On average, two people have about a 40% chance of experiencing a good personality match based on how their personality styles naturally fit together. That means that, most of the time, two people are likely to have a built-in challenge in relating well with each other – UNLESS they understand each other’s personality styles. Today Thomas Miller from his session provided a basic understanding of your personality style and the personality style of those around you that help you lead and connect with others in a more effective manner. In this session we learned how to identify and capitalize on their strengths, reduce struggles based on blind-spots and implement strategies for a more effective approach to organizational leadership.

​Here is a recap of some of the top wisdom points shared:

• Identify patterns in people to better understand them, lead them, and influence in a positive way.
• Remember there are patterns for people that can be observed in a quadrant form. Consider the DISC method.  People are either more Dominant, Influential, Steady, or Compliant personality mindset types. Ds are about the what? Is are about the who. S are about the how. And C is about the why. Measure twice cut once!
• Ds seek results. Active. Multi-tasker. Like to win, plan for future, like new ideas, and be own boss. Greatest Fear: Being taken advantage of. When communicating with a D be brief and direct! Ask what not how questions. Focus on results and discuss problem and outcome.
• Is seek friendly environment. Like to be liked, being in front of groups, like recognition, and activities. Greatest fear for Is is rejection and loss of approval. When communicating with Is don't do all the talking. Don't ignore ideas and allow time for socializing and follow up with details in writing. Four short 10 minute discussions are better then long 40 minute discussion.
• Cs enjoy environment that honors logic and facts. To be right, like clear expectations, and patterns. Appreciate instructions, finishing what is started, and organizing things. Their greatest fear is Criticism. For maximum communication with a C provide a lot of details and use validated facts. Be precise and specific. Answer any questions and follow up with additional data if requested.
• Ss seek a team environment and very loyal. Like teamwork and cooperation. Enjoy sticking with what works and harmony. Their biggest fear is loss of security and confrontation. To best communicate with Ss create friendly tone for discussion and show interest in them as a person. Don't be overly aggressive and minimize potential for confrontation.
• If you know people fall in general pattern shapes you can better understand how to deal with them to best serve their personality types to better serve your communication aims.
• People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. Show interest first and ask questions to show your care to build rapport.
• You have to be good under authority in order to be good in authority. Be able to serve well in order to lead well.
• Nice to be important, but more important to be nice. Be mindful of what you say and how you say it!
• You may actually HELP people by saying no. You can't say yes to everything. If it's not in the other persons' best interest or yours its good to say no.
• It's ok to build the plane while in their air. Take some risks and try new communications.
• Remember all successful communications is about connecting!
  

Thank you for great talk and session Thomas! Special thanks to productcampRTP for wonderful conference!

Today at ProductCamp-RTP a great break-out session was held titled, "Focus on Your Customers" presented by Nancy MacCreery, Founder, Broad Reach Marketing Services, LLC. One of her favorite Pragmatic Marketing sayings is "The answers you seek are not in the building". The point raised is, where do you get customer insights, especially if your organization doesn't have a marketing research department? Her talk helped by illustrating why customer insights are important and 5 practical ways to obtain them. Here is wisdom from talk to support your journey!

• ​Today at ProductCamp-RTP a great break-out session was held titled, "Focus on Your Customers" presented by Nancy MacCreery, Founder, Broad Reach Marketing Services, LLC. One of her favorite Pragmatic Marketing sayings is "The answers you seek are not in the building". The point raised is, where do you get customer insights, especially if your organization doesn't have a marketing research department? Nancys' talk helped by illustrating why customer insights are important and 5 practical ways to obtain them. Here is wisdom from talk to support your journey!
  
• Word of mouth is super important and be careful because a good experience people may share with 9 people, but a very bad experience people tell 22! Approx 43% of people feel less inhibited about complaining online.
• 6-7x more expensive to win a new customer then to keep an existing customer. 5% increase in retention can lead to 25% increase in profits.
• Learn what customers value and are saying about your product or service! Then use what they are saying they love into your marketing messaging, product naming, and development! Stop talking and start listening. Be close to your customer and hear the pulse on how they feel and what they say about your product.
• Always seek how customer insights can help you and what information you need to learn from your customers to improve your offering and better serve them. Engage with your customers to learn more and have them part of your company product development process.
• 5 methods to Gather Insights: Observations, Interviews, Focus Groups, Social Media, and surveys!
• Observational methods are key as you learn a lot from watching people. Even subtle clues like facial experiences during your customer experience or click-through flow and fall offs online.
• Interviews are important as interactive and one-on-one so useful for probing questions and gaining insights from current customers, past customers, and lost prospects.
• Focus Groups are great from interactive with group for directional feedback and getting product feedback on concepts, new products, and issues. Can be done on location or online groups. The key is to have a skilled facilitator and know very clearly what you need to gain out of focus group.
• Social Media listening is useful for monitoring keywords/comments, asking questions, and providing support. Helps you get close to your customer. #1 choice for customer service was people wanting to use social media for support at 34% over the 2nd means via website at 32%
• Surveys are critical to reaching many people at once to get a lot of data points, quantitative gathering of information, and allows you to ask specific questions to many to learn from patterns in data to guide your decisions.
• Keys For Successful Implementation: Respect peoples time, be ready to take action on feedback, reflect your brand and tone. Thank and update participants plus reward them.
• Key Survey Metrics: Measure NPS (Net Promoter Score) to see how likely your customers are to recommend your product
• Other great sources to gain customer insights is from a customer advisory board, customer appreciation events, and educational forums.
• Thank you Nancy MacCreery for great talk and everyone at ProductCampRTP for the wonderful conference.
  
  ​Thank you Nancy MacCreery for great talk and everyone at ProductCampRTP for the wonderful conference.
  

ProductCampRTP™ is where innovators, entrepreneurs, product designers, developers, managers and marketers connect to discover, educate, and network. The goal of conference was to give effective tools to improve your work processes and was filled with enlightening speakers, engaging activities, and the opportunity to network.
The conference kicked-off with a product discussion panel, facilitated by Steve Johnson, VP Products, Pragmatic Institute. Product leaders from RTPs' area's tech firms discussed the future of product and the tech industry. The panelists included Claire-Juliette Beale, Principal Product Marketing Manager, SAS, Eric Iwashita, Associate Product Manager, Pendo, Jack Hilton, Product Manager, UserVoice, and Troy Knight, Founder & CEO, BLDG-25.
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Here is some wisdom from the product discussion panel to help with your career:

• Need product manager and product developer to co-exist, work in partnership, and be on equal footing. To collaborate and be as one team to be successful.
• Sometimes product marketing and management can be like sex. "Everybody is talking about it, but nobody is doing it right." Must focus on best practices and have frameworks to follow that work
• Knowing what you users want is of upmost important. Don't build products people "ought to want". Build products people really need and want.
• Its so easy to switch vendors or brands for other products so you must differentiate and have a product that really delivers and makes people happy and/or does a far superior job for people. Turn your customers into advocates to share your product with others to help evangelize and grow your business from your happy customers.
• Qualitative data from spending quality time with your customers and seeing how they use the product or handle their issues you are trying to solve is critical to your success. Need to use both quantitative hard data, but most importantly spend quality time in the field with your customers for hours observing them with the problems they have and how they interact with your product to really get to know them and pick up on colorful signals you can't discover through numbers alone.
• How is that working for you? This is the key question to stop and learn from your past and where you are at to move forward upward and onward better new and improved.
• Draw a quadrant. One horizontal line is sustainability of your product being offered to be long and strong over time and vertical is vision of your company alongside the product
• Nothing seems hard to people who don't have to do it. Keep all in perspective.
• Do retrospectives and post-modem on business and products that fail to learn from it and ensure you don't do similar failure moves moving forward and get better & stronger in your future iterations and pivots.

Professional presence is an elusive, “you’ll know it when you see it” quality. It’s a blend of personal and interpersonal skills that send all the right signals: the impression you make, how you make others feel, and how effectively you communicate both verbally and non-verbally. It enables respected professionals to connect with others in a meaningful and authentic way by projecting confidence, integrity, and perseverance.

In the final 1/3 of the "Power of Professional Presence" program at UNC we discovered how effective leaders use presence to communicate, influence, and inspire specifically in spontaneous situations. We learned from Clinical Assistant Professor Greg Hohn on theater and impromptu techniques and mindsets that can translate over to our professional work life. Here is top wisdom points shared on how to make a difference by presenting yourself confidently to others in spontaneous and impromptu speaking moments:

• Improv is the art of the moment and becoming an expert at thinking on the fly. To be good at spontaneous speaking it starts with having great "situational awareness". Be aware of the people around you, the setting, read the vibe and room, and then communicate best that makes it all about the people around you.
• While improv and spontaneous speaking is based upon spontaneity, it's very important to still be prepared with key talking points, messages, and themes to pull from.
• Remember the quote, "Plans are useless, but planning is essential". You must always be prepared and practiced for your main communication points to have a well to draw from, but use the spontaneous moments as opportunity to improv to make the message best for the time, place, and people in that moment.
• When in doubt speak from the head with a story and/or speak from the heart powered by emotion that people can relate to.
• In a spontaneous speaking moment if anxiety arises remember to "Feel the fear, but do it anyway". Use the rational mind to calm your emotional mind. Ask yourself what is the worst thing that can happen? What really are the stakes here rationally? Most things are not life and death and that big of a deal. So rationalize it and then calm your emotional mind to just go ahead and deliver your message the best you can. Just bring your A game! Send it!
• Good improv always focuses on your audience and/or person communicating with. Get out of your head and escape your own ego to focus more on the other person. Be connected with the person and audience! Your results of your message will be superior when connecting with your audience and speaking with their hearts and minds as your first priority with message.
• Deliver your message around what that person or audience cares about. Make it all about them. Stick to benefits. What the message means to them. Then keep it simple. Simplify to break down your points to deliver a crisp easy to understand message.
• Understand the difference between perception and projection. "See what you see, not what you think you see". Don't let your assumptions project falsely on what you see in reality. Just see what you see neutrally and perceive all more positively and with an open minded.
• Body balance= Mind balance. If your body is straight, shoulders back, and head up with nice deep breathing then your mind and emotional state will reflect that good body balance posture. So if mind is frazzled focus on good body balance to help bring more mind balance.
• If you get nervous or anxious before a big speaking moment remember two steps. First, accept you are nervous. It's ok. Acknowledge it, but then set it aside. Speak positive to yourself that you will deal with that later. Step two is implement techniques that physically reduce tension like your good straight body balanced posture and deep slow breathing techniques.
• Remember this quote, "A calm body is a good home for a calm mind". Stand up straight relaxed with shoulders back and head up with a smile. Then breath slowly with depth. This makes your body relaxed to evoke a relaxed mind.
• Give people something to trust. The best way for people to trust you in spontaneous moments is to see authenticity and vulnerability in you. To see you genuinely caring to connect with others.
• Remember communicating is all about connecting. And we connect through transparency, honesty, vulnerability, and authenticity. Be the real you and communicate to others in that fashion. The more authentic and vulnerable you are, the more trustworthy and like-able you become.
• It's important to share emotions to convey your message. Know what you want your audience to feel and take away, then communicate from the heart to help evoke that emotion and connect with that message.
• Finally, "Care and Be Aware". Care about the moment, the present, and the people there and the message you want to impart with goodwill. Then be aware of setting, the people, the vibe, and ensure communication matches that setting in the best way possible to connect with all. If you care more about the people you are communicating with then you and care more about the message being helpful to others versus you telling it, and are aware your audience and setting, a great message will be delivered.

Overall a great UNC executive program on communications. Thank you Greg for the wonderful teachings at this class! Hope this helps support your aims to communicate better!