I just spent the past three days with Phillip Davis of Pure Tungsten talking about branding and marketing issues. I find it interesting that marketing and branding is less about the media channels that you use and more about who you are (as an individual, as an organization).
He talked about the pivot point. The pivot point is not about your product or service, but the essence of what your customer wants from you. If you can discover that essence, you can pivot around that point to provide more effective and different products and services.
What is your pivot point?
And I thought about what our pivot point is. It’s not the blog. It’s not our websites, our Working Leadership program. It is the internal conversations that we all have (with ourselves) about what it means to be a manager.
And when we remember the things that are important, it is never about a special day, but only the slices of moments when we are especially lucid. I think that is our pivot point. The moment of those internal conversations that bring meaning to what we do as managers.
I am curious about your thoughts.
Internal conversations are only beneficial when they produce positive results.
For some people though, your internal conversations boil over into a mess of bad emotions you’re left with a lot to clean up and a burnt pot…(your brain for example).
I especially like the last paragraph. I on occasion have felt the lucidness during a conversation with other managers, and have walked away energized.
If I read the language right, by “Pivot Point” you mean core product value – what it is that makes our customers use our product. Then you suggest that as managers our value comes from what or how we think.
Assuming I got the interpretation right, I feel inclined to disagree; I know some very good thinkers who failed as managers because they could not turn their thoughts into actions from their team members.
The core value of a manager has to be how much more effective she can make her team. To do that she has to influence the individuals in her team. The main skill for influencing a team member, is the relationship skill. By building relationships we can influence our teams to make better decisions and increase their effectiveness. Yes that all starts with the right internal dialog, but that dialog is useless without the ability to act on what we think.