Silence isn’t just golden, it’s the best way to get answers. That’s the first thing salespeople learn and the one that the best salespeople practice, no matter what else they do. Silence can get answers from your kids, from bosses, from the most non-communicative person in your organization.

But it’s one of those tools that you need to use correctly and avoid over-using.

I recommend using it only when you ask a closing question, i.e., a question to which you absolutely need an answer, not every question that comes up in a discussion.

It works like this, you ask a closing question, and then you shut up.

That’s right, after you ask the question you don’t say another word.

This is old wisdom that sounds easy, but is much harder to do in practice, because once you ask, the silence, and the pressure, start building.

And humans, especially these days, tend to fill silence, so if the other person doesn’t respond immediately the void is filled with explanations of what was meant, rephrasing, and, worse, another question.

The problem is that the minute you say anything else, the other person is off the hook and won’t respond to the original question—assuming they even remember it.

Try it, you won’t be disappointed.

As studies on corporate culture and the psychology of managers and workers proliferate, people spend more time and energy tracking themselves in an effort to “know their place” than ever before.

You are what you eat; you are what you wear, and now, you are where you sit. Far be it for me to pooh-pooh any of these findings, I’ve been around long enough to see them in action.

However, I have a passionate belief that you are what you think and an equally passionate belief that you can change what you think if you so choose.

My attitude towards, and development of, MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy)™ throughout my working years has it’s underpinnings in the writings (sans the religious parts) of Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich, to which I was introduced in my late teens.

His writings predate, and are supported by, much of the current research, so if you want a synopsis of great thoughts on which to build your MAP and guide your organization, here are ten of Hill’s greatest (and best known) quotes.

• “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”
• “What you think, so you will become.”
• “If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.”
• “Your big opportunity may be right where you are now.”
• “Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.”
• “A goal is a dream with a deadline.”
• “Thoughts mixed with definiteness of purpose, persistence, and a burning desire are powerful things.”
• “Perseverance: The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those that fail.”
• “Every adversity carries with it the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit.”
• “Lack of loyalty is one of the major causes of failure in every walk in life.”

Print them out; share them with your people; discuss them; embrace them; practice them; and watch the benefits roll in for your company, your people and you.

Years ago I knew a manager who believed that high stress yielded the best productivity, he generated that environment by setting unrealistic deadlines and generating plenty of consequence-fear (I, and my fellow recruiters, considered his organization our happy hunting ground). The year his department’s turnover hit 99%, which was everyone except him, he was finally terminated.

There are still too many managers who run stress-filled organizations and too many companies that ignore, allow, and even support them—it’s called performance culture—but, as they say, these times they are a’changin’—even if it takes suicide as the wake-up call for some.

“Earlier this year, the French automaker, Renault, found itself doing some soul-searching following a rash of suicides at a design complex outside Paris. In the course of about five months, three engineers killed themselves. In suicide notes and conversations with their families before taking their lives, the three men voiced anxiety about unreasonable workloads, high-pressure management tactics, exhaustion, and humiliating criticism in front of colleagues during performance reviews.”

And companies are starting to get it, “Draper Laboratory, an R&D shop based in Cambridge, Mass., refuses to buy BlackBerrys for its engineers.”How can anyone be creative if they are on’ 24 hours a day?” asks HR Director Jeanne Benoit. “We want to keep them fresh and robust.””

Another recent finding adds another significant reason to reduce worker stress, touching on businesses’ greatest bogyman—obesity and its effect on worker health.

“Scientists reported yesterday that they have uncovered a biological switch by which stress can promote obesity, a discovery that could help explain the world’s growing weight problem…”

Now you have two negatives—death and obesity—and two positives—creativity and retention; separately or together they have an enormous impact on the bottom line.

Here are six things you can do to reduce stress in our organization. No, they won’t get it done in a day, but there aren’t any silver bullets for organizational changes (or anything else, for that matter)—especially those involving individual MAP—all you can do is start and then keep going.

Finally, if you run a company, or any organization, and you don’t heed this wake-up call to start reducing negative stress then, as a manager, you are heading for the same fate as the dodo bird.

A client shared some excellent information from a book he read recently with his people (and me) and I thought I’d share it with you.

The “secrets” aren’t new, but they’re in a handy format that’s easily assimilated.

Read the secrets and pass them on to everyone you know. The more people who embrace them, the more civilized, valuable and productive your interactions will be—both professionally and personally.

The Best Kept Secrets of Great Communicators
by Peter Thomson

1. Think of listening based on the ratio of having two ears and one mouth. Use them in that ratio. Listen twice as much as you speak.

2. Maintain eye contact. It shows others that you are paying attention.

3. Take notes. This will reinforce your memory. It is advisable to ask permission first in some situations. That permission is seldom refused. If you wish to take a tape recording, it is vital to ask permission.

4. Allow people to finish their own sentences no matter how enthusiastically you want to jump into the conversation. Doing so will indicate respect for what the person is saying.

5. Get all the information that is available within a conversation so you will not jump to any false conclusions. Wait for the end of the sentence or end of the conversation to be sure this conversation is unique from any other that may sound similar to you.

6. Respond so the other person knows you are listening. Your response may be “Yes” or “I see” or merely nodding your head. Any of these will do.

7. Be accepting rather than judgmental so you can truly hear the message being given. Different accents, catch phrases, speeds of speech, and cultural generalizations can get in the way of hearing the actual message.

8. Ask questions when you do not understand something that was said. This goes a long way to building strong communication.

9. Ask core questions. That is typically a series of “why” questions that dive deeper into a particular subject to gain the greatest understanding of a situation. Start with broad information and continue seeking more specific responses.

10. Pause before replying. Pausing will add power to what you say. It indicates you are giving a considered response-that, you thought about it and it is not just some answer you offer every time this question comes up.

I was discussing performance (his) with a client today, and he said, “One thing I’m finding out is that it’s absolutely necessary to rest. The more rested I am, the better I am as a CEO. I’m too tired, much of the time, have too much busy work. I actually feel guilty when I’m not working to my maximum or over it—I need to change my mindset.”

He’s right—and it applies to every level, from execs to admin. Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS, who works nine to five and doesn’t bring work home, discourages his employees from working extra hours. He says, “Quite frankly, the type of programming that goes on in the employee’s ninth and tenth hour is usually thrown away the next day — it’s usually not very good. You just start making mistakes -— you get sloppy.
“I would rather you go home and rest, and come back fresh the next morning, instead of spending all morning correcting mistakes made last night when you were too tired.” (I recently cited this interview in another post)

If you, too, want to get rid of busy work, change your mindset and get to know your family/community/hobbies/etc. again, here’s how to start.

1. Separate out everything you can delegate or outsource. This often requires a change in your MAP, the part that accepts that others can do the work, whether they do it in the same way as you or not, and the results will be at the least adequate, possibly better. (It’s called letting go and it’s not as easy as it sounds, especially for entrepreneurs and owners.)
2. Take what’s left on your list and evaluate it on a what-if scale. That means you run each task against the question, “What really happens if this doesn’t get done today or this week?” Will the earth shift on its axis? Will a thunderbolt strike? Will our competitors kill us? Will our customers desert us? Will our employees revolt? Will the company fold?

Although similar to prioritizing, this is different. Most prioritizing is done in a now mode that often gives stuff a higher priority than it deserves. Running it though the what-if filter adds a reality check that frequently removes the item from “today” and, at times, from the list completely.

I have yet to have a manager do this who wasn’t amazed at the results and at the amount of time that was suddenly available.

Just remember, that new time isn’t for more work, it’s for more rest, fun, bonding, etc., both inside and outside of work.

Once you learn to use a what-if filter, share the skill with your organization, and watch both productivity and retention improve.

Intelligent, talented, aggressive, competent managers usually manage others as they, themselves, want to be managed, i.e., open communication, well-defined goals and the authority necessary to carry out their tasks.

Reduce any of these traits and management style almost always moves towards less communication and more structure—if not outright micromanagement.

Ten percent of employees do well anywhere, because they’re creative, aggressive, and intelligent; 80% reflect the style and skill of their management—they do well when they have good management and badly with bad management. Three percent of people are vicious, nasty, subversive and determined to wreck havoc no matter what kind of management they have.

What about the other seven percent? They are the people who, for various reasons such as illness, personality defect, personal situation, etc., have just lost the ability to function. These are the saddest problems for management.

Knowing what, and how much, effort to extend to rehabilitate a formerly capable employee who has turned into a liability is a manager’s greatest test.

Management wisdom says that once the management overhead necessary to rehabilitate a failing employee is greater than the potential gain of keeping him, then he should go.

But it’s rarely that simple—

• for legal reasons a manager may be forced to spend far more effort to rehabilitate a failing employees than he’s worth;
• talented managers are often reluctant to give up, believing that they will find some way to turn the person around;
• political connections can force a manager to expend valuable resources on a lost cause;
• etc.

No matter the reason, the cost of the effort, and its frequent failure, is not born just by the manager. Employees watch these situations with increasing frustration, lower morale and increased resume activity, while the company pays a high price through lost productivity, slipped schedules, and higher turnover.