Maurilio Amorim

Category: business

  • Welcome Pete Wilson to The A Group

    Some of the most significant events in life happen outside any clever planning on our parts. This is ever so true in this new chapter of The A Group. Today, Pete Wilson, author, speaker and former pastor of Cross Point Church in Nashville, TN joins our team as our new President.

    Pete Wilson The A Group
    Pete Wilson joins The A Group

    I have known Pete for many years and served on Cross Point’s Board during its first 12 years. As Pete was going through his own discovery journey for the next chapter in his career, I was contemplating The A Group’s future, and how we could best serve our clients. In a series of events that could only be described as “divine intervention,” both stories came together and a new chapter is being written.

    I founded The A Group almost 15 years ago, seeing a need to offer churches, ministries and non profits excellent marketing and technology services from people who understood their unique challenges. As The A Group grows and continues to serve organizations in the ever-changing world of technology, faith and culture, I realized that it was time for us to offer a fresh perspective and experience that can only come from recent service in ministry. Pete is the perfect person for that job.

    I know Pete’s heart for ministry, as well as the deep knowledge and wisdom he has acquired during his time leading large, growing organizations. Being able to offer his invaluable experience and counsel to other leaders is an honor.

    Nearly every client that comes to us is asking the same questions: how do we reach the next generation? How do we grow in an increasingly secular world? How do we adopt new technology and adapt to a new culture without losing our hearts? Pete has navigated that world with incredible wisdom and success, creating a growing, thriving church that reaches across generations. He has invaluable experience and encouragement to offer other leaders who are facing those same challenges.

    Ultimately this partnership will bring new perspective, creativity and leadership to our clients as well to our internal team. I can’t tell you how excited I am to have Pete as a part of The A Group!

    To read the full story of how this partnership came together, view our full announcement and hear from Pete as he shares his perspective on his blog.

    And be sure to subscribe to The A Group’s blog, as we’ll be sharing encouraging content and resources from Pete each week, along with marketing, technology and donor development resources. You won’t want to miss it!

    Please join me in welcoming Pete Wilson to The A Group. God has great things ahead!

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  • Your First Impression Matters

    “You never get a second chance at a first impression,” sounds like a tired cliche  your mother used to get you to comb your hair as a teenager. But I must say that, too often, professionals lose big when they discount the value of a strong first impression.

    First Impression matters

    We all have heard someone say: “he was not what I expected,” or “I imagined her being different.” Often these comments translate into “he did not look like he had his act together,” or “I expected her to be more professional.” Before you call me shallow and too focused on the veneer of human existence, hear me on this one. I agree we are so much more than the sum total of how we look and dress like. I get that. But no matter how hard we try to get people we meet to see the real us, we will be categorized by our first impression–at least for a while anyway. During those crucial first seconds people will place you somewhere in their minds.  We can make a positive impression or a negative one. Most of the time, we hold the power on how that impression is made.

    Regardless of our physical attributes, there are several things we can do about creating a first impression that will help us in life. Here are some thoughts:

    1. Dress appropriately to your role. Be yourself, but understand that you’re representing your personal brand as well as your professional role. No matter your style, wearing clothing that fits goes a long ways. Ok, this is a pet peeve of mine: coat sleeves that are too long, specially on men, make you look like a child wearing an older sibling hand-me-downs. Scuffed and dull shoes tell people you don’t care about details or finishing a job. You don’t need new shoes to impress someone, just make sure the ones you have are shined.

    2. Engage people with your eyes. Nothing says more about you than your eyes. They are true windows to your soul. If you fail to look people in the eye they might think you either have something to hide or you’re uncomfortable with them.

    3. Smile. That seems so obvious, but I can’t tell how many people I meet whom will extend a hand but their faces tell a different story. A smile is always appropriate.

    4. Get the other person talking about himself. Except for your mother,  no one wants to hear how wonderful you are.  You can never go wrong with focusing the conversation on your new friend.

    5. Assume the person you just met could become a close friend and treat her accordingly. What type of first impression would we make if we approached new people not as strangers but as a new friends we might have for life?

    6. Don’t take yourself too seriously. There’s nothing that endears someone to you more than some self-deprecating humor. My friend Wayne Elsey has a famous line. Every time someone compliments him on something he’s wearing, he often answers: Lane Bryant Catalog.

    What am I forgetting? Do you have any other points?

  • Learning vs Arrogant Organizations: A Lesson in Survival

    Learning organizations grow and live. Arrogant organizations die while looking back at the glory days. In my work as a consultant I can quickly assess if I am dealing with a learning or arrogant organization. No matter the size or age, learning organizations find themselves relevant to their audiences, while arrogant ones might continue to provide a product or service that fewer and fewer people seem to want. But when asked, no business, church, ministry would identify itself as arrogant. But here’s how I differentiate between them.

    learning leading organization

    Learning organizations ask the right questions. While we all want to do what we do better, sometimes that’s the wrong question to ask. “How should we do what we do better?” is a good question but “what should we be doing?” is a better one. You can improve your product or experience to the point of, not only diminishing returns, but obsolescence. You can manufacture the best typewriter in the world, but why would you?

    Learning organizations know what they don’t know. The danger of success is the error of the transfer of expertise into areas where the leading team has none. it’s the arrogance that says, “we are so talented, smart and wise that we don’t need any help from the outside.” Trust me, what you don’t know will eventually catch up with you.

    Learning organizations are led by life-long learners. Leaders set the culture of what they lead. That’s ever so evident when it come to a business or ministry’s ability to continually grow, ask the right questions and not become defensive when challenged by new ideas. If a leader is insecure, or non-teachable, he or she will create a culture of arrogance that will eventually stunt the growth and even kill the organization.

    What’s your experience with a learning organization or an arrogant one?

  • How to Decide If You Can Trust Someone

    There are times you instinctively know you should not trust someone. I have learned to trust my first gut reaction after getting in a business or personal relationship with someone I had second thoughts about only to be burned by them later. While I don’t think I can teach anyone how to develop an intuition on such matters, I can share some of the signs I look for in a person when I first meet them.  Here’s what I watch for:

    How to decide if you can trust someone intuition

    How they treat people whom they perceive “beneath” them. I watch closely the reaction to a restaurant server or an assistant when he or she messes up or fail to perform to the person in question’s standards. I remember one man who wanted to invest in one of my ventures yelling at a woman who served us the wrong beverage. It was an honest mistake. His reaction was clear enough to let me know I did not want to have this man as a partner.

    How they treat animals. I know this sounds crazy.  You don’t have to be an animal lover, but people who are cruel to animals are usually even more so to humans. Stay far away from them. I once did not hire someone who joked about shooting the neighbor’s cat with a BB gun for fun.

    Their business and personal history.  If the person you’re considering partnering with does not have business relationships that are long term that’s usually for a good reason: they have burned too many bridges and now you might be their next victim. Check their friendship network. If the important people in their life are all brand new, that should be a red flag as well.

    How they talk about their previous relationships. If the he quickly talks negatively about his former boss, girlfriend, business partner, without much prodding, chances are you’re the next in line after your deal goes sour.

    What’s important to them. Someone’s world view matters. A lot. If you are trying to align with someone whose priority, sensitivity and belief system is divergent from yours, think twice about it. Well, I’d go even further to say, just don’t do it. At one point I had people working for me who had great skills, but whose worldview were so different than mine that the longer we worked together, the more difficult our work environment became.

    What do you look for as you are trying to figure someone out?

  • The Danger of Being a Critic

    Negativity always comes with a price. A big one. It’s easy for me to be a critic. I grew up in a family that prided itself in finding what’s wrong with the world and each other. It was sort of a sport around the dinner table to see who would outwit the rest and deliver the best put down. We all laughed, but someone always got hurt.

    Now I’m a professional critic whose livelihood is partially funded by my ability to discern what’s wrong or what’s not working and help organizations figure out how to communicate in order to move to the next level. Being a critic is dangerous, and I’m very aware of the negativity that can creep in and suck the life out of every experience.

    critics criticism

    I have to work hard on being positive because cynicism and negativity are the first ones at my gate. I don’t want to end up like a lot of the angry people out there whose lives are dedicated to criticizing, denouncing, exposing, and judging people, who most often, they don’t even know. Sadly, the internet has given them a perfect dark place to hide and hate.

    Henri Nouwen writes about his encounter with an angry man and the effect it had on him. This is a long passage, but worth the reading.

    He sat in front of me. He was in his early sixties. The deep lines in his face, his unkempt hair, but mostly his burned-out eyes showed he was a very unhappy man. We talked about the weather, “It’s hot” he said, “Much too hot, I can hardly breathe, the humidity kills me.” I tried to cheer him up a little by saying, ‘We can use a little sun, and the humidity, well think of it as a free sauna.’ But he did not hear me. No smile came to his face. He began to talk about a colleague who left him many years ago. About a friend who had not called or written to him for two months, and about his neighbors who kept him awake during the afternoon when he wanted to take a nap. My presence was little more than an occasion for him to pour out his many complaints.

    He pointed out to me the corruption in our government, the war in Bosnia, the hunger in Somalia, the violence in South Africa. “The world is falling apart all over the place”, he said, “the television, the radio, the newspapers, they all show it. And they don’t even show the full truth.” I felt a sensation of darkness creeping around me. Where is this darkness coming from, I wondered. I am face to face with an angry man.

    So, I said nothing. I remained silent out of a deep feeling of powerlessness in front of so much rage.

    When I returned home and found myself all alone, I noticed that my body was shaking. I laid down in my bed and stared at the ceiling. And then I saw the angry man again. I saw him, not sitting in front of me, but walking slowly, bent over, pulling an enormous load behind him. He groaned and moaned as he moved forward. At times he seemed to lose his balance.

    As I continued to stare at the ceiling, I saw them all. Men, women, children emerging out of his long past. Chained to each other and to him. And while I kept looking in horror at the old man and his burden, the voice returned to me and said, “You are the man. You are the one you just met.” I didn’t want to hear those words, but the voice went on. “Don’t you see that you can’t let go of your burden. Don’t you see, you are the burden carrier. Don’t you see that without your burden, you don’t know who you are.” I protested, ‘But I don’t want such a burden! I don’t care for such a load.’ But gradually, my heart caused me to see that taking away my burden from me would be like taking the boat from the fisherman or the keys from the janitor or the car from the chauffeur or the bricks from the builder. Who would I be without my anger? Who would I be without anyone to judge or condemn? Who would I be without my complaints, without my feelings of rejection? Yes, without enemies? I am the victim. The one who cannot survive without my burden. I have become my burden.”

    It’s easy for me to hide behind my professional duty to see what’s wrong, broken, the mediocre and let the insidious work of negativity to shape me in to the angry old man Nouwen encountered. I fight it every day. Sometimes I think I’m losing that war.

    Are you a critic? Is it easy for you to see what’s wrong in a situation?

  • Persuasion and the Two Types of Motivation

    What motivates you? That’s the fundamental question for every communicator, sales person and for all us in marketing and communication. While there are a lot of different motivators in our lives, we all fit in two big general motivation categories:

    1.  Those who look at what they can gain from life: what can I get out of this?

    2. Those who look at what not to lose in life: what am I missing and how can I avoid loss?

    two types of motivation

    Often both groups  of people will come up to the same conclusion and course of action, but they will arrive at their decision through completely different motivations.

    This classification goes beyond the “half-full or half-empty glass” perspective of positive and negative people. In my experience, those who look at life for what it has to offer them are always trying to push their personal and professional boundaries in search of the next best thing. Their motivation is tied to achievement and gain. They went to college to gain knowledge and experience and to prepare themselves for a better future. They are always interested in the possibilities and taking chances in search of greater returns for their investments. When I meet people in this category I usually say something like “imagine if we could improve efficiency and reach more people. Look at what this kind of growth this new tool could produce.”

    Those who look at life from an avoiding loss mindset often will take the same course of action as the previous group but will do so not to be left behind and to avoid failing at their business, job or calling. Their fear of loss, irrelevance, or failure will drive them to take risks. People with aversion to loss usually go to college not so much to prepare themselves for an adventurous future but to make sure they don’t end up digging ditches or flipping burgers. Often when talking with people whose motivation starts from an avoiding loss perspective I might have a conversation that starts with something like: “the consequences of not moving forward could cause you to begin to lose ground, but if we close the back door and reach more people we can make some great strides soon.”

    Understanding the person you’re communicating with and their natural bent will help you be more persuasive and get your point across in a way that has the most impact.

    Which type of motivation do you lean towards?

  • The 10% Rule of Life

    We judge most things and experiences on details. I call it it the 10% rule because most of that what makes the details worth of notice usually happen at the very end of a project, building construction, manufacturing, design, experience–the last 10% of completion.That’s why finishing well is not just a good idea, it’s the difference between mediocrity and greatness and even success and failure.

    10% ten percent rule of life

    I don’t care how solid the foundation of a house is or how well-framed the walls are, if the painting is sloppy the entire structure gets devalued. “It’s just cosmetic,” you might say, but in the minds of most people the entire product gets devalued because of the last 10% of effort was not done well.  The opposite is true as well. Sometimes a beautifully finished building will garner top price before its owners find out that at core the structure is substandard. The value, rightfully or not, is mostly assessed by our first impression of the very last phase in any project. In construction we have even named them  “finishes.”

    Your last 10% can also be more than just an impression. It can be the difference between success or failure. I’ve been in multi-million dollar church facilities where I couldn’t hear or see well. After millions spent on steel, concrete, pipes and electrical wires, costs overrun “value engineered” sound, lighting and video to something inadequate.  The 10% rule comes to bear here and the entire church experience gets downgraded because the most important aspect of it, the message, gets no priority.

    Over the years, I have stopped using some very talented freelancers because they constantly break the 10% rule. They can get projects close to completion with brilliant ideas, but fail to deliver at the very end. They often “disappear”, miss deadlines, can’t get corrections and fixes done, or are not able to take direction to bring their vision and the client’s expectations in line.

    What are you thoughts on the 10% rule?

     

  • Vision, Tenacity and Your Success

    I was recently reminded that great organizations, missions and even products were ideas in the mind of a visionary who more often than not, did not have the proverbial two dimes to rub together when they saw the opportunity and set out to seize it.  Such dynamic has always fascinated me. For me the question has always been, “Did it succeed because it was a good idea or because the sheer tenacity of its visionary leader?”

    vision tenacity, Mount Rushmore
    Gutzon Borglum”s vision and tenacity built Mount Rushmore

    After going back and forth on the answer, I have come to believe that the answer is both –a good idea in the hands of a passionate and committed visionary.  I have seen great ideas, quantified by research, die because it lacked a champion that drove through the obstacles and refused to let roadblocks stop it from coming to fruition.

    I have also seen strong, hard-driving leaders hold on to a bad idea and pour their lives and resources into something that was ill-conceived or too far ahead of its time.  If you pour resources into a bad idea, you will only cause it to die slower.

    Success lies in the integration of a good idea and the resolute spirit that will not let it alone until it is born, grows and thrives.

    Now when I’m faced with an opportunity I always ask myself these two questions: “how good of an idea is it?” and shortly thereafter, “Am I passionate enough about it to make sure it can come to life and grow?”

     Have you ever had a great idea? What happened?

  • What’s My Motivation? How to Reward Your Team

    Understanding how to motivate people is key in any business and specially in non-profits. Early in life I thought most people were motivated by cash. After all happiness comes with more stuff, right? Well, that’s not been my experience. While most of us want to live well, most people I know would give money for the satisfaction of doing something they love. While I still have a long way to go in becoming a better manager of people, here’s a few things I’ve learned over the years.

    How to reward your employees

    Praise publicly, criticize privately. There’s nothing more encouraging to a team member than the praise of a superior in a public setting. The opposite, however, is true for criticism. Over the years I have made the mistake of inverting this equation with dire consequences.

    Take a chance. Everyone wants to have an impact in their work environment. One of the most motivational things you can do as a team leader is to take a chance on an idea or project by someone who works for you. This type of affirmation means more to some than money.

    Be creative. Maybe cash is tight and you can’t offer perks than your competitor but you can create a dynamic work environment where people thrive. Managers have seem to think that throwing cash at a problem is the only way to solve it. it seldom is. People want to contribute, make a difference and belong to a winning team that’s accomplishment something positive.

    Unless you understand what people value the most, you cannot properly reward someone. For some is to hear words of affirmation, others is the ability to take more ownership or implement of an idea, and, yes, to some it’s a raise.

    Beyond a raise, how do you want to be rewarded?

  • Selfishness: a Team Killer

    Some call it self preservation. I call it selfishness. As a consultant I see selfishness and a lack of respect for the team that happens in most organizations, including in ministry. But this less-than-ideal motivation is often masked as an altruistic quality by its offender. Here are few examples of how people hide their selfishness in business settings.

    Selfishness a team killer

    The Exaggerator. He makes the problem bigger and more dire than it really is so he can assure his request gets funded. His new computer is way more important than anyone else’s. In my experience, people in IT have the corner on this one. Throw in a few jargon words like API, SAS followed by “security breach” and the boss is asking how soon he can have that computer set up.

    The Diva. Everyone knows that if she doesn’t get her way, there’s going to be a meltdown soon. The Diva’s project, opinion and importance are always paramount. She gets offended easily and when challenged, outrage is sure to follow. “What do you mean, you disagree? Do you know how much experience I have in this field? Let me tell you . . . ”

    The Drama Queen. Everything is about him. Yes, you don’t have to be a woman to be a drama queen; it’s gender-neutral. And, no, drama king doesn’t work. If a coworker is having a tough day, then the drama queen’s world becomes chaotic with extra stress over the situation. No matter what happens at the office, the drama queen will find a way to make it about herself. “Did you hear that Bob in accounting got fired?” “Bob? Why does everyone I care about leaves me?”

    What other form of disguised selfishness have you encountered in the work force?