Google “leadership” and you will arrive at a total of 147,000,000 results. Leadership is a hot topic. By definition a leader is a person who leads. A guide or conductor, a person who directs, has commanding authority or influence.

Leadership is the process of influencing the thoughts, acts, and motivation of individuals or a group through communication to achieve a vision/goal. Leaders impact our daily lives in both good times and bad times.

This is also a very philosophical question at heart. Propose the question “What is leadership and what purpose does it serve?” to a philosophy class and I imagine that the discussion would be quite electric.
The purpose of leadership is to inspire a person or group of people to accomplish a goal. The leaders purpose is to steer and motivate them toward achievement of a goal for the good of the large. In other words leadership is defined by the purpose it serves: to advance a better way.

Stephen Covey states “Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out”

Leadership is all around us day in and day out on varying scales of degree. The choir as a group leads the church members in song, the lead goose heads south for the winter forming a familiar V shape overhead as other geese join mid flight, the football coach calls a time out to confer with his players, the president holds the annual state of the union address to inform and solidify a nation.

Leading does not equate with being in charge. In actuality, leaders aren’t necessarily in charge at all. Leadership is a combination and application of personal traits, knowledge, skills, talents, attitudes and abilities. One of the styles of leadership is to delegate and a good leader knows when and how to pick the right person(s) for the job.

Intelligence is a trait we are all born although at different levels and it takes training to develop this commodity. Albert Einstein once said, “We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles but no personality. It cannot lead; it can only serve.” Good leaders use and develop their intelligence to pair with their self-awareness, influential skills, perception and appearance of honesty, integrity, and confidence to guide us toward their vision of a better outcome for the group.

Life demands leadership. Where there are leaders there are followers. We require vision along with the direction and motivation to achieve our goals. Without this we are lost. The largest selling book, the bible, states in Proverbs 29:18 Where there is no vision, the people perish.

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In today’s business world, we are nothing without our email. Now, we don’t even need to be sitting in our office to hear the ding of our inbox, alerting us that yet another message has arrived; we live in a time where smart phones are everywhere and we can have our email with us at all times. With all this new technology though, there has also come an onslaught of laws that are designed to keep email compliant with things like customer privacy, law enforcement investigations, and corporate governance. In short, the purposes of the laws are to make sure that email is being used, and managed, properly.

If you work for a doctor’s office, you certainly know about HIPAA. The two rules that affect email compliance are the Privacy Rule and the Security Rule. Of the two, the Security Rule is more in-depth and essentially mirrors the Privacy Rule; its purpose is to focus on information and security best practices and revolves around the security cornerstones of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The Security Rule focuses on everything from workstation management of information to facility access and transmission security. It is vital that any information you send via email, not speak of the patient’s identity or the problem they are facing; many offices will use initials when speaking about patients via email.

In the financial industry, email compliance is governed by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Also known as GLBA, it is basically the same law as HIPAA, just for a different type of business. It is designed to ensure the privacy and security of non-public personal information as it relates to individuals financial information. GLBA’s rules apply to mortgage lenders, banks, stock firms and others of the like. Within GLBA, the financial company is charged with several things: to designate an employee or employees to coordinate the information security program, to identify reasonably foreseeable risks to non-public information, to make sure their suppliers are also using safeguards, and to monitor all of the above.

On top of these two rules, there are also others. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, also known as SOX, is watched over by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. This act was designed in response to the various, and highly publicized, bogus financial reporting in the early 2000s. SOX discusses what information may leave an organization and how long the industry should keep information on file; it requires that financial companies keep emails on file for six years. Likewise, the SEC Rule 17a-4 and NASD Rules 3010 and 3110 affect email communications within the financial industry.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. When it comes to email compliance, there are rules everywhere, and your business needs to know which apply to you and how to handle them. There are several ways to handle these issues, most of which include hiring at least some type of IT security firm to develop a total information security plan that will comply with recent, and future, government email regulations.

Richard Bliss is an Internet Security Expert and VP of Marketing with with worldwide GroupWise compliance software provider GWAVA. Visit them online and see why GWAVA is the #1 software provider for Novell GroupWise.

A poor sales conversation can get you off tracking. Even though you may not be aware you’re doing it, after a bad appointment you shut down and don’t function at your best. You’re calling a time out. I encourage you to take a time out. Just make sure you spend that time in a way that provides value for you.

During prime selling time it’s not uncommon to find salespeople sitting in the local coffee shop reading the paper. A poor sales conversation can be really upsetting even demoralizing. You need time to regroup before you head to the next one, so you don’t have a repeat of the previous experience.

While the experience is fresh in your mind it’s the best time to actually learn from the experience, and make adaptations so you don’t repeat it. In all likelihood you got a stall or objection, or you just didn’t connect from the start and never had a conversation with the other person to begin with. If you’re going to get value from this experience there are a couple things you need to do.

Identify the point where things started to go wrong. If you didn’t connect from the onset, was it because: you didn’t do your homework before making the appointment, you didn’t adapt your communication style to one that was more comfortable to the prospect, or did you try to sell the prospect and manipulate them to do what you wanted them to do not what was best for them? Did you fail to listen to what the prospect was saying causing the prospect to feel disrespected?

If you don’t know it, when you get a stall or objection when your solution is a good match for the prospect it’s because you didn’t help the prospect to discover the value in your solution. That means you either don’t understand the buying process, or you just need more practice. But in the meantime all is not lost.

Make a list of all the stalls and objections you know you’ll get or could get. Here are some common general objections:

I don’t have enough money It’s too complicated or too simple It isn’t all that important to me I’ll just wait and do it later I want to look into other options.

Start with these and add to your list until you’ve thought of as many as possible. Now start thinking of examples and stories of other people or other situations where people thought these things too. Use stories to make a point that removes the validity of that objection for the prospect.

Engaging the prospect with stories is a non-threatening way of getting the prospect to look at things from another perspective. Stories help people to gain a better understanding, and they increase your connection. As you spend time replaying the conversation and thinking of ways you can adapt your behavior in the future you’ll start to regain your confidence. You’ll get fired up for the next insurance sales conversation, and you’ll be much better prepared.

About the author: Cheryl Clausen can help you get unstuck. Look here to see how your Sales Skills match up. Could you succeed faster if you just had more time? Improve your Time Management Skills, check this out