Business Building Corner

Developing good people skills involves respecting and managing the differences between individuals. For example, when prospecting for business builders to join your LifePharm team, diversity is a plus: the more variety you have in terms of ethnicity, educational background, personality and professional experience, the farther you can expand. Although it may be intuitive to prospect for people who are similar to you, embracing those who are different will help expand not only your own horizons, but also allow you to grow distinguishable “legs” for your business. When you respect the unique differences between individuals, you are giving your business more areas to outreach.

An offshoot of managing differences is the recognition that in some cases, conflict is beneficial. Conflict often produces positive change. It also creates innovative ways to solve problems and ultimately may improve teamwork. Resolving disagreements requires once again, respecting differences. Each person may have a differing point of view and being open minded enough to understand another’s perspective demonstrates a willingness to work together. Even when two people do not agree, just by agreeing to disagree, they often can work together toward the same goal, even if using different approaches.

Being someone with good people skills does not mean you "give in." On the contrary, you need to respect yourself enough to give that same respect to others. Nor does this does not mean that you aggressively maintain your point of view and downplay others. It means that you are assertive yet flexible. If you are the team leader, your tact and diplomacy are needed to “referee” differences, so you may encourage a less assertive personality to express itself while calming a more forceful type.

In building your LifePharm team, each individual’s input is valuable; however, your team’s eventual consensus is even more important to its overall success. The consensus may come naturally or result from compromise between team members. The mutual goal is most important, and how each team member goes about achieving it depends on each person’s comfort level in approaching sales and prospecting.

Some basic communication stumbling blocks are:

• Creating confusion: Are you confusing people with the way you communicate? Is your message simple and clear? Do you know what your intent is: persuading, motivating, informing? Your purpose will determine how you say what you want to say. Make sure you know what your message is, so your delivery can be precise.
• Hearing and not listening: We hear and understand faster than we speak, and this can lead to inattentiveness when on the listening end of a communication. By practicing active listening, we engage with the speaker and better understand the feelings and intent of the speaker.
• Having preconceived notions: When we decide before hearing someone out on what the outcome will be, there is a high risk of misperception, misinterpretation or missing information. Many preconceived notions come from non-verbal communications, such as body language. What the speaker says, in these instances, may be in contrast to what the body language conveys. In reality, the speaker may not even be aware of the discrepancy, while the listener has possibly made a negative snap judgment. Developing good people skills therefore involves learning to understand people's non-verbal communication in order to manage our own.
• Emphasizing differences over similarities: When we focus on what we perceive as differences, we tend to overlook the similarities. Always remember that regardless of ethnicity, educational background, professional experiences and so forth, we are all human beings with the same basic desire to better ourselves.

Integrity is the cornerstone of people skills. Integrity in business means transparency and truthfulness when dealing with prospects and team members. In LifePharm, it requires serving people in an uncompromising way. In other words, you are going to help people first and foremost, and whatever comes of that is secondary—it has been proven time and again that the IBOs who serve without reserve, are the most successful.