Windsor Training: October 2014

Wednesday, 29 October 2014

4 Ways to Give Effective Criticism at Work

The image shows an army drill instructor shouting at a new recruit and this is supposed to symbolize the feeling that an employee has when they feel that they are being criticized unfairly.

Nobody really likes to be criticized: the word has negative connotations of someone pulling your work apart and telling you how bad it is and making you feel angry and annoyed, just like a drill instructor shouting at a new recruit. The reality is that people are often simultaneously bad at giving criticism and similarly poor at receiving it. Whilst we often like to think that we are giving out good advice and feedback, the recipient may hear our words as negative criticism and respond in a way that we had not intended.

Couching everything as mere feedback often misses the point that there may be serious performance issues that need to be addressed. That doesn't, however, mean that the manager has to adopt an overtly negative or hyper-critical approach to giving meaningful and developmental criticism. Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos are famous for roasting colleagues, you and I have to be more positive in our approach, if we want to develop our team and deliver on our objectives.

So how do we ensure that as a manager we are a good critic to?

#1 – Accentuate the Positives

Start by praising what went well. If you start on a positive then you have the team member on side and they'll also believe that what you are telling them is balanced and considered and they may be more receptive to what you have to say. If you launch in with what went wrong, then you will alienate them from the outset and their defences will be up, even if you then proceed to give them some praise for something that went well.

#2 – Highlight Progress

Even if the performance isn't quite where it needs to be, give credit where progress has been achieved and forward momentum has been made. A key part of motivation is to feel that we are getting good at something, but if all we hear is how bad we are doing, even where some progress – however slight – is being made, then this can be a powerful de-motivator. If things have improved, then say so.

#3 – Be Encouraging

Suggest that the issue can be resolved and that the team member is capable of overcoming it and succeeding, given the right encouragement and support. Try and be nurturing towards your team, because the payback in terms of the boost to performance will be incalculable and you will be building a supportive and loyal group around you.

#4 – Share the Blame

Don’t make the team member out to be a scapegoat. If you are the manager, then some of the blame probably sits on your shoulders and if part of the reason is something that you did, or failed to do, then say so. Otherwise you will just start to build resentment and a belief that you are prepared to sacrifice others and shift the blame. Your team don’t expect you to be infallible, but they do expect you to have broad enough shoulders to admit your own mistakes when they happen.

Will Trevor is the Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training. Please click 'Follow' if you would like to hear more from Will in the future. Feel free to also connect via his Linkedin page, or via Twitter and Facebook or email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

TESCO: What Went Wrong?

The picture shows a outdoors billboard advertising a competitor to Tesco superstores, but the poster uses a Tesco slogan and instead says, " Every Lidl Helps".

Few people could have predicted the demise of one of Britain’s leading retailers and fewer still would have dared to imagine it to have been quite so dramatic and as sudden as it was. Recently Tesco shares have plummeted, seeing nearly half their value wiped out on the back of a management admission that it overstated first half yearly earnings by £250 million ($400 million), with pre-tax profits down by 92% and a 56% fall in UK trading profits. Some have pointed to a failure of leadership and management and others have highlighted the role of 'Big Data'. But Tesco’s reversal of fortune has been such that even the billionaire investor and ‘Sage of Omaha’, Warren Buffett, was prompted to admit in a recent NBC interview:

"With Tesco, we definitely made a mistake. I made a mistake on that one more than anybody else made a mistake ... That was a huge mistake by me."

What has gone wrong with the UK’s leading retailer?

There are a number of factors that we can attribute to Tesco’s failure. Michael Schrage of MIT Sloan and HBR, has highlighted several areas, but particularly Tesco’s fabled reliance upon ‘Big Data’, so let's look at four key factors:

#1 - The failure of Fresh and Easy in the USA:

Tesco never quite recovered from the severe dent to its reputation from the high profile failure of its Fresh and Easy convenience stores in the USA. When the company finally pulled out, its plans to have over a 1,000 stores across the country were in tatters and it was nursing over £1.6 billion in losses from its investment.

#2 - The rise of the ‘deep discounters’ and greater price competition:

Tesco and a number of the other leading grocery retailers have failed to get to grips with the fierce price competition from discount chains such as Lidl and Aldi, particularly within Tesco’s home market, the UK. The discounters directly attacked the Tesco strategy of ‘everyday value’ and a recent marketing campaign by Lidl even mocked the well-known Tesco strapline, by substituting their own name, “Ever Lidl helps” (see the picture above).

#3 - Management Succession – the departure of Terry Leahy:

Academic books are probably already being written about the inability to effectively manage the succession from the previous chief executive, Terry Leahy, to the current embattled incumbent, Phil Clarke. Clarke has failed to reach the heights achieved by his predecessor. Tesco may yet become a case study in botched management succession to match the lessons to be learnt from the handover of Sir Alex Ferguson to his ill-fated successor, David Moyes, at Manchester United.

#4 - Big Data Disillusionment?

Tesco virtually wrote the book on using big data to hone its deft marketing with powerful analytics that enabled it to target and segment with the information gleaned from its Clubcard loyalty programme. Other retailers, both in the UK and internationally, viewed with awe the incredible dexterity with which Tesco was able to use its data to gather insights about customer loyalty and behaviour. Increasingly, however, as a recent Telegraph article made clear, consumers may be getting disillusioned by the loyalty cards which are seen as being more advantageous to the retailer than they are for the consumer. The appeal of the discounters, such as Aldi and Lidl, has perhaps come from their simplicity and straightforward approach, maybe offering a slice of how shopping used to be before data and analytics changed the retailing landscape.

Tesco: Corporate Failure or Future Turnaround?

All of this is not to suggest that Tesco is in terminal decline and it may yet regain its mojo, but there is no doubt that the average student’s favourite case study in business success, may be replaced by one of corporate failure. Whether that then morphs into a study in corporate turnaround, remains to be seen, but with recent media attention focusing on an ill-timed purchase of an executive jet, the retailer that could once do nothing wrong, now seems to be getting the attention for being unable to do anything right.

Sunday, 26 October 2014

Bill Gates or Steve Jobs? Who will we remember in 50 years?

I’d like to get a debate going and I’d like to have your views.

Two of the greatest technological and entrepreneurial leaders of this age are Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, but how will we remember them in terms of their legacy of leadership and entrepreneurship? Who will we remember in years to come for their legacy to future generations?

Gates has the advantage of still having time to shape his legacy, whereas Jobs’s deeds are now cast in stone and open to interpretation. Maybe it’s a little unfair to set this up as a boxing match between two entrepreneurial heavyweights, but my question was inspired by the comments of best-selling Canadian author and speaker, Malcolm Gladwell.

Jobs: The 'Tweaker'

In an article in the New Yorker, Gladwell said that Jobs was more of a ‘tweaker’, rather than a true innovator and visionary. He argues that Jobs didn’t invent the graphical user interface (GUI) and the mouse, instead he took the ideas from the Xerox research center at Palo Alto (PARC). He also didn’t invent the iPod, he waited until early MP3 technology had been tested and developed elsewhere and then launched his own device. Gladwell says of Jobs:

"Every single idea he ever had, came from somebody else. And he would be the first to say this. He would also take credit for things. He was shameless. He was an extraordinarily brilliant businessman and entrepreneur. He was also a self-promoter on a level that we have rarely seen.

Gates: The Philanthropist

Gates, on the other hand, would be remembered for his charitable work and the fact that he has established the Gates Foundation with billions of his own money, claiming that there would be statues of him across the Third World, not for his entrepreneurship or leadership, but because his money is likely to fund a cure for malaria.

In Defence of Jobs

Defending Jobs, the Forbes columnist, Frederick Allen, argues that Gladwell gets the nature of invention and Job’s achievements wrong. According to Allen, if you use Gladwell’s definition, then all of greatest inventions are tweaks: Ford didn’t invent the automobile; the Wright brothers didn’t invent flying; and there were a number of light bulbs before Edison’s.

What Jobs did was to build a better device for the storing and retrieval of music and he also built an ecosystem to support it, with the iTunes platform. As for the mouse and the GUI, Steve Jobs biographer, Walter Isaacson, points out how limited the developments were that PARC had made and that the Apple team brought the whole desktop dream to reality, enabling things to be dragged, dropped, resized and manipulated, like never before.

So what do you think: will we remember Gates for his charitable work and Jobs as an innovator and visionary? What do you think will be their legacy in 50 years’ time?

Thursday, 16 October 2014

What can the West learn from the Developing World about education? #Fixit

There is a slightly outdated, though stubbornly enduring, perception that education in the West is the hallmark of excellence and that the developing world still has a lot of catching up to do. Whilst this may be the case in some areas, it is by no means true across the board and excellence and best practice can be seen within the developing world, despite, and because of, the many challenges and limited resources. As my contribution to the #Fixit debate I am going to argue that there is a great deal that we can learn from the developing world and we have no room for complacency and I'm going to draw upon the thoughts of two experts.

The first is Sugata Mitra, Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University and winner of the TED Prize 2013, and the second is Adam Braun who builds and runs schools in the developing world through his non-profit organization,Pencils of Promise. Their recent collaboration on Microsoft’s Work Wonders project brought forth five insights as part of a TED discussion from their own experience of how the West can learn from the education systems of the developing world, where innovative approaches are adapted in the face of need:

Children can be teachers: In classrooms in the West, there is still ostensibly an assumption that the teacher is the expert and the students are there to learn. However, the actual act of teaching is a powerful learning experience in itself and Sugata Mitra has formalized this in his SOLE (Self-Organized Learning Environment) programme, where students teach each other, without the mediation of a teacher. The student as teacher is a common feature of some classrooms in the developing world, often because of the mix of age groups and ability and also the large class sizes.
Movement and Learning: How many times do we remember being told to sit up straight and sit still? This actually runs counter to scientific evidence which shows that brain activity increases after physical activity. So the rather chaotic environment of a classroom in the developing world can be more conducive to proactive learning, because of the lack of desks and equipment requiring movement and activity, rather than rigid motionless concentration.
Limited Resources Necessitate Cooperation: When there is one computer and five children, they learn to cooperate and work together, rather than sit isolated in their own world with a computer to themselves and little reason to interact with the person sitting next to them.
Reading Together Aids Comprehension: As with the previous point, Sugata Mitra noticed that when students read something together from the Internet on a large screen, then their comprehension increases because of the collective input, rather than the solitary act of reading that is encouraged in the West.
Using Symbols Helps Learning: Progress has been made in encouraging students to develop a form of sign language to assist them in their reading, because learning is both a visual and auditory experience, but by adding symbols this brings in the spatial plane as well.

What can we do to #Fixit?

These are some deceptively powerful insights that could deliver a handful of tangible gains within the classroom, but what actions can we take to utilize the points mentioned here?

Encourage more opportunities for students to teach each other in small groups – something I tried when teaching core mathematics with a very mixed ability and multinational group of students. The results were encouraging.
Encourage more movement and activity, at regular intervals and during break time. Often the requirement to retain rigid discipline magnifies minor infractions, but if you tolerate a greater degree of movement and noise, there may be learning benefits for the group.
Switch of a few computers! Encourage a group of five to cluster around the computer and come up with cooperate a collaborative approaches to issues, rather than solitary silo learning. This may also encourage the movement and activity as well.
Group reading. This links to the previous point: try and raise levels of comprehension by encouraging the grouped approach to computer work.
Sign Language. A number of schools already teach sign language anyway, but for early years learning, also encouraging students to develop signs as an aide memoire for difficult words may encourage a higher level of comprehension and language skills.

Some of these ideas are already being implemented in classrooms, but they are valuable insights from two acknowledged experts. Sugata Mitra has actually made a valuable point that it is actually not entirely about what we can learn from the developing world, but more correctly, “What can children teach us about learning?”

Written by Will Trevor - Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Picture Credit: By Godot13 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Tuesday, 14 October 2014

"Planes, Trains and Automobiles": What next for 3D printing?

The picture shows a group of 3D printed heads in a variety of colours, which represent the versatility of 3D printing to create items of varying size, shape and colour.

In 2008 I remember standing in front of a 3D printer at the Renault Formula 1 team factory in the heart of ‘Motorsports Valley’ in Enstone, Oxfordshire, in the UK. I had never seen a 3D printer before and I marvelled as layer upon layer was added to what was a precision part for the high performance engine of a formula one racing car. I watched mesmerized as the piece slowly rose and took shape, as if from some primordial soup. 3D printing has been around for a couple of decades now, with some suggesting that its impact and potential has been over-hyped. Nevertheless, there have been a number of high profile breakthroughs in this sector, from Makerbot to the more controversial 3D printed handgun, and last week saw the arrival of the first 3D printed car, the Strati, but where is all this going and what next for 3D printing?

Prosumer or mass market?

Debate still rages as to whether 3D printing will remain the preserve of the power user, or prosumer, or make the leap to the mass market, with 3D printers someday becoming as ubiquitous as your average desktop Epson or HP printer. Gartner, the technology research organization, in a recent report has suggested that mainstream 3D printing is about 5 to 10 years away.

Use of the term ‘3D printing’, however, really seems to have fired people’s imaginations and helped to transform a little-understood industrial process into the perception that this is becoming a more mainstream technology that is now on everybody’s lips and with the power to disrupt. In the past few years that evolutionary process has been helped, amongst other things, by the rise of a number of startups intent on challenging the big boys by attempting to bring 3D printing to the desktop, such as Makerbot and Formlabs. Such was their promise that they soon came into the crosshairs of the industry big beasts, with Stratasys snapping up Makerbot in 2013. Whilst the jury is still out on whether this will be good for the industry in the long term, the drama from startup to corporate prey is well chronicled in the Netflix documentary, “Print the Legend”.

“You can have every color you like, including black!”

There is no doubt that 3D printing has the potential to be a disruptive technology that may forge a new industrial revolution and overturn the logic of outsourcing manufacturing to the developing world and upend the requirement for economies of scale in making manufactured goods. Instead of long production runs and expensive tooling, I can make one item almost as economically as one million and I can customize it so that it’s exactly the way you want it, from colour and styling to functionality and form. As Henry Ford might have said, if he was talking about 3D printing, “you can have every color you like, including black!”

7 Sectors: Disruptive Technology & New Industrial Revolution

Here are seven sectors where I think that 3D printing will bring about a revolution in the way in which we manufacture and distribute 3-dimensional physical objects:

Pharmaceuticals – The potential here is vast and it has the long term potential to disrupt the multi-billion Dollar pharmaceuticals industry by allowing customers to print their drugs and medicine at the point of need. Not only would it make simple over-the-counter medicines, like Ibuprofen, cheaper to produce, but also drugs where there is low demand could be printed cost-effectively for the patient, because economies of scale would not make producing small batches prohibitive.
Automobiles – If the arrival of the Strati is anything to go by, there could come a day when you just walk into the car dealer’s showroom and have the make and model that you want printed there and then for you. At least that is the vision of Jay Rogers the CEO of Local Motors the company that designed and built the Strati. With just 49 parts, including the 3D printed body shell, that represents a considerable saving on the circa 5,000 parts needed to build the average family car.
Aerospace – Disruption is already being felt within the aerospace industry, with GE’s new LEAP and GE9x engines using 3D printed fuel nozzles and turbines that add to the durability of the part, but also reduce fuel consumption. The potential is for airlines to print the part they need, wherever in the world the aircraft happens to be, whether that is at some remote airport, or even for an airforce jet onboard an aircraft carrier.
Construction – In China the construction company Winsun recently produced 10 3D printed houses in a single day and for a cost of $5,000 per unit and atUSC California a team is working on a large 3D printer that will fabricate a house in one go: walls, electrics and plumbing. These changes may bring cheaper and more affordable houses for the masses and the potential for disruption is huge.
Healthcare and Prosthetics – In this sector strides are already being made in terms of prosthetics and diagnosis is being assisted by physicians able to see a 3D printed model of a heart from a scan, to enable them to examine its structure and propose an appropriate treatment. There is even progress being made in the field of bioprinters that could make everything from ears to vital organs.
Manufacturing – It is conceivable that when you place an order via the Amazon website that the item is then produced at the large sheds that were once their vast distribution centers and now become their distribution and manufacturing centers and delivered by drone, of course. The ability to produce anywhere and in any volume may well disrupt the comparative economic advantage that low-cost manufacturing nations, such as China, have enjoyed over the developed world. This is somewhat different from onshoring, because you will not see the same numbers of people employed in vast factories being repatriated, instead there may be scope for small specialist printers for items that cannot be fabricated instore or in the home.
Food – Who needs Raymond Blanc when your 3D printer can rustle up a gourmet meal without the need to travel to the nearest fine dining restaurant? All I do is download the file and the printer does the rest and with no messy pots and pans to wash up after the meal! There are a number of 3D food printers already on the market, such as Foodini, Candy and Chefjets and they are working with confectionary, pasta and chocolate. NASA has even funded research to produce 3D printed food for deep space missions.

These are just a few areas where the initial ripples of disruption are starting to be felt, but this revolution is not going to be overnight, and my list is by no means meant to be exhaustive, I could quite easily have mentioned the advances being made in other applications, such as entertainment, art, fashion, and jewellery, etc. And if you think the price of replacing your laser print cartridges is exorbitant, just you wait until you are paying for the 3D replacements for your desktop 3D printer!

What do you think? Is 3D printing just over-hyped or are we on the verge of a new industrial revolution?

Written by Will Trevor - Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Picture credit: By S zillayali (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Sunday, 12 October 2014

"THE NEXT BIG THING"?: The Top 10 Emerging Technologies

The picture shows a half face of a model wearing a pair of Google glasses. It symbolizes the emerging technologies and represents wearable tech, which is one of the emerging technologies mentioned in the article.

People always want to know what the next big thing is likely to be, because if you can catch a wave before anyone else does then you may stand to make a fortune. Steve Jobs didn't invent the mouse, the graphical user interface, or the MP3 player, but he certainly knew a good idea when he saw one and he was able to exploit it at the right time and in the right way and then how to incorporate them into Apple products.

The pace of change in terms of technology is breath-taking and at the moment we are seeing new products or materials that may revolutionize our lives: 3D printing, the ‘Internet of Things’, Graphene, to name but a few. Some have been in development for a while, others promise to open up new opportunities and create new industries. The entrepreneurs who can envisage future uses and trends will be the ones who may profit most from these new technologies.

I am not proposing to let you in on some big secret about what the next big thing will be, but here are ten that are worth watching, according to the World Economic Forum and identified in the ‘Top 10 Emerging Technologies for 2014’ report:

1. Body-adapted Wearable Electronics - Shifting the boundaries between ourselves and the technology, this is products like Google Glass and Fitbit. These are usually external wearables, but they are morphing into something more sophisticated that will do more than just monitor our heart rate and instead provide a range of real-time feedback.

2. Screenless Display - Releasing us from the physical constraints of a smartphone or tablet screen, screenless display promises to allow the projection of holographic key boards onto a surface, for example, or images projected directly onto the retina.

3. Human Microbiome Therapeutics - Our greater understanding of the thousands of microbes that inhabit the human ecosystem of millions of cells is leading to significant breakthroughs in terms of new treatments for serious diseases and the potential for vast improvements in our general healthcare.

4. Brain – computer Interfaces – controlling computers with the power of the mind is not just for X-Men and Dr Who, we have already seen technology that enables quadriplegics to move their wheelchairs or manipulate a robotic arm to lift an object.

5. Quantified Self (Predictive Analytics) – Basically data gathering on just about everything related to your daily life. Smartphones and other such ubiquitous technology is making vast amounts of data available that will assist everything from urban planning to traffic management. Privacy concerns abound, however.

6. Nanostructured Carbon Composites – Developing stronger and lighter composite materials, which would make vehicles much lighter, but also allow greater strength to absorb impacts. Boundless potential in both defence and civilian uses for these materials.

7. Mining Metals from Desalination Brine – With the Earth’s population exploding, freshwater will become a scarce commodity. Desalination of seawater becomes an attractive proposition, but it uses considerable energy. By extracting valuable minerals and metals, this could offset the costs of desalination.

8. Grid-scale Electricity Storage – Unlike fossil fuels, renewable sources of energy such as wind and wave cannot be stored. New technologies, such as flow batteries, may enable us to store the resulting energy from renewables in a way that is similar to fossil fuels.

9. Nanowire Lithium-ion Batteries – Batteries that could charge more quickly and generate more electricity and may revolutionize the electric car industry.

10. RNA-based Therapeutics – An important part of DNA that enables cells to function. RNA-base drugs offer the promise of treatments for a range of genetic disorders, cancers and other infectious diseases.

You may be able to spot the potential in one of these ten emerging technologies and if you do, you could be the entrepreneur who is lauded as bringing forth the ‘next big thing’.

What do you think will be the next big thing?

Written by Will Trevor – Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Picture Credit: By Tim.Reckmann (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Tuesday, 7 October 2014

"As You Like It": Getting Liked on Social Media

How do we get someone to like what we are doing on social media? Is it the same in person as it is on social media or is there something else going on?

We all want to be liked, unless, of course, you are the Grinch or Kevin O’Leary on Shark Tank! But even they, or so we’d like to believe, use their abrasive and unlovable characters as a shield to the liking and approval that they really crave. The ‘like’ has become an important element of social media and it has evolved to signify, not just approval, but the fact that someone is viewing and engaging with our content, whether shared or authored. More importantly, it is a reasonable indicator that it is being read, whether fully or in part, and so it is also a useful metric as to whether your social media content is hitting the right audience.

Thumbs up

It is interesting that the iconography of liking is the ‘thumbs up’ symbol. It comes from the gladiatorial arena, where the thumbs down was considered to be the signal that the victor was being given the assent to dispatch the losing combatant. Some controversy surrounds the idea that the thumbs up, by default, meant that the loser was being granted life, but popular cinema has embraced that idea and so has wider society and particularly the world of social media. In some non-Western societies, however, the thumbs up varies from being offensive to positively vulgar. Nevertheless, the thumbs up seems here to stay and represents the fact that I virtually like what you have done or shared, regardless of its real origin or meaning.

What does the giver get out of it?

The giver, for want of a better term, is expressing their approval for the content that you produced or for something that you shared. It is also seems to be some form of agreement, because the giver is more likely to hit that ‘like’ button, if you have provided something that accords with their own pre-existing viewpoint or that they agreed with having read it. My evidence is anecdotal, albeit based upon my own experience, but posts and articles that are somewhat controversial seem to get lots of views and generate plenty of comments, but encourage fewer likes. Slightly more upbeat and positive messages seem to be more likely to encourage the reader to hit ‘like’.

The passive act of liking

Beyond just viewing the post on LinkedIn, liking is the most passive act in terms of responding to a post. Nevertheless, it does flag up on your timeline, and that of your connections and followers, and so it is a form of recommendation and in practice it plays a similar role to actually sharing the article. It is evident, however, that some followers will like your content without venturing further than the headline and the brief segment that appears on the timeline. It would seem that the motivation of the latter is in generating attention to their own content and profile, which is another strategy all together.

What does the receiver get?

Perhaps, to get slightly psychoanalytical for a moment - on the premise that ‘you are what you share’ on social media - we also take it as personal validation and acceptance of who we are. Getting liked makes us feel good about ourselves and our place in this virtual world of social media amongst a global audience of connections and followers, the vast majority of whom we will never meet in person. But I think I am getting too deep here and this is a post for another day.

"Likes bring attention to what we are sharing"

Likes bring attention to what we are sharing. The author sees their viewings increase and this leads to an upward spiral of likes and comments, which on LinkedIn will flag your content as interesting and relevant and should then see it picked up by the algorithms, from where we see it promoted more widely on Pulse. This leads onto a virtuous upward spiral of likes, comments and shares, until that post, which was originally read by a few of your regular followers, has now circled the globe to a worldwide audience.

How do I get more likes?

Mathematically it would be interesting to see what the correlation is between the number of views and the corresponding number of likes: logically the more views you get, the more likes! But that doesn’t help us. These are my recommendations for getting more likes:

Stay away from controversy – write about things that make people feel good about themselves or that help them to achieve their goals. Controversial subjects may make for interesting reading and if it is comments you are after, you will probably generate more of these, rather than likes.
Give the reader a call to action – ask them a question and invite their views on what you have been talking about. Engagement spans the passive to the active and so the more they are encouraged to respond, the more they will probably give you a thumbs up.
Post regularly – if you develop a regular readership of followers, they will develop a predisposition to like and approve of your writing and your viewpoint. These fans will provide the early likes that will propel you up the virtuous cycle of likes, comments and shares.
Share-ability - does the content have currency in terms of addressing a topic that is currently hot and worthy of sharing with your fellow connections. Is it something that you might share with your followers if you chanced upon it in your timeline?
Tap into personal experience or expertise - followers like to feel that you are sharing something that has come from your personal experience or expertise, so if you can relate the points that you are making to anecdotes and stories, then the more your readers may relate to what you are saying and like the message.

If you've liked what I have written, well, you know what to do! Otherwise, what is it that makes you like something that you have seen or read on LinkedIn?

Written by Will Trevor, Founder and Training Consultant for Windsor Training: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Picture Credit: By Mark McArdle from Canada (Fernando Alonso) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0) or CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons