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Believe you are creative and don’t be afraid of being wrong.
- Listen to what other people have to say.
- Listen, accept, and think about the criticism you receive from others.
- Break with routine. Force yourself into something new to gain a new perspective.
- Gain a new perspective by role playing; pretend you are someone or something other than who you are.
- Relax; humor and fun allow the mind to venture down new, previously untraveled paths.
- Practice coming up with ideas for every problem and challenge you see, hear about, or come up against.
- Daydream; let your mind wander, and see where it leads you.
- Look at two unrelated processes or products. Try to link them together in a new, innovative way.
- Ask lots of questions – and listen to the answers.
- Ask new and different questions – ones that are unexpected, perhaps somewhat illogical, perhaps even a little crazy; ones that make you think.
- Try to come at a problem from an entirely new perspective.
- Write all your ideas down. Don’t let them get away.
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TEN LESSONS ON BECOMING A LEADER
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Challenge Provides the Opportunity for Greatness – in Leading and Learning to Lead. Experience is the best teacher.
- Leadership is in the Eye of the Beholder. Managers can be appointed from above, leaders cannot; constituents choose them.
- Credibility is the Foundation of Leadership. Credibility – made up of trustworthiness, expertise, and dynamism – may be the single most important asset to leaders.
- The Ability to Inspire a Shared Vision Differentiates Leaders from Other Credible Sources. Leaders must also envision – and help others envision – an uplifting and ennobling future.
- Without Trust, You Cannot Lead. Leaders focus on fostering collaboration, strengthening others, and building trust; essential groundwork for risk-taking.
- Shared Values Make a Critical Difference in the Quality of Life at Home and at Work. When personal values are in line with the goals of the workplace, people are more successful and healthy. Shared values enable everyone to experience ownership in their organization.
- Leaders Are Role Models for Their Constituents. Leaders set the example for others.
- Lasting Change Progresses One Step at a Time. Progress is always incremental; the key to lasting improvements is small wins.
- Leadership Development is Self-development. Leadership is an art in which the medium is the self, and leadership development is a process of continuous improvement.
- Leadership is Not an Affair of the Head. It is an Affair of the Heart. To lead others requires passionate commitment to a set of fundamental beliefs and principles, visions, and dreams..
From Coaching for Leadership: How the World’s Greatest Coaches Help Leaders Learn.
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They’re the best and brightest, and possibly, some of the tougher ones to manage within your organization.
Why? For starters, they generally don’t like to be led, they generally don’t put a lot of stock in titles or promotions, they know their worth and expect that you do too, and their work had better be interesting because they’re easily bored.
According to “Leading Clever People,” a Harvard Business Review article by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, managers can take steps to harness the talent of the most clever contributors in the workplace and keep them interested enough to stay on board.
To be effective, however, leaders first must understand what makes this segment of the working population different.
Unlike many other workers, these are employees who:
- Know their worth.
- Know how to obtain funding for projects.
- Expect immediate access to managers and higher-ups.
- Are connected to extensive networks of knowledge.
- Won’t thank you for good leadership.
To retain clever employees and help them perform their best, it’s a good idea to:
- Reduce administrative distractions.
- Maintain diversity of ideas and encourage innovative thinking.
- Make it safe to fail.
- Allow clever people to pursue their interests – some may create new business opportunities or your company.
- Establish credibility with your clever employees by showing your expertise and how it complements theirs.
Source: Harvard Business Online and BNET. © MMVII WWJ Radio, All Rights Reserved.
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By Steve Pavlina
Heuristics are rules intended to help you solve problems. When a problem is large or complex, and the optimal solution is unclear, applying a heuristic allows you to begin making progress towards a solution even though you can’t visualize the entire path from your starting point.
Suppose your goal is to climb to the peak of a mountain, but there’s no trail to follow. An example of a heuristic would be: Head directly towards the peak until you reach an obstacle you can’t cross. Whenever you reach such an obstacle, follow it around to the right until you’re able to head towards the peak once again. This isn’t the most intelligent or comprehensive heuristic, but in many cases it will work just fine, and you’ll eventually reach the peak.
Heuristics don’t guarantee you’ll find the optimal solution, nor do they generally guarantee a solution at all. But they do a good enough job of solving certain types of problems to be useful. Their strength is that they break the deadlock of indecision and get you into action. As you take action you begin to explore the solution space, which deepens your understanding of the problem. As you gain knowledge about the problem, you can make course corrections along the way, gradually improving your chances of finding a solution. If you try to solve a problem you don’t initially know how to solve, you’ll often figure out a solution as you go, one you never could have imagined until you started moving. This is especially true with creative work such as software development. Often you don’t even know exactly what you’re trying to build until you start building it.
Heuristics have many practical applications, and one of my favorite areas of application is personal productivity. Productivity heuristics are behavioral rules (some general, some situation-specific) that can help us get things done more efficiently. Here are some of my favorites:
- Nuke it! The most efficient way to get through a task is to delete it. If it doesn’t need to be done, get it off your to do list.
- Daily goals. Without a clear focus, it’s too easy to succumb to distractions. Set targets for each day in advance. Decide what you’ll do; then do it.
- Worst first. To defeat procrastination learn to tackle your most unpleasant task first thing in the morning instead of delaying it until later in the day. This small victory will set the tone for a very productive day.
- Peak times. Identify your peak cycles of productivity, and schedule your most important tasks for those times. Work on minor tasks during your non-peak times.
- No-comm zones. Allocate uninterruptible blocks of time for solo work where you must concentrate. Schedule light, interruptible tasks for your open-comm periods and more challenging projects for your no-comm periods.
- Mini-milestones. When you begin a task, identify the target you must reach before you can stop working. For example, when working on a book, you could decide not to get up until you’ve written at least 1000 words. Hit your target no matter what.
- Timeboxing. Give yourself a fixed time period, like 30 minutes, to make a dent in a task. Don’t worry about how far you get. Just put in the time.
- Batching. Batch similar tasks like phone calls or errands into a single chunk, and knock them off in a single session.
- Early bird. Get up early in the morning, like at 5am, and go straight to work on your most important task. You can often get more done before 8am than most people do in a day.
- Cone of silence. Take a laptop with no network or WiFi access, and go to a place where you can work flat out without distractions, such as a library, park, coffee house, or your own backyard. Leave your comm gadgets behind.
- Tempo. Deliberately pick up the pace, and try to move a little faster than usual. Speak faster. Walk faster. Type faster. Read faster. Go home sooner.
- Relaxify. Reduce stress by cultivating a relaxing, clutter-free workspace.
- Agendas. Provide clear written agendas to meeting participants in advance. This greatly improves meeting focus and efficiency. You can use it for phone calls too.
- Pareto. The Pareto principle is the 80-20 rule, which states that 80% of the value of a task comes from 20% of the effort. Focus your energy on that critical 20%, and don’t overengineer the non-critical 80%.
- Ready-fire-aim. Bust procrastination by taking action immediately after setting a goal, even if the action isn’t perfectly planned. You can always adjust course along the way.
- Minuteman. Once you have the information you need to make a decision, start a timer and give yourself just 60 seconds to make the actual decision. Take a whole minute to vacillate and second-guess yourself all you want, but come out the other end with a clear choice. Once your decision is made, take some kind of action to set it in motion.
- Deadline. Set a deadline for task completion, and use it as a focal point to stay on track.
- Promise. Tell others of your commitments, since they’ll help hold you accountable.
- Punctuality. Whatever it takes, show up on time. Arrive early.
- Gap reading. Use reading to fill in those odd periods like waiting for an appointment, standing in line, or while the coffee is brewing. If you’re a male, you can even read an article while shaving (preferably with an electric razor). That’s 365 articles a year.
- Resonance. Visualize your goal as already accomplished. Put yourself into a state of actually being there. Make it real in your mind, and you’ll soon see it in your reality.
- Glittering prizes. Give yourself frequent rewards for achievement. See a movie, book a professional massage, or spend a day at an amusement park.
- Quad 2. Separate the truly important tasks from the merely urgent. Allocate blocks of time to work on the critical Quadrant 2 tasks, those which are important but rarely urgent, such as physical exercise, writing a book, and finding a relationship partner.
- Continuum. At the end of your workday, identify the first task you’ll work on the next day, and set out the materials in advance. The next day begin working on that task immediately.
- Slice and dice. Break complex projects into smaller, well-defined tasks. Focus on completing just one of those tasks.
- Single-handling. Once you begin a task, stick with it until it’s 100% complete. Don’t switch tasks in the middle. When distractions come up, jot them down to be dealt with later.
- Randomize. Pick a totally random piece of a larger project, and complete it. Pay one random bill. Make one phone call. Write page 42 of your book.
- Insanely bad. Defeat perfectionism by completing your task in an intentionally terrible fashion, knowing you need never share the results with anyone. Write a blog post about the taste of salt, design a hideously dysfunctional web site, or create a business plan that guarantees a first-year bankruptcy. With a truly horrendous first draft, there’s nowhere to go but up.
- 30 days. Identify a new habit you’d like to form, and commit to sticking with it for just 30 days. A temporary commitment is much easier to keep than a permanent one.
- Delegate. Convince someone else to do it for you.
- Cross-pollination. Sign up for martial arts, start a blog, or join an improv group. You’ll often encounter ideas in one field that can boost your performance in another.
- Intuition. Go with your gut instinct. It’s probably right.
- Optimization. Identify the processes you use most often, and write them down step-by-step. Refactor them on paper for greater efficiency. Then implement and test your improved processes. Sometimes we just can’t see what’s right in front of us until we examine it under a microscope.
From http://www.workspacemagazine.com/articles/september_article_1.php
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New Thinking On Memory
By Nancy Kalish, Prevention
New Thinking On Memory – Print – MSN Health & Fitness
These days I spend a lot of time in front of my closet. It’s not that I’m particularly choosy about what to wear. It’s because I can’t remember why I opened the closet in the first place. Somehow, between my living room and bedroom, all memory of what I was after went poof, leaving me staring blankly at those shelves.
It seems like ever since I hit my mid-40s, my memory has been in a state of rebellion. I certainly remember all the big things: my name, what year it is, the fact that my teenage daughter believes I’m invading her privacy when I ask her what happened at school today. But it’s the little things what I ate last week at that new restaurant or even if I liked that new restaurant (speaking of which, what was its name?) that sometimes slip away. Experts say that such “senior moments” are normal even if it will be decades before you can begin to think about tapping your 401(k). Reassuring, yes, but that still doesn’t help me remember the name of that restaurant.
Brain researchers are on the case. Studies are uncovering how our mundane, everyday habits what we eat, the pills we take, how we rest, and even our confidence levels have a big impact on our brain. Here’s what experts say are the newest strategies guaranteed to keep your memory quick, agile, and sharp.
Check Your Iron
Iron helps the neurotransmitters essential to memory function properly and your brain can be sensitive to low amounts. “A poor diet or heavy menstrual periods, such as those during perimenopause, can cause your iron levels to drop enough to affect your recall abilities, even if you don’t have anemia,” says Laura Murray-Kolb, PhD, an assistant professor of international health at Johns Hopkins University.
When she gave memory tests to 149 women, those with low iron levels missed twice as many questions as those with sufficient amounts. Yet after 4 months of taking iron supplements, most of the women, with their iron levels back to normal, scored as well as the best group in the first test. Murray-Kolb recommends that women who don’t get enough through their diets consider taking a daily multivitamin with 18 mg of iron (8 mg for postmenopausal women).
If you still suspect you’re low, ask your doctor for a blood test to check your ferritin level, which will reveal even a moderate iron deficiency; a regular blood test isn’t sensitive enough to pick up levels lower than the threshold for anemia.
Turn Off Background Noise
We all multitask, a necessary survival skill of the digital age. But did you know that just listening to the news while you answer your e-mail can limit how well you’re able to recall both? Normally, when you take in new information, you process it with a part of the brain called the cerebral cortex. “But multitasking greatly reduces learning because people can’t attend to the relevant information,” says UCLA psychology professor and memory researcher Russell Poldrack, PhD. That’s because the brain is forced to switch processing to an area called the striatum, and the information stored here tends to contain fewer important details.
Luckily, this kind of memory problem has an easy fix, says Poldrack: Simply pay undivided attention to whatever you really want to recall later.
Refresh Your Mind
Yes, you know that meditation can reduce stress, which research shows can damage brain cells and your ability to retain information over time. But the ancient practice can do more than just soothe your soul: It may also sharpen your memory. According to a University of Kentucky study, subjects who took a late-afternoon test after meditating for 40 minutes had significantly better scores than those who napped for the same period.
Even more surprising, when the subjects were retested after being deprived of a full night’s sleep, those who meditated still scored better than their study counterparts. How could that be? Meditation, like sleep, reduces sensory input, and this quiet state may provide a time for neurons to process and solidify new information and memories.
Brain scans have revealed that meditation produces a state somewhat similar to non-REM sleep (which many specialists believe is the more mentally restorative sleep phase), in that many neurons of the cortex fire in sync, says Bruce O’Hara, PhD, a coauthor of the study. “However, unlike when you sleep, consciousness is fully maintained in meditation, so there is no grogginess upon ‘awakening.’”
For regular, highly experienced meditators, the benefits to memory can be substantial. A 2004 University of Wisconsin-Madison study discovered that the brains of long-term Buddhist practitioners who have meditated every day for many years generated the highest levels of gamma waves a pattern of brain activity that’s associated with attention, working memory, and learning ever reported in other studies.
Good sources to help you get started:
A Woman’s Book of Meditation: Discovering the Power of a Peaceful Mind by Hari Kaur Khals
Meditation for Beginners DVD, gaiam.com
Control Your Cholesterol
A healthful cholesterol level is as essential for mental sharpness as it is for cardiovascular efficiency. When plaque, caused by “bad” LDL cholesterol, builds up in blood vessels, it can hinder circulation to the brain, depriving it of essential nutrients. One possible consequence: memory problems.
“It doesn’t take much plaque to block the tiny blood vessels in the brain,” explains Aaron P. Nelson, PhD, chief of psychology and neuropsychology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “In addition, several studies have shown that high cholesterol is a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease.” While that connection is not fully understood, the take-home is clear: Get your cholesterol checked regularly; if it’s high, work with your doctor to lower it.
Double-Check Your Meds
One side effect of taking many prescription and over-the-counter drugs can be a worrisome increase in memory lapses. Antidepressants, antianxiety drugs, antispasmodics, beta-blockers, chemotherapy, Parkinson’s medications, sleeping pills, ulcer medications, painkillers, antihistamines, and even statins can all affect your memory, says Gary Small, MD, chief of the UCLA Memory and Aging Research Center and author of The Longevity Bible: 8 Essential Strategies for Keeping Your Mind Sharp and Your Body Young.
As you get older, drugs tend to stay in your system for a longer period of time, increasing the likelihood of troublesome interactions. Fortunately, any drug-related impairment will likely improve as soon as the drug is discontinued. “Speaking with your doctor about adjusting your dose or switching medications is often a simple solution,” says Small.
Munch an Apple
A couple of apples a day may keep the neurologist away. “Apples have just the right dose of antioxidants to raise levels of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that’s essential to memory and tends to decline with age,” says Tom Shea, PhD, director of the University of Massachusetts Lowell Center for Cellular Neurobiology and Neurodegeneration Research. In addition, antioxidants in apples help preserve memory by protecting brain cells against damage from free radicals created by everyday metabolic action, such as the processing of glucose by the body’s cells.
A study Shea coauthored with Amy Chan, PhD, published last year in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, found that mice suffering from the equivalent of normal human age-related memory loss or early Alzheimer’s disease got a memory boost when they consumed a daily dose of apple juice. After just 1 month, those mice did a far superior job on a maze, which tests short-term memory, than the animals that didn’t get the drink. Shea has begun clinical trials to determine whether humans get a similar benefit. In the meantime, he recommends consuming two or three apples or two 8-ounce glasses of apple juice each day; even one will give your brain a good lift.
Rev Up Your Heart
Old-fashioned cardio can also keep your memory spry by improving a number of aspects of brain functions. Last year, researchers from the University of Illinois, Urbana, put two groups of older, healthy adult volunteers on different regimens. One group did aerobic training three times a week for 1 hour; the other did non-aerobic stretching and toning.
MRIs taken after 3 months showed that the aerobics group actually increased their brains’ volume (which could reflect new neurons or cells) and white matter (connections between neurons) in the frontal lobes, which contribute to attention and memory processing. The aerobic exercisers, who ranged from age 60 to 79, had the brain volumes of people 2 to 3 years younger, said Arthur Kramer, PhD, who reported his results in the Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences. Taking a 1-hour walk at a brisk, slightly breathless pace three times a week will likely confer the same benefits.
Believe In Your Brain
Do you find yourself worrying about forgetfulness? Give it up! Any anxiety you feel about your occasionally wayward memory later in life may actually make it worse. In a recent North Carolina State University study published in Psychology and Aging, healthy older folks scored poorly on memory tests after being informed that aging causes forgetfulness.
When another group was told that there wasn’t much of a decline in their recall abilities with age, however, they scored 15% higher even better than a control group told nothing about memory and age. “Believing in negative stereotypes can be a self-fulfilling prophecy,” says head researcher and psychology professor Thomas M. Hess, PhD. “That’s a shame because your memory probably isn’t nearly as bad as you fear it is.”
High-Tech Brain Power
Your teen knows best: Video games are good for your brain
What’s an eight-letter word for brain booster? The answer could be Nintendo. Experts say playing one of the new games specially designed to improve your focus could have the indirect effect of getting your memory in shape.
“Whenever you solve puzzles or do brainteasers, you’re making the connections between your neurons work more efficiently, which is like putting money in the bank,” says Stuart Zola, PhD, an Alzheimer’s researcher at Emory University. But if you get too good at one game, quickly proceed to the next level, or try a new one altogether. Your brain is very much like a muscle: It needs constant challenge to grow.
For starters, try:
Nintendo’s Brain Age, a computer game featuring a set of fun reading and mathematical exercises to be done every day.
A “virtual mental gymnasium” at My Brain Trainer, where you can calculate your “brain age” and work to lower it.
Check out our selection of games from the “brain fitness” experts at Happy Neuron.
Buyer Beware: Ginkgo biloba
Should you take ginkgo biloba for a memory boost? These experts make a less-than-compelling case for the supplement.
Maybe: “The jury is still out. Some studies suggest that ginkgo is useful, but more research needs to be done. If you’re going to take ginkgo, you should do it with caution. It has side effects, such as reducing the ability of your blood to clot, that could be a problem if you take aspirin or a blood thinner. So check with your doctor to make sure it won’t interact with your medications.” Stuart Zola, PhD, codirector of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Emory University
No: “A National Institute on Aging study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found absolutely no memory benefits when normal people take ginkgo biloba supplements. And, as is true with all herbal supplements, which are unregulated, you can never be certain what you’re getting in the bottle. Consumers should be very wary.” Aaron P. Nelson, PhD, assistant professor, and author of The Harvard Medical School Guide to Achieving Optimal Memory
Glass of Red for your Head
Here’s a pleasing Rx for boosting brainpower: Flex your noodle by doing crossword puzzles and brain teasers for an hour or so, then cool down with a glass of wine it, too, may help preserve your memory. According to research done by Philippe Marambaud, PhD, a compound in red wine, resveratrol, may help ward off Alzheimer’s disease.
Marambaud, a senior research scientist at New York’s Litwin-Zucker Research Center for the Study of Alzheimer’s Disease and Memory Disorders, found in lab experiments that resveratrol hampered the formation of beta-amyloid protein, a key ingredient in plaque found in the brains of people who die with Alzheimer’s disease.
Alcohol’s benefits to the heart it can help lower cholesterol levels may also protect against memory loss by improving circulation to the brain, says Aaron Nelson, PhD. But remember, everything in moderation: “Drinking more than a glass won’t help, and it just might hurt.”
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www.execunet.com — July 12, 2007 — Despite larger compensation packages and a greater emphasis on retention sweeping across Corporate America, a recent survey conducted by ExecuNet, the leading executive career, business, and recruiting network reveals executive job satisfaction levels remain dangerously low as companies struggle to keep their management teams intact.
According to a survey of 2,149 executives with an average salary of $221,000, 48 percent report they are not satisfied or somewhat unsatisfied with their current job. Among those who are unhappy at work, more than half (52 percent) are preparing to leave their company within the next 12 months.
“Given the pace at which companies are hiring executive-level talent this year, disgruntled executives won’t have to look far in search of greener pastures,” says Dave Opton, CEO and Founder of ExecuNet.
The survey reveals job satisfaction levels vary considerably across professions:
Profession
Percentage of Executives Satisfied
With Current Job
Human Resources
67%
CFO/Comptroller
63%
General Management
47%
Marketing
44%
Sales
42%
MIS/IT
41%
More at ExecuNet – Executive Job Search, Networking & Career Advancement
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It turns out that the corner office with a big picture window might not be the ticket to workplace bliss after all.
A recent online poll by ExecuNet of more than 2,100 executives revealed that more than half are not satisfied with their jobs. Roughly half of those who responded said they plan to leave their positions within a year.
Topping the list of reasons for job dissatisfaction were: lack of advancement options, friction with their bosses, and misalignment with the workplace culture. Sales managers and IT executives were the least happy, based on poll results.
For dissatisfied executives, however, changing jobs may not be a permanent fix in the happiness quotient department. HR managers who responded to the poll said executive job dissatisfaction tends to surface around 14 months after they take the position.
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Seven Deadly Workplace Sins
To avoid becoming the once-respectable, often-humble guy who got a promotion but lost his wits (and gained an ego), follow McKee’s advice on the seven deadly career sins to assure career advancement and move you on the path to paycheck promise land:
1. Pride
Despite any help they received along the way, time and again, people take full credit for their accomplishments in the office, thinking that personal success will fast-track their career.
The sin: “What often goes unrecognized is that people around, and especially below, the serially solo-successful resent the ego-centricity, and may actually begin to actively undermine that person’s efforts in the future.”
The salvation: “A dose of acknowledgment of and appreciation for one’s peers and subordinates, so they may share in some of the glory, can go a long way to foster one’s long-term success.”
2. Envy
It’s OK to acknowledge another’s achievements, but lamenting “what should have been yours” can be destructive and adversely impact your own ability to focus on current job tasks, McKee says.
The sin: “Allowing yourself to be overly envious of others in the workplace can sabotage your self-esteem, which is one vital characteristic every successful business person shares.”
The salvation: “Rather than being envious, let the accomplishments of others become motivational fuel for your fire in working toward your own successes.”
3. Anger
Anger doesn’t benefit anyone in the workplace – it only damages your reputation, credibility and professionalism.
The sin: “Those prone to angry outbursts rarely get promoted; they are seen as being poor leaders who cannot inspire or motivate others.”
The salvation: “It’s fine to feel passionately about your job or a project at hand and to disagree with others, but learn how to channel those emotions into actions that will work to your benefit in the eyes of others – especially your superiors – rather than against it.”
4. Greed
An employee’s selfish desire for “more, sooner” is what motivates many workers. While these folks may do well in the moment, they won’t be prepared to take things to the next level, McKee warns.
The sin: “Taking this notion to the extreme can and will be self-defeating as core values become misguided and life becomes unbalanced in the process.”
The salvation: “The road to success requires a long-term approach in all aspects of one’s job duties. Those laser-focused on quick, short-term gains may do well in the moment, but will be ill-prepared to take things to the next level.”
5. Sloth
Indolence gets you nowhere in life – especially in corporate America. Laziness in the workplace will have you sitting idle, watching others surpass you in success and authority.
The sin: “Simply put, complacency and laziness have no place whatsoever in the workplace – especially for those with high aspirations. Expecting one’s past achievements and successes to carry them forward in their long-term career is imprudent.”
The salvation: “Treat every work day and every project as if your job, and your future at large, depends on it. It very well may.”
6. Gluttony
Too much focus on only one facet of life, like work, is a recipe for overall failure. Make sure you’re ready – professionally and personally – to take on new and bigger challenges, for which expectations are also bigger, McKee says.
The sin: “Many individuals move up the corporate ladder so fast that they actually end up failing as a consequence. More isn’t always better – especially if you’re not ready for the challenge at hand.”
The salvation: “Achieving career success also includes maintaining a life balance, and a misplaced professional desire can create a backlash both at home as well as amid peers for your perceived obsessiveness.”
7. Lust
The old “grass is always greener” adage applies to the workplace as well. Spending your time focused on others’ work achievements rather than working to further your own is a sure-fire career killer,” McKee contends.
The sin: “Spending an inordinate amount of time fixated on what you don’t have rather than what you do will foster a bad attitude and negative overall demeanor.”
The salvation: “One’s overall ‘presence’ in the office plays a big part in who gets promoted and who doesn’t. No matter how ambitious, it’s prudent to be ‘present’ and make the most out of your current position at this moment in time.”
MSN Careers – Seven Deadly Workplace Sins – Career Advice Article
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Marcus Buckingham Thinks Your Boss Has an Attitude Problem
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/49/buckingham_Printer_Friendly.html
Marcus Buckingham teaches CEOs how to get the most out of their people and their organizations. His first lesson: Forget everything you think you know about being a leader.
There is a noble promise at the heart of the new world of business: Everyone has the right to meaningful work, and people who do meaningful work create the most value in the marketplace. Even as the talent wars have fizzled into pink-slip parties, few senior executives would dispute the vital importance of finding, engaging, and developing the best people. Ask any CEO, “What’s your company’s most precious asset?” Without hesitation, the answer will be, “Our people.” Ask the same CEO, “What’s the primary source of your competitive advantage?” Chances are, the reply will be, “Our unique culture.”
This kind of talk drives Marcus Buckingham nuts. It’s not that he disagrees with the sentiments — he’s spent his 15-year career as a pioneering researcher and a global-practice leader at the Gallup Organization, making the link between people, their performance, and business results. What troubles him is the lack of rigor behind the rhetoric. “There’s a juicy irony here,” says the 35-year-old Cambridge-educated Brit. “You won’t find a CEO who doesn’t talk about a ‘powerful culture’ as a source of competitive advantage. At the same time, you’d be hard-pressed to find a CEO who has much of a clue about the strength of that culture. The corporate world is appallingly bad at capitalizing on the strengths of its people.”
Buckingham, on the other hand, is remarkably good at communicating his subversive message. He has produced two best-selling books: First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently (Simon & Schuster, 1999), with coauthor Curt Coffman, and Now, Discover Your Strengths (The Free Press, 2001), with coauthor Donald O. Clifton. Meanwhile, Buckingham has helped build a ballooning consulting practice at Gallup, with more than 1,000 clients, including Best Buy, Disney, Fidelity Investments, Toyota, and Wells Fargo.
His mission, as he describes it, sounds almost quaint: “to create a better marriage between the dreams of workers and the drive of companies to win.” His methodology is anything but quaint. Buckingham has led an effort inside Gallup to crunch three decades’ worth of data on worker attitudes into actionable insights on human performance and productivity. First, he and his team tapped into a database of more than 1 million Gallup surveys that focused on workers from around the world. Although these workers had been asked many questions, there was one big question behind the interviews: “What does a strong and vibrant workplace look like?” Buckingham eventually distilled 12 core issues (called the “Q12″ in Gallup-speak) that represent a simple barometer of the strength of any work unit.
Next, Buckingham’s team ran massive number-crunching studies to analyze how answers to the Q12 shaped hard-core business results. The link between people and performance was vivid. The most “engaged” workplaces (those in the top 25% of Q12 scores) were 50% more likely to have lower turnover, 56% more likely to have higher-than-average customer loyalty, 38% more likely to have above-average productivity, and 27% more likely to report higher profitability.
Buckingham and his colleagues made one other finding that startled them: There was more variation in Q12 scores within companies than between companies. That is, in each of the more than 200 organizations that he analyzed, Buckingham found some of the most-engaged groups and some of the least-engaged groups. His conclusion: There is no such thing as a corporate culture. Companies are made up of many cultures, the strengths and weaknesses of which are a result of local conditions.
“It’s staggering,” he says. “Few of the CEOs in our study could say which work units in their company were engaged effectively and which weren’t. They didn’t know where their culture was strong and where it was weak, whether it was getting better or getting worse — or how much this variation was costing.”
Talk about speaking truth to power. CEOs don’t understand what makes their employees tick. They don’t know how to get the best performance out of the most people. They can’t say where their companies are strongest or weakest — or why. And that’s just the first of Buckingham’s series of assumption-busting messages. “The major challenge for CEOs over the next 20 years will be the effective deployment of human assets,” he declares. “But that’s not about ‘organizational development’ or ‘workplace design.’ It’s about psychology. It’s about getting one more individual to be more productive, more focused, more fulfilled than he was yesterday.”
In several conversations with Fast Company, the tireless Buckingham offered an overview of his pathbreaking research and identified five attitude adjustments that redefine the essence of leadership in business.
Attitude Adjustment #1
Measure what really matters. (By the way — the numbers you’re using now don’t matter.)
Numbers are crucial to running a company, and CEOs love them. Yet the numbers that most leaders use to manage the people who are part of their business are mostly off target. The CEOs who come to us are almost always fixated on two questions: How is our average performance improving over time? and How do we stack up against our competitors?
Both of those questions obscure what’s really important. Averages hide the fact that within any company are some of the most-engaged work groups and some of the least-engaged work groups. But this range is what is most revealing.
You can divide any working population into three categories: people who are engaged (loyal and productive), those who are not engaged (just putting in time), and those who are actively disengaged (unhappy and spreading their discontent). The U.S. working population is 26% engaged, 55% not engaged, and 19% actively disengaged.
In essence, then, the CEO’s job is to improve the ratio of engaged to actively disengaged workers. But here’s the problem: Few of the CEOs in our study could say which work units in their company were effectively engaged and which weren’t. They didn’t know where their culture was strong and where it was weak, whether it was getting better or getting worse.
That’s where the Q12 comes in. Survey the workforce every six months, and the result will be a vivid picture of which work units are engaged in a way that leads to the best performance and which workers are not.
I work closely with Best Buy, the big electronics retailer. When they started surveying their employees in 1997, they were in the 45th percentile of our Q12 database. By the end of last year, they were in the 70th percentile. More important, in those four years, 99 stores improved their Q12 scores significantly, while just 18 stores had scores that fell. The 99 stores that improved their engagement level dramatically improved their P&L budgets. The stores whose engagement level fell missed their P&L budgets. These are the numbers that matter.
Attitude Adjustment #2
Stop trying to change people. Start trying to help them become more of who they already are.
CEOs hate variance. It’s the enemy. Variance in customer service is bad. Variance in quality is bad. CEOs love processes that are standardized, routinized, predictable. Stamping out variance makes a complex job a bit less complex.
There is, however, one resource inside all companies that will hinder any attempt to eliminate variance: each individual’s personality. Human beings are the one irreducible complexity in every company. And you can’t eliminate that complexity by forcing people to become more like one another. You can’t standardize human behavior. Of course, that’s precisely what most leaders attempt to do. That goal — standardizing human behavior — is the driving force behind most executive-training programs and leadership-development courses. What’s the quickest way to build a coherent culture? Get everyone to manage the same way.
Not only is that approach psychologically daft, it’s hugely inefficient. It’s fighting human nature, and anyone who fights human nature will lose. The best managers don’t even try to fight that fight. We studied 80,000 of them from 400 different companies — people who excelled at getting great performance from their people. These managers followed the same basic set of principles: People don’t change that much, so don’t waste your time trying to rewire them or trying to put in what was left out. Instead, spend your time trying to draw out what was left in. When it comes to getting the best performance out of people, the most efficient route is to revel in their strengths, not to focus on their weaknesses.
Let me give you an example from my company. Our senior VP of marketing, Larry Emond, doesn’t have a lick of empathy. It was surgically removed at birth. He also lacks a quality that I call “developer”: getting a kick out of seeing someone else grow. Now, I could spend my time admonishing Larry. I could try to explain to him why that blistering email he dashed off had a crushing effect on several people. But he still wouldn’t get it.
You might think that Larry is doomed to be a poor manager. Absolutely not. Larry’s strength is that he has the qualities of self-assurance and a strategic mind-set. He doesn’t need to have empathy to achieve results. People feel that Larry encourages their development, because he keeps thinking about how they can be part of this future he’s describing.
Now Larry’s approach seems obvious — why would you do anything else? And yet, in most organizations, Larry would be confronted by some nice, well-intentioned HR person — probably going off of feedback from a 360-degree survey — who would say, “Larry, as a leader, you need to be more responsive to your direct reports.” There would be a lot of, “Tone that down, Larry.” Well, how about, “Dial that up, Larry”?
If you are clear about the outcome that you want, instead of standardizing the qualities and steps that you think are required to get to that outcome, you should honor the fact that Larry’s nature is irreducibly unique — rather than wasting time and money wishing that it weren’t so. What goes for Larry goes for all kinds of people in companies. The best strategy for building a competitive organization is to help individuals become more of who they are.
Attitude Adjustment #3
You’re not the most important person in the company. (Believe it or not, your middle managers are.)
American culture is CEO obsessed. We celebrate the hard-charging heroes and mythologize the iconoclastic visionaries. Those people are important. But when it comes to getting the most productivity out of everyone in the company, they’re not the most important people. Our research tells us that the single most important determinant of individual performance is a person’s relationship with his or her immediate manager. It just doesn’t matter much if you work for one of the “100 Best Companies,” the world’s most respected brand, or the ultimate employee-focused organization. Without a robust relationship with a manager who sets clear expectations, knows you, trusts you, and invests in you, you’re less likely to stay and perform.
I admit, it seems like the most obvious point in the world. But do we revere the role of the middle manager? Hardly. We don’t even like the term! We’d rather transform everyone into grassroots leaders, change agents, intrapreneurs. We look at managers as costs to be cut — or, at best, as leaders-in-waiting, people who are putting in time before they get the big job.
So what exactly do great managers do? First, the best managers start with a radical assumption: Each person’s greatest room for growth is in the area of his greatest strength. It goes back to my last point. Good managers believe that each person is wired in a unique way — and these managers are fascinated by this individuality. Rather than seek to round it out or fill it in, the best managers do everything they can to sharpen and amplify that uniqueness. And then those managers work with people to help them understand their strengths, to build on them, to give them the confidence to be different.
Attitude Adjustment #4
Stop looking to the outside for help. The solutions to your problems exist inside your company.
Talent is a multiplier. The more energy and attention you invest in it, the greater the yield will be. That’s why the best leaders are relentless at seeking out, shadowing, studying, and highlighting the lessons of their own top performers.
The funny thing is that most CEOs spend their time benchmarking best practices in other companies. They want to know how they’re doing relative to their peers. I tell my clients, Don’t go on a tour of Disney, Southwest Airlines, or Discover Financial Services. You have some of the world’s best managers working inside your own company. Look to them first. Learn from your own people first.
At Gallup, we’ve spent years documenting the simple, charming secrets of these extraordinary people. In the corners of every big company that we’ve studied, there are hundreds or thousands of them toiling away in relative obscurity. If you find them and shine a light on them, they will point the company’s way to the future.
Take another look at Best Buy. It’s like a controlled laboratory that is devoted to understanding the power of local managers and local work groups. In a sense, the company’s strategy is built on uniformity — everything from store layout to product positioning to uniforms to operations manuals are standardized across the country. Yet even across 400 nearly identical environments, there’s an amazing range of employee engagement and business performance. In the Best Buy store that has the highest Q12 scores, 91% of employees strongly agreed with the statement, “I know what’s expected of me at work.” In the store with the lowest score, just 27% agreed.
Not incidentally, the store with the highest Q12 score ranks in the top 10% of Best Buy stores as measured by P&L budget variance — and the store with the worst Q12 score falls in the bottom 10%. To improve overall corporate performance, Best Buy’s leaders don’t need to look outside the company. They just need to figure out how to build on the strengths of its best stores.
Building on these strengths means identifying internal best practices and shining a light on your best managers — people like Ralph Gonzalez. Ralph is a store manager who was charged with resurrecting a troubled Best Buy in Hialeah, Florida. He immediately named the store the Revolution, drafted a Declaration of Revolution, and launched project teams, complete with army fatigues. He posted detailed performance numbers in the break room and deliberately over-celebrated every small achievement. To drive home the point that excellence is ubiquitous, he gave every employee a whistle and told them to blow it loudly whenever they “caught” anybody — whether coworker or supervisor — doing something “revolutionary.” Today, the whistles drown out the store’s soundtrack, and, by any metric — sales growth, profit growth, customer satisfaction, employee retention — the Hialeah store is one of Best Buy’s best.
But here’s what really impressed me. Most companies would take a best practice like Ralph’s whistle and say, “That’s a great form of recognition. Let’s give out whistles in every store.” Best Buy did something much smarter: It extracted and spread the core lesson from Ralph’s best practice, rather than institutionalizing the practice itself.
Attitude Adjustment #5
Don’t assume that everyone wants your job — or that great people want to be promoted out of what they do best.
There are two myths about talent that feed the conventional — and misguided — approach to career tracks and leadership development in most companies. The first myth: Talent is rare and special. Wrong. We all have talent. What’s rare and special is a worker who finds a role that suits his or her talents. The second myth: Some roles are so easy that they don’t require talent. Wrong again. We hear a lot about developing more respect for frontline workers and customer-facing employees, but peel the onion and you run into a rigid hierarchy of jobs. The compensation system evolves out of that hierarchy. So do titles and careers.
We say that we want to build world-class organizations. That’s meaningless if we don’t value world-class performance in every role. Yet the people who touch customers the most — hotel housekeepers, outbound telemarketers — get the least respect and the lowest paychecks. The assumption is that anyone can do that job and that nobody would want to do it if they were given a choice to do something else. Frontline talent has a prestige problem, and it’s turning into a corporate-performance problem.
We studied the 3,000 housekeepers of a 15,000-room luxury-hotel chain. It turns out that great housekeepers are not beaten down by the relentless grind of cleaning rooms. On the contrary, they seem to be energized by doing the work. In their minds, the work they do asks that they be accountable and creative and that they achieve something tangible every day.
Unfortunately, the only way we have to reward excellence on the front lines is to promote people out of the very roles that they do best. We turn great housekeepers into supervisors, virtuoso shelf stockers into salespeople, and managers into leaders. A major challenge for CEOs is to define excellence in every role — and pay on it, award titles on it, distribute prestige on it, and make it a genuine career choice.
Satisfaction at work depends on nothing more than self-knowledge. And that gets leaders right back to their main task of engaging their employees at every level. What are you doing to turn your people’s talent into the kind of performance that thrills customers, whether those customers are internal or external? The beautiful thing about a culture that is built by focusing on individual strengths is that no one can steal it. And any advantage that’s hard to steal is an advantage that lasts.
Polly LaBarre (plabarre@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior editor based in New York. Contact Marcus Buckingham by email (mbuckingham@gallup.com).
Sidebar: 12 Questions That Matter
If you want to build the most powerful company possible, then your first job is to help every person generate compelling answers to 12 simple questions about the day-to-day realities of his or her job. These are the factors, argue Marcus Buckingham and his colleagues at the Gallup Organization, that determine whether people are engaged, not engaged, or actively disengaged at work.
- Do I know what is expected of me at work?
- Do I have the materials and equipment that I need in order to do my work right?
- At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
- In the past seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
- Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
- Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
- At work, do my opinions seem to count?
- Does the mission or purpose of my company make me feel that my job is important?
- Are my coworkers committed to doing quality work?
- Do I have a best friend at work?
- In the past six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?
- This past year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?
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