Impact Impression Blog

Most people do their best work when they know their manager trusts them. If they worry that you think they’re lazy, incapable of directing their behavior, or lack integrity, they’re unlikely to take feedback or coaching from you. So go out of your way to gain your employees’ trust by demonstrating positive assumptions about them. Give challenging assignments, with the clear and confident belief that your expectations will be met. And don’t hide information, or assume people will mishandle it. Instead, promote transparency. Try adding a “through the grapevine” agenda item to meetings as a fun, informal way for people to share company information they’ve heard, so you can either confirm or debunk the rumor. When managers demonstrate positive assumptions, employees respond in kind. [HBR]

Making other people better at something requires more effort than we need to make ourselves better at the same thing. In other words, it is much easier to tell somebody what they should do if they can see we have done the same thing ourselves. Our lives say much more than our mouths can ever articulate. How we talk to people, how we react to situations, in whom we put our faith, how promptly and genuinely we care about other people, and a host of other life matrices combine to give us away quicker than we are ready to defend ourselves. So, the work starts with us. We are better placed to suggest strategies to other people only if we have applied such strategies--or similar ones--to our lives, and we are currently prospering as a result of that. It is easier for people to believe what has previously worked for someone else. This explains why big organisations spend a lot of money inviting successful people to talk to their members of staff. People with success stories tend to...

The way we do our payment is changing dramatically. For example, people are beginning to use their smartphones for every kind of formal and informal transaction - to shop at stores, buy songs and movies online, and even do their banking. At the heart of these changes in how we do our transactions are lots of companies competing and collaborating to facilitate transactions. Although a great percentage of people use digital forms of payment, very few fully understand that it is an extremely complex industry. Payments is transferring information from one party to another, and nearly every stakeholder in the industry benefits when that process runs on digital rails. This is the era that we are in. Do you see any business opportunity? If everything is moving towards online, there must be something you can do (service or business) to be part of this moving train. Think.