thinking about your value proposition and write it down. That will be the first step towards more powerful communication as you focus your pitch around this promise. Don’t give up on the exercise if you find that once you start writing things down, that the process does not work out as easily as you hoped. Over time, the idea will crystallize and a strong, effective Unique Value Proposition will emerge.

Do yourself a favour though. Don’t try to pin a proposition without consulting with those who know it best – your current and former customers. This is the most important part of the process. In talking to a few of them specifically about this exercise, you should quickly realize there is a common theme that keeps emerging, and it will likely be very different than what you thought it would be. That’s what you should go for and build on. It’s what makes you or your service unique and with that, no one will be able to easily claim the same promise. For one, they’ll be looked at as a ‘me too’ pretty quickly and lose their credibility while you build brand equity around your promise.

The last point to take note of here is to maintain your message consistently once you’ve established your value proposition, and resist the urge to change it whenever you alter your marketing. Focus on it in the long run, and re-evaluate it as you go to ensure it remains competitive. It’s the repetition of the same message that will make you stand for something unique in your market. It will take time and effort. At some point, no one will be able to touch you on that particular promise, but only if you maintain your competitiveness in that specific area.