The 8 Kinds of Smart–A Different Kind of Training

How Multiple Intelligence is Changing the World of Business

2009-03-12T14:26:00.000-07:00

There are at least four areas where multiple intelligences impacts us a small or home business owners. [NOTE: If you need more information on Multiple Intelligences or The 8 Kinds of Smart please check my website.]

1. Developing Your Business Team or Business Partners

Multiple intelligence gives you a whole new way to maximize the full potential of each of your business partners or each member of your team. You should not only encourage each team member to excel in his or her stronger intelligence areas, but also provide ways to help people develop areas that are not as strong, thus creating a more well-rounded team.

What can this mean for you as a home business or small business owner?

• When you learn to look at people through the lens of The 8 Kinds of Smart, you'll discover numerous skills, abilities, gifts, and talents which have likely never been brought to bear on your business. Learning to access these capacities on a regular and ongoing basis profoundly impacts your retention rate and your team's motivation.

• You’ll learn how to activate each of the intelligences in yourself, your team and business partners. People need to have a wide range of techniques, strategies, and methods to call on when faced with problems or new challenges which arise in their business. Teaching them how to use all of their intelligences gives you a more creative, personally invested, and responsible organization.

2. Business Problem-solving and planning

Using the multiple intelligences in business planning guarantees that you access the full creativity and gifts of all involved in the planning process. Often planning does not get beyond a simple rehashing and reshaping of past ideas and solutions–ideas and solutions which have been less than effective.

What can this mean for you as a home business or small business owner?

• You’ll gain an understanding the dynamics of creativity and how to tap them in planning sessions or problem-solving. Research has discovered that creativity is a learned process. Knowing how to nurture and develop the creative prowess in your team gets better answers to problems, a wider range of ways to meet challenges, and a clearer vision of your goals–and you get the “buy in” of everyone involved.

• You’ll learn how to promote the best thinking of all involved in the planning process. When you understand the wide range of critical and creative thinking skills available in the different intelligence areas, you suddenly have many more ways to think about any problem you’re trying to solve. You need to train your team and business partners to be better thinkers..

3. Training, Coaching, and Mentoring

Effective training, coaching, and mentoring must balance knowledge acquisition with hands-on application of the knowledge. Often a training, coaching, or mentoring session fails to reach all learners or participants primarily due to the "mono-modal" style of the presentation.

What can this mean for you as a home business or small business owner?

• You’ll know how to plan “multi-modal” presentations which access the full learning potentials of the participants. Presenting information in just one way will not reach everyone. When you use a wide range of teaching and learning strategies, methods, and techniques, everyone gets it!

• You’ll be able to help your team and business partners transfer the learning from the training, coaching, or mentoring session to their daily work in their business. In most cases transfer of the learning does not happen automatically. It takes variety of techniques to help people apply the information from the training session on the job.

• You’ll gain skill in dealing effectively with the adult learner. Research has documented that the adult learner has distinct needs which must be addressed in a formal training situation. You must make sure you are addressing the hierarchy of basic human needs, and know how to handle the difficult participant, answer questions, and understand the dynamics of a group.

4. Team and Business Partners Skill Development

Multiple intelligence gives you an opportunity to understand the various “intelligence profiles” of your team. An intelligence profile gives a picture of the unique intellectual capacities of each person, including areas that are more developed and areas that and less developed.

What can this mean for you as a home business or small business owner?

• You’ll understand the full potential of each person on your team. Once you understand a person’s intelligence profile you have very powerful information for helping each perform at his or her highest potential. You must use different strategies for dealing with different profiles. You can’t relate to everyone the same!

• You’ll be able to analyze the intelligence profiles of your organization and pin-point areas of needed skill development as well as areas of real strength. This give you a whole new was to leverage the strengths of your business team so that all rise to new levels of success.

Learn HOW You (and other people) Learn!

2009-03-12T13:53:00.000-07:00

In the mid-1980s a Harvard researcher named Howard Gardner published his now famous book entitled Frames of Mind. In it he documented his research on multiple intelligences, what I call The 8 Kinds of Smart. Basically Gardner discovered that each of us has eight different intelligences - eight ways we go about such things as knowing what we know in our lives, learning, remembering things, understanding, and processing information.

Not only did this research find that we all learn differently, it also discovered is that intelligence can be taught, enhanced, and developed. The great news about The 8 Kinds of Smart is that we all have all eight and probably more than eight intelligences.

However, not all the intelligences are equally developed within us. Nonetheless, they are already part of our biology and our neurology as human creatures, so we can literally awaken, stimulate, and trigger all eight intelligences in our brain-mind-body system.

Through consistent use and regular practice, we can strengthen, enhance, and develop almost any less developed area just any skill you have developed in your life. The same is true for your intelligences!

THE MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCE PROFILE INDICATOR

I'd like to invite you to participate in a process I've created for assessing your own and other's "intelligence profiles". Your intelligence profile provides you with a picture of The 8 Kinds of Smart as they are currently manifest in your life, based on your responses to a SmartSurvey™ of different aspects of your life.

After completing the SmartSurvey™ you'll be presented with a "Multiple Intelligence Profile Indicator". The whole process is free and is available on my website. Click Here to learn more about the Multiple Intelligence Profile Indicator .

The profile will indicate which two intelligences seem to be more developed than the others. It will also indicate that some are emerging, and some are in various states of sleep or latency.

But the great news about The 8 Kinds of Smart is that any underdeveloped or sleeping intelligences can be awakened. They can be stimulated, triggered, and brought to the fore so you can work them!

10 Modern Leadership Myths & Realities

2009-03-12T12:50:00.000-07:00

Several years ago the Gallop Organization conducted a research study of hundreds of companies asking the single question: “What do great managers or leaders do?”. Results of this important project are reported in the book First Break all the Rules. The following pages summarize some of what the this study found under the title of “Modern Leadership Myths and Realities".

As you consider read about these, keep a mental checklist of which of these you have consciously or unconsciously bought and what you can do to enhance your own leadership skills.

MYTH #1: Anyone can be anything they want if they just try hard enough and hold to their dreams. You can change people’s natures.

=> REALITY: People are neurologically “wired” differently. They have certain pathways laid down in their brain for certain talents. You cannot change who they are at this level. Great leaders figure out the different ways their people are wired and then help them be more of who they already are.

MYTH #2: Everyone should strive to be a leader. The leadership role is no longer as important as it once was.

=> REALITY: Leaders are as important (and more important!) than they have ever been. In a global marketplace, an organization's competitive edge is in it’s people. Leaders work with their people helping them turn their talents into performance.

MYTH #3: Every business partner or team member should be treated the same.

=> REALITY: Every business partner or team member should be treated in ways that are consistent with who they are as people. This involves gaining an understanding of their different goals, their talents and skills, their intelligence profile, and what motivates them toward better performance.

MYTH #4: Leaders should “keep team members or business partners at arms length”. They should not get too close or friendly with them.

=> REALITY: Forming close relationship, even friendships, is the key to effective leadership. It is only here that a leader really gets to know and understand his or her team members and business partners at deep enough levels to genuinely help them be the best they can be.

MYTH #5: When selecting people for certain tasks within the organization, select people who have past experience, who have high intelligence, or who are very determined.

=> REALITY: Select for talent. Past experience, intelligence, and determination are not as relevant as what a person loves to do and what they, by nature, do very well.

MYTH #6: The key role of the leader is to define and promote the right steps for business partners or team members to follow for the different aspects of the business.

=> REALITY: The key role of the leader is that of a catalyst who first of all figures out how his or her people are different, second defines the appropriate outcomes for each person, and third does whatever it takes to help a person achieve the desired outcomes.

MYTH #7: Team development involves promotion to the next rung of the organization's ladder.

=> REALITY: Team development is a process of working with each team member or business partner to find promotion opportunities which are appropriate for them as the individual they are.

MYTH #8: Leaders should focus their efforts on diagnosing what’s wrong, what’s not working, or what has failed and finding ways to fix it.

=> REALITY: Failure and excellence are not two sides of a single coin. They are different realities and are NOT causally related. Managers should focus on excellence – on what’s working, on what’s succeeding, and on what’s right.

MYTH #9: Everyone can and should be able to do anything and/or play any role on the team. The leader’s job is to help everyone “broaden their skill sets”.

=> REALITY: A focus on broadening skill sets does not create a strong team. Strong teams happen when each member is doing what they do best. The leader's job is to help each person on the team perform the skills and play the roles for which they are best suited.

MYTH #10: Leaders should control their people. They should find the weaknesses in their people and help them overcome or strengthen their weak areas.

=> REALITY: Each person is delightfully unique. Their so-called “weaknesses” are a part of what makes them unique. Forget about trying to fix these. Instead focus on helping people excel in their strong areas. Find ways to help them become more and more of who they fundamentally are.

2 Paradigms of Learning -- In Which Paradgim is Your Training?

2009-03-04T03:57:00.000-08:00

The findings of contemporary brain-mind research have given us a shocking new picture of our potentials and capacities as human beings. Part of this area of research is the research into human intelligence: Just what it intelligence? How do we learn? What makes us smart?

At some point in our lives, often in the early years of our schooling, most of us were given what was basically a paper-and-pencil test, where were asked to perform a variety of activities (most of which we would rarely encounter again the rest of our lives!).

Based on how we performed those activities we were assigned a number which was supposedly an indicator or our intellectual capabilities as a human being, from that point on. In school, children were tracked based on those numbers. In the workplace often one's job and/or possibility of advancement was based on scores on these so-called "intelligence" or "ability" or "aptitude" tests.

When people "bought their score", so to speak, the score became a "self-fulling prophesy" limiting their vision of what was possible for themselves

Of course you know exactly what I'm talking about here. It's the famous "IQ" or "Intelligence Quotient".

Well, the findings of those who have been investigating human intelligence have called into question almost everything we used to think intelligence was. In fact what has been revealed are two very different paradigms of intelligence.

Below is a comparison of the two paradigms. I'm calling them the "IQ Paradigm" and the "MI Paradigm":

The IQ Paradigm: Intelligence is fixed and static at birth
The MI Paradigm: Intelligence changes, grows, and expands throughout our entire life.

The IQ Paradigm: Intelligence can be measured on paper-and-pencil tests.
The MI Paradigm: Intelligence can only be measured accurately by its performance in life.

The IQ Paradigm: Intelligence is genetically determined.
The MI Paradigm: Intelligence is nurtured and shaped by a wide range of experiences.

The IQ Paradigm: Intelligence = high ability in language, math, and some spatial tasks.
The MI Paradigm: Intelligence = the range of our innate capacities for knowing, learning, and acquiring information.

The IQ Paradigm: Your IQ score defines your intellectual capabilities in life.
The MI Paradigm: We are a blend of eight intelligences with some more developed than others; they all can grow.

The IQ Paradigm: Intelligence is primarily a mental function.
The MI Paradigm: Intelligence occurs throughout our brain-mind-body and beyond in our social environment.

The IQ Paradigm: Cultural differences and environment have little effect on one’s intelligence.
The MI Paradigm: Different cultures emphasize the importance of certain intelligences over others.

The IQ Paradigm: You’re stuck with the intelligence given you by nature.
The MI Paradigm: Intelligence capacities are developmental and move from the level of novice to mastery.

The IQ Paradigm: The key is to find out how smart people are.
The MI Paradigm: The key is to find out HOW people are smart.

The IQ Paradigm: Standardized intelligence assessment instruments reveal one’s intelligence capacity.
The MI Paradigm: There is no such thing as a standardized person–we are all unique; standardized tests are invalid.

I invite you to visit a page on my website to learn about multiple learning styles and multiple intelligences (a.k.a. The 8 Kinds of Smart).

You might also find it interesting to get a profile of your own multiple intelligences and take multiple intelligence test!

Qualifying Criteria for an Intelligence based on the research of Dr. Howard Gardner, Harvard University

2009-03-03T15:45:00.000-08:00

1. An intelligence must possess an identifiable core operation of set of operations. There are a specific set of learnable/ teachable capacities involved for each intelligence. For example, if I asked you to identify the core skills in involved in language (WordSmart or verbal-linguistic intelligence) you would likely mention such things as knowing the ABCs, knowing how to use the ABCs to make words, making words into sentences, sentences in paragraphs, and paragraphs into whole essays.

You would probably mention such things as the importance of knowing how to properly use words (grammar), or understanding the order and meaning of words in a sentence (syntax and semantics).

You might discuss aspects of the spoken word as well, such things as the sound of words and proper pronunciation (phonetics), or understanding the sociocultural context of words where certain words have totally different meanings in different cultures and even different subcultures within a culture (praxis).

Each of the eight intelligences has its own unique set of clearly observable operations or capacities.

2. An intelligence must have a distinct biological-neurological base. Each of the intelligences activates certain processes in the brain-mind-body system These processes, in principle, are more or less localized with the brain-mind-body system. In other words, when you are visualizing something in your mind, painting a picture, or sculpting something in clay, I can observe activity in distinct parts of your brain-mind-body system.

Likewise if you are dancing, participating in a physical game, or acting something out different areas of your brain-mind-body system will be activated. This can be observed by any number of brain-imaging technologies available today by which one can actually observe various areas of the brain “lighting up” went different tasks are performed.

An additional piece of the research underlying this criterion was Howard Gardner’s study of brain-damaged individuals at Boston Medial University. He was fascinated by the fact that through damage to certain regions of our brain we can loose whole areas of our human intellectual capacities and yet other areas remain unaffected and remain very much in tact.

Probably the most common example of this is people who have lost their language capacities due to a stroke but who, nonetheless, are functioning very effectively in all other areas of their lives. Gardner also did extensive studies of idiots savants, prodigies, and other exceptional individuals and found powerful manifestations for each of the eight intelligences.

3. An intelligence must possess a clear evolutionary history. As humanity has matured over the years, it is possible to document the development an increasing complexity of our human intelligence capacities.

The most obvious and well-known example of this is the development of our language. At one time in our evolution as a species, our language consisted of nothing more than a series of grunts, groans, and other sounds we could make with our vocal chords and series of crude etchings on the wall of caves.

When you consider such things as the writings of Shakespeare, the novels of Stephen King, or the poetry of Maya Angelo you can get a sense of how far we have come!

This evolutionary history can also be seen and traced in our human development from infancy to adulthood where, generally, in early childhood we acquire a set of basic skills in each of the intelligence areas, almost by osmosis.

Our experience in elementary school tends to build on these early childhood capacities to provide us with a more complex repertoire of intellectual capacities. As we move into the secondary years these capacities become part of our repertoire for successful living.

Probably the highest level of an intelligence’s development can be seen in the various vocational and/or avocational pursuits (careers and hobbies) in which we become involved in our adult lives.

Examples of this could include the designs of an architect like Frank Lloyd Wright, the physical skills of an accomplished athlete such as Michael Jordan, the performance of a concert musician such as Tina Turner, or actor like Tom Hanks, a computer wizard like Bill Gates who can make a computer do everything but walk the dog, the mediation skills of someone like former president Jimmy Carter, or the knowledge the natural world such as Jane Goodall or Jacques Cousteau.

Each of these figures represents certain “end states” which exemplify a certain level of complexity and mastery of various sets of human intellectual capacities.

4. An intelligence must be universal to the human species. No matter where you go in the world, regardless of the culture you will find manifestations of the different intelligences. Not only will you find the intelligence present but you will find that every culture values, supports, and encourages the of the different intelligences, both through formal training and and experimental exploration.

This being said, I must also point out that different cultures will have different biases regarding what they they feel is most important.

In the Western world we tend to think that the be all and end all of being smart is skill in the famous three Rs—reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic—as the song goes.

However, many Asian cultures place at least equal value on the development one’s interpersonal capacities such as being a good member of team, being effective in collaboration with others, or the ability to build consensus in a group of people.

There is also often a high premium placed on the development of one’s introspective capacities, namely, the ability to “go inside,” so to speak, and acquire knowledge about the self and of being able to act on such knowledge.

When I lived and worked in Africa I found great importance given to such things as dance, music, art, and drama as ways to express the deep wisdom of the culture and to reinforce key personal and social values. All the intelligences were valued, but somehow capacity in these areas was seen as special and even more profound.

5. An intelligence must be susceptible to encoding in a distinct symbol system. This, for me, is one of the most interesting aspects of working with the eight intelligences. Another way to say this is that each intelligence has its own distinct language, its own jargon, vernacular, and its own special modus operandi.

To really understand an intelligence you must learn to speak its language; for example, if you want to be a dancer, you must learn the the steps and body movements involved for such things as the tango, rumba, or cha cha. These precise steps and movements constitute a unique language associated with dance. This is not unlike learning to write a essay by carefully putting together precise words, phrases, and sentences to communicate an idea.

6. An intelligence must be able to muster support from traditional, experimental psychological tasks. Psychologist are able to examine our various intellectual capacities in operation and thus more fully understand relationships, not only between the different intelligences, but also relationships of the various core capacities of a given intelligence.

They are also able to infer distinct brain and mental functioning related to the different ways of knowing.Part of this criterion also involves support from psychometric findings. This is the realm of assessing the intelligences themselves.

In principle one must be able to test a given intelligence and its related capacities and thus discover a persons relative strength or weakness in a given intelligence area. I say “in principle” because, while this sounds logical actually doing it is much more difficult.

An assessment of an intelligence must be “intelligent fair.” That is to say the assessment must itself be couched in the language or symbol system of the intelligence it purports to test. No one would ever suggest that to find out what Michael Jordan knows about basketball, we should sit him down at a desk and given him a paper and pencil test! No, the test itself must involve a performance in which all of the capacities of the body are accessed.

A Different Kind of Smart is Changing the World of Business

2009-03-03T14:52:00.000-08:00

Multiple intelligences–A Different Kind of Smart™–applied in the workplace, is helping managers, corporate trainers, and those charged with human resource development make the workplace a more productive, more creative, and and more human place–all of which results in greater profitability for the company.

• How often have you wished you knew how to help each member of your workplace team maximize their potential on the job and increase their productivity?

• How often have you been frustrated because you feel that you’re just not communicating with your employees?

• How often have you felt that you’re smarter than people give you credit for?

• How often have you been surprised by a creative idea or an approach to a problem from someone you didn’t think had it in them?

• How often have you conducted training sessions that ended up being dull, boring, and a waste of time because little learning actually occurred?

In 1985 the noted Harvard psychologist and educator Howard Gardner, conducted research investigating how we come to know what we know about our world, what we have traditionally called intelligence. How do we learn, process, and understand information? What is the process by which we acquire knowledge? In a nutshell, “What makes us smart? What makes us intelligent?”

In this research, Gardner discovered that each of us possesses at least eight distinct areas of intelligence, eight ways we acquire knowledge, process information, learn and understand. I refer to this as The 8 Kinds Smart. I think you'll discover the The 8 Kinds of Smart is a very different understanding of intelligence indeed!

For a description of The 8 Kinds of Smart check out my video on YouTube at . . .

Most of us grew up believing that intelligence is fixed and static at birth. We believe were born with a certain amount of intelligence and are stuck with it. Furthermore, through a series of tests, involving mostly paper and pencil tasks, one’s intelligence quotient can be assessed. After performing the tasks on a given test, one is assigned a number which, supposedly, is a valid indicator of his or her intellectual capabilities from that point on.

The Multiple Intelligence view of intelligence calls into question the basic assumptions about our intelligence represented by the “IQ paradigm”. The multiple intelligence understanding of our human capacities views intelligence as a biological, neurological, psychological, sensory, and cognitive phenomenon. It’s much much more than what goes on between our ears! Our intelligence occurs throughout our entire brain, mind, body system and even beyond ourselves in our sociocultural environment as well.

What Does Multiple Intelligence Bring to the Corporate, Business World?

A new vision of human resource development. The goal of a Multiple Intelligence approach to HRD is to maximize the full potential of the workforce by not only encouraging each employee to excel in his or her stronger intelligence areas, but also by providing ways to help people develop areas that are not strong, thus creating a more well-rounded team. What can this mean for you?

• Understanding how to put together more effective teams. Group dynamics research has documented that heterogeneously grouped teams get more done. When you understand the different kinds of smarts of your people and when you use this information for team-building, you dramatically increase the productivity of your workforce.

• Finding and developing hidden leadership qualities and potentials. When you learn to look at people through the lens of the eight kinds of smarts you, discover numerous skills, abilities, gifts, and talents which have likely never been tapped on the job. Learning to access these capacities on a regular and ongoing basis profoundly impacts your employee retention and motivation.

• Learning how to activate each of the intelligences in yourself and your employees. People need to have a wide range of techniques, strategies, and methods to call on when faced with problems or new challenges which arise in the execution of their jobs. Teaching employees how to use all of their intelligences gives you a more creative, personally invested, and responsible workforce.

A multifaceted approach to strategic planning and problem solving. Using Multiple Intelligence in corporate strategic planning guarantees that you access the full creativity and gifts of all involved in the planning process. Often planning does not get beyond a simple rehashing and reshaping of past ideas and solutions–ideas and solutions which have been less than effective. What can this mean for you?

• Understanding the dynamics of creativity and how to tap them in corporate planning sessions. Research has discovered that creativity is a learned process. Knowing how to nurture and develop the creative prowess in your workforce gets better answers to problems, a wider range of ways to meet challenges, and a much clearer vision of your goals–and you get the “buy in” of everyone involved.

• Promoting the best thinking of all involved in the planning process. When you understand the wide range of critical and creative thinking skills available in the different intelligence areas, you suddenly have many more ways to think about any problem you’re trying to solve. You need to train your workforce to be better thinkers.

• Knowing how to move a group’s thinking to higher-order realms. Effective planning must fully engage the full being of all involved in the planning process. You’ve got to know how to move people to a place where ideas are synthesized, integrated, and transformed into action.

A multi-modal approach to corporate training. Effective training must balance knowledge acquisition with hands-on application of the knowledge. Often a training session fails to reach all learners or participants primarily due to the mono-modal style of the presentation. What can this mean for you?

• Knowing how to plan “multi-modals” presentations which access the full learning potentials of the participants. Presenting information in just one way will not reach everyone. When you use a wide range of teaching and learning strategies, methods, and techniques, everyone gets it!

• Helping participants transfer the learning from the training session to their daily work assignments. In most cases transfer of the learning does not happen automatically. It takes variety of techniques to help participants apply the information from the training session on the job.

• Dealing effectively with the adult learner. Research has documented that the adult learner has distinct needs which must be addressed in a formal training situation. You must make sure you are addressing the hierarchy of basic human needs, and know how to handle the difficult participant, answer questions, and understand the dynamics of a group.

A screening process for maximizing employee productivity. Multiple Intelligence gives you an opportunity to understand the various “intelligence profiles” of your workforce. An intelligence profile gives a picture of the unique intellectual capacities of each person, including areas that are more developed and areas that less developed. What can this mean for you?

• Understanding the full potential of each person on your team. Once you understand a person’s intelligence profile you have very powerful information for helping each perform at his or her highest potential. You must use different strategies for dealing managing different profiles. You can’t relate to everyone the same!

• Analyzing the intelligence profiles needed for leadership and managers. In the past the criteria for leaders/managers were based on specific areas of expertise, technical knowledge about a given industry or business, or on the ability to communicate, motivate, and mobilize people. The capacities of the eight intelligences listed earlier give a picture of the new intelligence-based leader.

• Interviewing with multiple intelligences in mind. Organizations which have and maintain the competitive edge recognize the need for workers who possess a wide range of intelligences. The interview process is the key to finding these people and keeping them for the long term. Multiple Intelligence-based surveys, when interviewing prospective employees, can save you big time and money.

All in all, as The 8 Kinds of Smart becomes part of the corporate culture, everyone is expected to tap the full range of their human capacities on the job. There is a profound appreciation for and valuing of human diversity and the multitude of approaches different individuals might employ to accomplish the same task.

Multiple Intelligences & Customer Service Understand Your Customers’ Needs ANDHow to Meet Them ALL!

2009-03-01T07:25:00.000-08:00

How often have you experienced the following when you’ve called customer service or you’ve been at a so-called “customer service” desk in a store?
• the person behind the counter rarely looks you in the eye

• the customer service rep is so busy defending the company that he or she never really understands your issue, concern, or problem

• you reach a company’s “live” answering service which knows little or nothing about the company, it’s products, or services, but you’re assured “someone will call you back”

• you know more about the product you’ve purchased than the person with whom you’re talking

• when phoning customer service you’re put “on hold” for a long period of time and you’re forced to listen to a barrage of sales pitches or to a radio station

• you phone customer service and you only get through to a live person after making thirty-seven selections from an automated answering service

• the person with whom you’re talking sounds (or looks!) like they’re totally, unconditionally bored with their job

• you feel like you’re interrupting and bothering the customer service representative

• the customer service rep does most of the talking

• you leave feeling angry, frustrated, or in someway unsatisfied with your experience and you doubt you’ll do business with the company again

• you feel like you’re being talked down to

• the person behind the counter growls or scowls at youUnfortunately, this list could probably go on for quite a while, especially if you started adding your experiences!. The sad part about a list like this is that everyone of these negative experiences with customer service is preventable; yet in far too many situations they persist resulting in damage to the reputation of a company and its products and services.

In this article you will learn a Customer Service System that is based on the groundbreaking research on multiple intelligences – The 8 Kinds of Smart. A multiple intelligence approach to customer service creates an entirely different “customer experience” than those mentioned above.

Multiple intelligence asks us to look at ourselves and other people through a very different set of eyeglasses. When we deal with our customers from this perspective we suddenly have brand new ways to deeply connect with them, to understand their concerns, and to meet their needs.

What are some of the benefits of a multiple intelligence approach to customer service?
• When you can figure out out “where a customer is coming from” and how they process information, you can better meet their specific needs in ways that are tailored to them.

• The multiple intelligences give you multiple ways to more deeply and authentically connect with your customers, thus increasing the likelihood of a long-term relationship with them.

• When you know how to use a “multi-modal” approach to problem-solving you have many more options for truly helping a customer meet his or her needs, or addressing his or her concerns and issues.

• Your communication skills get turbo-charged because you have a wide variety of CustomerSmart™ Strategies for adjusting what you have to say to a customer based on their dominant intelligences.

• When you can pick up clues to a customer’s “intelligence profile” (which intelligences are stronger and more important to them) you can instantly adjust how you deal with them so you’re speaking to them at deeper levels.Designing the “Customer Experience”

The customer experience involves every single moment of contact a customer has with your company or organization from the very beginning, through the actual sale, to the contact with the company after the sale into the future.

Customer experience involves both the direct and indirect contacts and dealings with your company whether it be through a distributor of your products or services, a print ad, your website, FAQs you may have posted, forms which they fill out requesting further information, the experience of calling your 800 number, the “on hold” experience when this is necessary, the sound of the voice at the other end of the line, the first impressions they form in face-to-face customer service situations, what your body language communicates, and how your dress impacts them.

When you intentionally integrate The 8 Kinds of Smart into all of your dealings with customers, something almost magical happens. They open up to you in amazing ways because you are tapping into who they fundamentally are at deep levels of their being.

A multiple intelligences approach to customer service provides you with a screen and a set of tools for dramatically transforming each and every customer’s experience of your organization. The system presented in this article gives you some beginning tools to both find out what a customer needs and to fully address and met those needs, beyond all of their expectations.

Following you will find three samples of CustomerSmart™ Strategies from different intelligences. These demonstrate the power of integrating strategies such as these into your current customer service.

LogicSmart
Key characteristics of LogicSmart customers include being systematic and organized; they always having a rationale or argument for what they are thinking or doing; they love the challenge of a complex problem to solve; and the enjoy working with numbers, mathematical formulas, and spreadsheets.

Some Key Questions to ask yourself when dealing with LogicSmart customers:

• How do we make sense to our customers?
• Do they understand our rationales and reasons?
Sample CustomerSmart™ Strategies

• Have them come up with what would make sense to them for resolving a complaint, problem, or issue.

• Look for ways to present information in charts, graphs, tables and, diagrams.

• Talk about your company, products, and services using statistics, percentages, data, case studies, and background research findings.ImageSmart
Key characteristics of ImageSmart customers include being aware of objects, shapes, colors, and textures; they are great at task which required visualization, pretending, and imagining; they express themselves through drawing or making visual diagrams.

Some Key Questions to ask yourself when dealing with ImageSmart customers:

• What do my customers actually see?
• What do they see in their mind’s eyes
• What do they see in their imagination?
Sample CustomerSmart™ Strategies

• Always have something to show them, even though it might not seem necessary to you.

• If they’re having difficulty expressing something, ask them to get a picture in their head first then describe what they’re seeing, or ask them to draw you a picture of it.

• Ask your customers to visualize themselves using your products or solving a problem.BodySmart
Key characteristics of BodySmart customers include learning best through “hands on” activities and performance; they communicate well through body language, facial expressions, and physical gestures; they want to experience a product or service to see for themselves how it works.

Some Key Questions to ask yourself when dealing with BodySmart customers:

• How do they feel about our company?
• What do they do with our product or service?
• How do they use it?

Sample CustomerSmart™ Strategies

• Have them dramatize, act out, or physically show you a problem or issue they are experiencing.

• Get them moving: “Let’s go for a walk and talk about this more so I can get a better feel for the situation.”

• Whenever possible, offer a demonstration or simulation of a solution you’re suggesting to their problem.
Each customer is unique. Each customer processes information in slightly different ways. They’ll express their concerns, issues, problems, and challenges in ways that are unique to their unique “intelligence profile”.

When you can recognize this and tap into their uniqueness, customer service becomes an experience of building long-term customer relationships, which go way beyond the present moment.

You CAN understand your customers’ needs and meet them ALL!

Multiple Intelligences & Motivation and Productivity–Tapping the Full Potential of Your Business Team

2009-03-01T07:06:00.000-08:00

Probably the most well-known mapping of what motivates us comes from the famous psychologist, Abraham Maslow. He called it the “Hierarchy of Needs”. The basis of Maslow's theory is that human beings are motivated by unsatisfied needs, and that certain lower needs need to be satisfied before higher needs can be satisfied.

For example, if you are hungry and thirsty, you will tend to take care of the thirst first. After all, you can do without food for weeks, but you can only do without water for a couple of days! Thirst is a “stronger” need than hunger. Likewise, if you are very very thirsty, but someone has put a choke hold on you and you can’t breath, which is more important? The need to breathe, of course. On the other hand, sex is less powerful than any of these. You probably won’t die if you don’t get it!

Maslow took this idea and created his now famous hierarchy of needs. Beyond the details of air, water, food, and sex, he laid out five broader layers: the physiological needs, the needs for safety and security, the needs for love and belonging, the needs for esteem, and the need to actualize the self, in that order.

I have reworked the hierarchy a bit under five basic categories:
• Physical needs (which is Maslow’s physiological needs)

• Emotional needs (where I have included the need for safety and security)

• Relational needs (Maslow’s needs for love and belonging)

• Cognitive needs (including needs of esteem)

• Spiritual needs (Maslow’s needs for self-actualization)Understanding these basic human needs is at the core of any effective business coaching and deeply motivating your business partners to produce. In some ways, success in motivating people to succeed in your business this is like what's involved in coaching kids in sports:

You've got to insure they have fun;
You've got to help them develop the skills needed in the game;
You've got to focus on their individual growth, then show them how to be members of the team; and
You've got to do everything in your power to help them win.

However, equally important is a person’s “intelligence profile”. An intelligence profile reveals the Eight Kinds of Smart as they show up in a one’s personal and professional life It reveals intelligence areas which are more highly developed than others.

Once you have a picture of another person’s profile you at the same time have some very powerful information for dealing with and relating to them. You also can see areas which can be strengthened and empowered. It gives you powerful clues to help each team member “be all that they can be”.

When we have a sense of this, we at the same time have a sense of what it will take to motivate them, which, as I mentioned earlier results in greater productivity.
When you approach your business partners from the standpoint of The 8 Kinds of Smart, most of your problems with motivating them will vanish. This is because you are dealing with them in ways that are “in synch” with who they are at deep levels of their psyche.

Following are several examples of multiple intelligence strategies you can use to motivate people who have different intelligence profiles.

As you work with these strategies, remember that each person possesses all eight intelligences. So motivation strategies from just one area will likely not work by themselves. But chances are that when you’re working with someone whose dominate intelligence is ImageSmart, for example, you’ll be far more effective in your communication with them and in successfully motivating them if you use some of the ImageSmart motivators.

SoundSmart people are sensitive to all manner of sounds in the environment. They usually have a love of music and rhythmic patterns and might work better with music in the background.

Examples for motivating SoundSmart team members:
• Encourage suggestions on the musical-rhythmic aspects of your advertising.

• Ask for suggestions on how to manage unhelpful or distracting sounds.

• Watch how you say whatever you say in conversation – the sound of your speech may communicate more than the actual meaning of your words.

• Play music during meetings or performance reviews to help set or shift moods and to make transitionsWordSmart people generally have highly developed skills for reading, speaking, and writing. They are likely precise in expressing themselves and irritated with others are not.

Examples for motivating WordSmart team members:
• Offer free and open access for conversation with supervisors when needed.

• Give them articles to read and ask them to write executive summaries to share the information with others.

• Get them involved in writing sales copy for your products or services.

• Ask them to write press releases, industry-specific articles, or reports for publication.SelfSmart people are generally self-reflective and self-aware. They tend to be in tune with their inner feelings, values, and beliefs.

Examples for motivating SelfSmart employees:
• Frequently ask them to “go inside” and be aware of their feelings, intuitions, reflections, and thought processes.

• Give them independent work assignments.

• Provide them time to reflect before having to produce something or give an answer to a question.

• Talk with them about their personal goals and how they see them fitting in with the goals of the company.Once you have figured out what motivates your team or business partners, you at the same time have some very important clues for helping them be more productive. Use the multiple intelligence motivation strategies to create a plan for dealing with an team member based on his or her “intelligence profile”.

For example, plan your daily relating and mentoring / coaching strategies based on their more dominate intelligences; take their more developed intelligences into account when planning training and development; and remember these stronger intelligences when conducting any kind of planning or performance reviews.

The goal should be to tap perceived intelligence strengths "on-the-job" (whether one is working from home or from a traditional office), and come up with plans for enhancing those intelligences which “need some help”

You CAN tap the full potential of your business team!

Multiple Intelligences and Sales & Marketing–Moving Prospects From Where They Are To Where You Want Them To Be!

2009-03-01T05:30:00.000-08:00

The old approaches to sales and marketing are dead. They haven’t been working for a number of years. And yet you’d never guess this by looking at the sales and marketing department of the majority of companies in our world today.

One night, while we were all sleeping, customers changed. For the most part they stopping listening to and paying attention to advertising.
•They started putting their phone numbers on national “don’t call” lists.
• They got filters on their computers to prevent unwanted messages from getting through to them.
• They started complaining about spam to their internet service providers.
• They got “pop up blockers” to prevent internet ads from interrupting their online experience.
They reached a point of information overload and they decided to do something about it. Block and ignore information they didn’t want to receive.

My father, who is 87 years old, lives in Colorado Springs. He lives in a great retirement community. When I visit him often in the evening we’ll spend some time watching TV. When ads come on during a program or between programs he mutes the sound on the TV. We talk, or if I’m not there, he simply sits there until the ad is over and the program returns, then he unmutes the TV.

When I’m at home watching TV I wait till ads to go and get a snack, brush my teeth, or do something in my home office. I know I usually have 3-5 minutes before the program returns. I tune out the ads. Companies are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for these ads slots, but lots and lots of people never fully experience them.

When I get my mail each day from the US post office, I usually throw away about half of the mail I get without even opening it. I have learned to recognize marketing and sales communications from companies I’ve not asked to hear from, so they end up in the circular file next to my desk.

The sales and marketing game has changed, whether you're in a home-based business or a more traditional business setting. And this is precisely because consumers are no longer paying attention to our messages.

Seth Godin, best-selling author of a number of books on the the new sales and marketing paradigm, calls this “marketing attention deficit”. Consumers today have found, and are finding ever new ways, to block those messages they don’t want to receive or have not requested to receive.

So assuming this is right, what do we do? I believe we've got to take a whole new look at our sales and marketing messages and make sure they're are attractive to potential business partners and customers. My advice is start with "personal branding". Dont' start by promoting your business opportunity or trying to sell your products. Start by promoting YOU!

You first job is to get prospective business partners and customers to trust you enough to allow you send them messages you're fairly sure they'll pay attention to. Start marketing YOU before you even think about marketing your product or service or trying to make a sale. Once you've got this new approach figured out, the rest of this special report will help you create messages that have a stong likelihood of getting through prospects' "filtering screens"!

A Different Kind of Sales & Marketing

In what follow you will learn a Sales and Marketing System that is based on the ground-breaking research on multiple intelligences – The 8 Kinds of Smart. A multiple intelligence approach to sales provides you with a new system for “playing ball”, so to speak, in this new sales “playing field”. The article presents a revolutionary system which will help you connect to and relate to your potential customers is a totally new way.

The 8 Kinds of Smart asks us to look at ourselves and other people through a very different set of eyeglasses. The concern is to learn HOW people learn, HOW they process information, and HOW they understand and perceive things. The chart below shows eight ways we do this!

So what are some of the benefits of a multiple intelligence approach to sales and marketing?
• When you can figure out out “where a potential customer or client is coming from” and how they process information, you can better focus your sales and marketing messages to speak directly to them.

• Multiple intelligences give you many ways to more deeply and authentically connect with your potential customers, thus increasing the likelihood of a long-term relationship with them.

• When you know how to use a “multi-modal” approach to sales and marketing you have many more options for helping a customer understand how your products or services genuinely meet their unique needs.

• Your communication skills get turbocharged because you have a wide variety of strategies and tools for molding your sales and marketing message to a potential customer based on their dominant intelligences.

• When you can pick up clues to a potential customer’s “intelligence profile” (which intelligences are stronger and more important to them) you can instantly adjust your sales and marketing presentation to them so you’re reaching them at deeper levels.How do we identify the intelligences in our customers. Customers will say and do things that help you understand where they’re coming from intellectually, if we know what to watch for and listen for. Here are a couple of examples for three of the intelligences.

ImageSmart customers think in pictures. In order to fully understand something, they need to see a picture of it or, if there’s no actual image to look at, they’ll often create one in their mind’s eye through some kind of visualization or the use of mental imagery.

WATCH for. . .
• Desire to touch the product you’re selling
• Closing their eyes to remember something
• Drawing a diagram to communicate with you

LISTEN for . . .
• “I see what you mean!”
• “I can’t get an image of what you’re saying.”
• “Can you show me a picture of how it works?”
Some ImageSmart Sales & Marketing Strategies

• Make a flow chart to show how a product works; e-mail or fax it if you’re selling over the phone.
• Help the customer visualize how to use your product in his or her life.
• Mind map the information as you’re talking; if on the phone ask the customer to create a mind map as you talk.BodySmart customers process information primarily by doing, touch, and movement. They want to know how anything they purchase will work in the real world where a product or service actually will be used.

WATCH for. . .
• Desire to try out your product for them self
• Use their body to express them self (gestures, facial expressions, etc.)
• Want you to demonstrate the benefits and features your product

LISTEN for . . .
• “I have a feel for it, but I can’t express it in words.”
• “That comment really makes my heart beat faster.”
• “Let me try it for myself.”
Some BodySmart Sales & Marketing Strategies

• Perform a physical demonstration of your product or send them a video clip so the customer can experience it.
• Offer your customer a “hands on” opportunity to try out your product or service for them self.
• Show a video of ordinary people using and benefiting from using your product or service.PeopleSmart people often do their best thinking out loud with other people. Collaboration gets their learning juices flowing. Their ability to relate to and understand others makes for strong groups that support all members.

WATCH for. . .
• Empathy with others’ feelings and life situation
• Impressed with other peoples’ opinions about your product
• Mentioning other groups or teams they’re part of who might benefit from
the product you’re selling

LISTEN for . . .
• “Let me repeat what I just heard you say. Tell me if I got it.”
• “I need to talk with my significant other, team mates, close friends, etc.”
• “I wish so-and-so was part of this conversation. They’d really find this interesting.”

Some PeopleSmart Sales & Marketing Strategies

• Use endorsements of your product from respected experts in your industry or from well-known people in society.
• If appropriate, do a conference call where you have a small group in on the presentation.
• Make extensive use of testimonials where other people are telling how the product helped them.Once you have discerned your customer’s needs and their dominate intelligence, the process for using the Sales Strategies is quite easy. You simply take your normal sales presentation and you present it using strategies from the intelligence you have discerned is your customer’s dominant intelligence.

You CAN discover where your customers are and move them where you want them to be!

Have You Turbo-Charged Your Training With These Teaching/Learning Strategies?

2009-03-01T05:19:00.000-08:00

Training and development (T&D) are really two sides of a single coin:

• Training can be defined as preparing someone’s skills to perform specific tasks.

• Development is concerned with empowering people who have the readiness to deal not only with present needs but also those of the unknown future. Stephen Covey calls this “sharpening the saw” to be ready for whatever comes.

Training and development are natural processes. In many ways, the evolutionary process and T&D are the same. Evolution is a process by which an organism changes its behavior or form in order to better compete with other organisms or to adapt to a changing environment.

Evolution is the unfolding of potential. Nothing can unfold if it has no potential. Therefore, in a metaphorical sense, evolution can be described as a process of remembering potentials which have been forgotten or which may have not been needed previously.

T&D works the same way. Through the awakening of new knowledge, novel perspectives, untapped capacities, hidden skills, and different ways of knowing, potentials which have been latent prior to this awakening process are now activated. Once this has occurred, one’s perception of everything is different because seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling–in short living itself– is happening on many more levels than before this awakening.

Obviously what I have just described is the ideal T & D experience. How often does this really happen in training sessions you conduct, meetings you lead, or presentations you give?

How often, instead do you prepare and prepare; you make what you felt was a brilliant presentation, only to have the participants leave grumbling about what a waste of time it was? How often do you knock yourself out to make a presentation interesting but as you look out at the participants you can tell their minds are off somewhere else?

Whether you are talking about traditional business training or "field training", the issues I've mentioned above present themselves. Of course the traditional training situation is often in a classroom, a conference call, a webinar, or an online course in which one is participating. The field training situation is what we often call "on-the-job" training or training in a "real world" setting. Field training tends to me more hands-on.

The good news I bring you in this report is that the awakening I described earlier can happen one hundred percent of the time IF the training session, meeting, or presentation is structured properly to take into account all the we know about how the human brain learns and processes information. And this applies equally to both traditional and field training!

A Multi-modal Approach to Training

What does multi-modal learning mean? In a nutshell it means learning something in wide variety of ways. The scientific research behind multi-modal learning has documented that:
• The more different ways a person learns something, the more they will really learn it.
• The more different ways they learn something, the more they will remember it.
• The more different ways they learn something, the more they will genuinely understand and assimilate itIn most of your formal education you basically learned required information in two or three ways at best—the traditional “reading, writing, ’rithmetic” ways of learning which were are at the heart of most of the learning we did in school.

However, not everyone learns and processes information best in the traditional ways. Most people need to learn and process information several different ways for the information to really stick. In multi-modal approaches to learning people discover how to learn anything more quickly. They discover how to remember forever what they’ve learned. And they learn how to apply the information they get to their personal and professional lives.

When you’re involved in communicating with others, you’ll be surprised at how much better they’ll understand what you’re teaching when you structure your training session to access a wider range of their learning and knowing capacities. The key to doing this is to structure your training around the eight multiple intelligences.

Let me introduce you to a tool that will forever change any training you’ll ever do, whether it’s a formal training workshop, the more informal training which occurs daily on-the-job, leading meetings or discussions, making a presentation, or any time you’re involved in situations where you’re needing to communicate with others.

It’s a revolutionary training tool called the Multiple Intelligence SmartStrategies™. The SmartStrategies™ provide all of the strategies, techniques, methods, and tools you will ever need to put together dynamite training sessions, meetings, or presentations in which people will learn the material you’re teaching better than you ever thought possible, and they’ll have fun in the process!

Multiple Intelligences (a.k.a. The Eight Kinds of Smart) is simply a model for understanding at least eight different ways people learn, understand, and process information. The following diagram shows the eight:

Here's is a a sample of three teaching and learning strategies for each intelligence which you can incorporate into your teaching.

ImageSmart Strategies
• Create diagrams or pictures of the information.
• Visualize how to use the learning in your life.
• Mind map the information

LogicSmart Strategies
• Make graphs of related facts and figures.
• Pass out an outline of the key points and subpoints.
• Use different thinking patterns to analyze the information.

BodySmart Strategies
• Role play or act out concepts of the learning.
• Turn the information into a physical game.
• Watch an expert and copy what they do until you master the skill.

NatureSmart Strategies
• Find equivalents for your information in the natural world.
• Examine environmental issues that connect to the topic.
• Incorporate natural objects into your presentation.

SoundSmart Strategies
• Make up a song about the information.
• Think of background sounds you associate with the learning.
• Use different ways of speaking to explain the information (loud, soft, fast, slow).

WordSmart Strategies
• Turn the information into a limerick or a poem.
• Write it up as a front-page newspaper story.
• Make up riddles, jokes, or puns based on the information you’re learning.

PeopleSmart Strategies
• Interview experts in the area you’re studying.
• Explain your learning to a group of friends.
• Learn with others, with each person learning a part then teaching it.

SelfSmart Strategies
• List personal implications of the knowledge for you.
• List 10 ways to use what you’re learning right now.
• Think about the spiritual or universal implications of what you’re learning.

What so often happens in learning is that people learn something only in the space between their ears and above the neck. How long does it usually last? In my experience, sometimes as soon as thirty minutes after the training session, people have forgotten most of the information.

However, when you employ multi-modal teaching and learning strategies, the learning takes place throughout the entire brain-mind-body system and beyond, in the social environment as well.

If you want to reach everyone, everytime, and know that people will leave your training having genuinely understood your information, you’ve got to present it in a variety of ways to appeal to the different intelligences. And I promise you, the Eight Kinds of Smart are already present in any group you train or to whom you make a presentation!