B2B Reads: Strong Leadership, Intellectual Diversity, and Strategic Planning

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In addition to our Sunday App of the Week feature, we also summarize some of our favorite B2B sales & marketing posts from around the web each week. We’ll miss a ton of great stuff, so if you found something you think is worth sharing please add it to the comments below.

How Leaders Can Control Their Frustrations with Team Members
Leaders cannot avoid frustrations amongst their business and employees, however many are aware that they can utilize emotional control to deal with it. Some causes of this frustration come from difficulties with communication, inability to bring change to fruition, and lack of advancement opportunities. It’s important to understand the difference between reacting versus responding, as well as how to control your emotions in these situations. Thank you, John Mattone, for helping us understand how to control our frustrations amongst team members. 

How to Help Your Team Say No at Work
Learning to help your team say no within the workplace is crucial for everyone to feel a sense of control within their careers and general lives. This can be done by knowing when to say no, understanding why saying no can be difficult, and ways that your team is able to approach saying no. Thank you, David Dye and Karin Hurt, for breaking this complicated action down in the most effective and least stressful way possible. 

Leading Adaptive Strategy
Strategic planning is vital to a business’s success and in order to do this effectively, you must be clear on where you want to go and how to get there. Some important ways you can ensure that your strategy is as adaptive as possible is to identify and review strategic assumptions, remember threats, use scenario planning, and build organizational resilience. Thank you, Dr. Rob Sheehan

How to Use your Time Effectively and Efficiently
It can be easy to get overwhelmed by how much you have to do in such little time, but this challenges you to use your time effectively and efficiently to achieve your goals. Some actions that will help you stay focused on what’s important and use your time effectively include writing down and ensuring your priorities are visible, evaluating abd revising your priorities often, and checking for alignment. Steps for efficient time management include creating a to-do list, getting organized, and removing clutter. Thank you, Paul Thornton, for sharing your advice on how to effectively and efficiently manage our time. 

Is it Time to Fire Yourself?
Assessing your performance within your career and position is important for both personal and professional growth. Sometimes this means contemplating how you might do your job differently and being honest with yourself because sometimes we can become too invested or uninterested in the work that we are doing. This is an essential leadership skill of scenario planning. Read more to understand the importance of self-evaluation within your workplace. Thank you, Adam Bryant, for forcing us to measure our performance from a holistic perspective for the benefit of our learning and the company’s success. 

Struggling to Fit In? Don’t. Your Difference is your Gift
Leadership isn’t about the title or being in charge, but it’s about the people themselves who make great leaders. Lessons that can be beneficial for your journey into leadership include your difference being your gift, breaking free of narrow boxes, embracing your own magic, and taking what you’ve learned in practice into habits.Thank you, Kristin Hendrix, for sharing your insights on the difficulties that come with leadership and lessons to combat these feelings. 

4 Ways to Kickstart Happiness
Stress and anxiety are a major cause of disability and even death in our world today, so it’s imperative to optimize your health and wellness emotionally, mentally, and physically. Increasing your daily happiness is critical for a healthier lifestyle and this can be done by suspending disbelief, taking time to be happy even for a few moments each day, understanding how your brain works, and making your happiness a priority. Thank you, Irene Becker, for highlighting what’s truly important within our lives. 

Exploring your Team’s Intellectual Diversity
Diversity isn’t just considering culture, gender, ethnicity, and race but also the different ways that we all think and ideate. Intellectual diversity focuses on the distinct ways or systems that illustrate how people think and process information differently. Mind patterns and thinking talents are systems of perception that relate to different realms of responding to input which must be known to then apply to your teams. Thank you, Weaving Influence, for breaking down how we can explore our team’s intellectual diversity. 

Are You Building an Organization or a Business?
It’s important to understand the answer to this question for the purpose of organizational development. A business is considered to be a linear entity that takes money in, while an organization is considered to be a living, breathing, layered organism that is changing at any given time and is responding to stimuli all of the time. From a leadership perspective, it’s important to be clear about how you view the entity you’re leading. Thank you, Jonathan-Rowan Belchers, for identifying the difference between a business and an organization, as well as why it’s important to understand how you’re leading your entities. 

Stop Spinning Your Wheels: Selling Techniques for Fast Closes
Slow selling kills deals and every salesperson is familiar with the positive feelings associated with a sales process that happens efficiently and quickly. The benefits of moving your customers through the pipeline expose various key leading indicators of how well your sales team is doing. This article breaks down why deals may close quickly or not, as well as how to speed up the sales process. Thank you, Elissa Nauful, for discussing the benefits of fast selling and how to do this effectively.