We hope you had a warm and safe holiday season and the stockings were full.

Banyan exists to enhance the success of those we are fortunate enough to know, and after 11 years, the tree of connections and relationships keeps growing.

Everyone is on their own path toward their vision of success, yet we have noticed some common traits and habits while listening. In these publications, we try to create a collective understanding of what is working now and what changes we are noticing.

Grainger is an industrial supply company that says they are “Here to serve you, the ones who get it done.” At Banyan, we aim to offer a similar service but with business strategy and tactics.

In the spirit of “Getting it Done in 2025,” here is what we noticed this year and how we think it might impact you.

Who We Listen To

The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal appear to be the final two print publications bridging the gap to the digital world of podcasts and alternative format media.

The cable TV world is now feeling the squeeze they gave to the broadcast players decades ago from the streamers of Netflix, Amazon, Apple, and YouTube.

Millions of choices mean the audience is not guaranteed to be on the same page, and we all need a sorting machine that hasn’t been created yet. “What are you watching?” is something I often hear in social settings.

Podcasts have been improving and do a good job of allowing niches to exist. I noticed our habits have changed a bit. I listen to the following podcasts.

The Allin Podcast – www.allin.com for a weekly review of business and technology.

The Founders Podcast – www.founderspodcast.com for a study of human success through biographical review.

This Week In Startups Podcast – www.thisweekinstartups.com for a bottom-up look at what new technologies are being built and interviews with the founders.

I listen to podcasts when in the car and doing my chores around the house and yard on the weekends.
It is really interesting that 60 years after the world was getting information from Walter Cronkite while sitting in front of a small screen, more and more people are getting their information on the fly while they are moving and listening. Yes, people are also watching videos, but the need to be informed while remaining static is gone.

Keep Moving…

All the billionaires are back in the game.

Imagine if you could have all the greatest NBA players on the court simultaneously at their prime, playing in a mythical NBA finals. Bring the popcorn! Watching Jordan and Bill Russell match wills against Shaq and Bird with Magic and Steph flying around the court, chirping would be epic.

Well, that is what it feels like in the business world right now, as all the big players are allocating capital and making bets on retaining or gaining more leverage as the AI revolution continues. Bezos is back at Amazon, Sergey is back at Google, and Elon appears to have at least 5-billion-dollar bets running.

The good news is that we are all playing in this game, and over 2024, we chronicled what we thought were the crucial work skills professionals should be acquiring and honing to sustain excellence. The Crucial Work Skills white paper is meant to combine with our Essential Elements of Close Knit Teams white paper from 2023 to empower you to bring your best self while working with others for joint success.

One reader asked us what we thought the most crucial work skill would be right now, and in reviewing what we wrote and learned this year, it has to be the ability to deeply understand what your customer needs next. What are they frustrated with right now, what pain are they living with, and how can you help improve their condition?

We have called this tactical empathy and will be diving further into how you can improve your ability to understand your customers' needs so that you earn the right to have a crucial conversation about getting them to a better state.

You may not be a billionaire, but you are in the game of business, and 2025 appears to be another year of adaptability and flexibility as you use new tools to surprise and delight your customers.
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Bring on the new year; we can’t wait!

I have had the same conversation with clients five different times in the last week, which means I should post it on LinkedIn for the benefit of my network.

I have been encouraging them to send out an email asking all their prospects if they will be looking for their services in the first or second half of next year.

December 15th and June 15th are significant dates to email all of your prospects because you can use the calendar's full effect as a flanking mechanism to set up appointments with your target audience. Because if you ask someone about two halves of a year and the answer is neither, then are they really even a prospect??

You also get a chance to flush out the crap in your funnel, which naturally shows up as we dream up ways that a casual conversation really might mean business in the future :)

In professional services of all types, the first business meeting, where the prospect discusses and shares details, is the true leading indicator of future success.

People don't like to track it because it shows just how few they actually have in a year, but we must track it, as performance measured is performance enhanced!

This brings us back to why Dec 15th matters: You get to write the following email to your "prospect" list.

____________________________

Email Subject: Checking in on the First Half of 2025 - Should we schedule a call?

We are officially in the Holiday season, with functions and events almost every hour, so I recognize that you may not get to this email right away.

However, as things calm down around the new year, I wanted to get a quick response from you on a simple question.

Will you be looking at (insert your services) in?

A. The first half of 2025
B. The second half of 2025
C. Not in 2025

We will pattern our follow-up with you based on your answer.

Thanks so much,
Drew
_____________________________
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This type of email may be hard for you to send out, but it does tie in nicely to our recent post on When is the right time for a hard conversation question??

For all business owners, the answer is "Now would be fine".

Conflict is hard no matter what form it takes.

We watch organized conflict in sporting events, which can be quite aggressive, and we also experience a subtler form of conflict at work, where passive-aggressive behavior can rule the day.

No matter what your role is on a work team, you will eventually need to be able to work across the company channels and have a plan for dealing with conflict that naturally occurs. Even inside your department, a constant stream of conflicting ideas or personalities necessitates one’s ability to get in and out of a hard conversation.

The consulting firm Vital Smarts out of Utah wrote a best-selling book, Crucial Conversations, over 30 years ago and has trained thousands of employees worldwide. They aim to help companies have a common language for handling the foreseen and unforeseen issues in delivering their goods and services. All their research shows that how people communicate with each other matters in calm and tense situations.

Jim Collins wrote a best-selling business culture book called “Good to Great.” After a massive regression analysis, Collins identified the highest-performing or great companies and their common characteristics. Along with leaders who saw problems like a mirror and successes like a window, getting the right people on the bus was the key to success. It appears that culture matters.

Glenn Parker spent a career developing systems for team communication and collaboration at large companies and then published his work along with a short 18-question survey that allows people to learn what their dominant team player style is and how to work with others once they are aware of how that style impacts how you in a group setting. Parker’s work is helpful to a leader who is inheriting a team and reminds us of Peter Drucker’s simple observations in his white paper "Managing Oneself" that readers and listeners will sometimes struggle to collaborate well.

All this research on culture and team success is important as leaders like Jeff Bezos evangelize their 6-page summary style of communication for two pizza teams, and everyone rushes to emulate what worked for him and assumes it will work for them. We don’t think it is that easy.

You need to have a plan to lead yourself and others, and once you are the leader, you are entitled to run the system you think fits the objectives of the moment.

Our last crucial skill might appear to be an accumulation of these nuanced people skills, which start with having a full tool belt that allows you as an individual contributor to listen with compassion, ask questions with the right tone, be prepared to navigate conflict, state your points of view clearly, and work within the system that has been outlined by the leader.

As a front-line manager, you would seek to enhance these skills by further understanding how your team should communicate and which channels will be the single source of truth (CRM, Slack, email, meetings) as you work together.

Finally, if you are the CEO and are looking to recruit the best leadership team you can, it would appear important that you outline the system you have in place for operational excellence and how you intend to manage and lead the communication mechanisms for building a company culture that runs towards the problem.

Without a plan and a process for identifying Moments of Maximum Influence (MOMI'S), the more people you hire, the more variety you will get in how they handle or avoid conflict. This clutter and confusion will be hard for your early people to define, but they will feel it, and it can crush your morale when you need it most.

An intuitive leader will also be looking for hard conversations that aren’t happening inside and outside of the company and looking to unlock those MOMIs with the right communication topics and skills.

An easy way to tell when meeting with a company is to ask when the right time to have a hard conversation is:

If people look at their feet, you know the answer is never.

If they look you in the eye and say, "Now would be fine," you know you have a winner.

Click here for our full publication on Crucial Work Skills.