Tag Archives: success

Be Inspiring, Anyone Can be a Boss

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The job of a leader is challenging, especially since it comes with the responsibility of success but also the well-being of the teams of people in the organization. Here are some tips on inspiring your team.

Don’t be bossy. Being a leader is different than being a boss. Any one can assign work and punish people who don’t complete it. Leadership requires a high level of responsibility and personal involvement in the projects one oversees. Leadership is more about influence than authority.

Make your team feel safe. No goal is protected entirely from failure. It can happen by chance or human error. Allow your team to feel safe failing with you. If something goes wrong don’t immediately blame the team or point fingers about specific mistakes.

Motivate and encourage people. Use positive and encouraging feedback. Help team members see that their ideas matter. Encourage them to develop their talents. Make sure to note when their work has improved or impresses you.

 

Some Thoughts On Setting New Year Goals

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Given this time of year is busy and stressful both in our careers and in our personal lives it seems impossible to even begin to think about next year when there is so much crammed into the end of this year. But it is really never too early to start thinking about the future.

As a leader it is your job to set the tone. When looking at your end of the year numbers, keep in mind that you’ll want to budget both time and resources to invest in the professional growth of your time. You’ll want the best quality training you can get. Whether it is keeping up with new technology, changes in regulations that affect your business, or changes to products, services and branding you’ll want your team up to date for the challenges ahead.

Pep talks, metaphoric speeches and rallying the troops is all well and good, but you’ll want real, concrete goals for the new year. Vague New Year’s resolutions like ‘getting the business into shape’ are useful and it is hard to make your team accountable for such vague goals. You want to set goals that are specific and achievable—if you set goals too high you are setting your team up for failure. You also want to set goals for which you can measure you and your team’s success. Also, give yourself and your team a time frame for achieving these goals.

At some level all successful businesses depend on quality data. Whether your team collects this data for the organization or you organization outsources their data acquisition make sure you are acquiring data that is not only accurate, but the data you actually need. Look back at your year and decide where you data was lacking.

 

 

When Distractions Are a Good Thing

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When we speak about success, leadership, the workplace and other goal oriented parts of our lives we typically think of distractions as bad. How to avoid all those things that lead our attention away from responsibility and personal betterment have been a large part of the conversation of success. But what if distractions weren’t all bad—which seems to be the popular narrative about distractions in America.

According to an article in Psychology Today distractions can very much be a good thing in many situations. The article suggests that distractions are one of our primary coping mechanisms for dealing with physical pain. Not only that, but also mental pain such as anxiety. In children, pre-surgery anxiety is very common. In one study, three groups of children were studied for pre-surgery anxiety. There were three groups: one was given an anxiety medication; one group was given nothing; one group were given video games to play. The study found the video game group to have the least amount of measurable anxiety. Another study found that adult patients given video games to play experienced 50% less pain during wound cleanings.

But clearly distractions are also bad at time. How can we tell the difference? Dr. Jane MacGonigal has written extensively on the subject of distraction and she suggests that we simply ask ourselves whether we are using the object of distraction as an escape from our lives or are we using it to enhance our lives?

In the workplace, in a group as the leader, is a particular person or group using a distraction as a means to avoid uncomfortable conversation, to avoid boring or challenging work, to disengage from useful problem solving? Maybe it’s OK for your employee to play Words with Friends for fifteen minutes to ease their anxiety about please an important client. Maybe some off-topic conversation at a creative meeting is just want the group needs to relax and be able to share the ideas they think might be good, but are afraid of.

PsychologyToday.com

5 Questions Good Leaders Ask

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What can you control?
This question shifts the focus from focusing on that which is beyond the protégé’s control and onto what someone can actually do about the situation the find themselves stuck in. One might not be able to change an unfair policy immediately, but they may be able to find short-term answers to help themselves deal with it while they work on longer-term solutions.

What obstacles are facing you?
Protégés may be not want to share the challenges they find troubling, or may not have really thought them through. Asking about them directly allows the mentor to explore the challenges with which the protégé is struggling, and discuss the individual’s strengths and weaknesses in addressing them.

In three to five years how do you want to change?
Since the business world changes at such a fast pace today, focusing on a shorter window still allows enough time for creative, aspirational thinking without the distraction of how different the workplace might be at that time. The answers may reveal how the protégé wants to grow, or fundamental changes they need to make to achieve their goals.

What is the outcome you want?
If the protégé is facing a complicated situation, that is often the best question you can ask to help them lift their head up and start to look at the situation from an entirely new angle.

What does success look like to you?
Asking what success looks like can refer to long-term goals and planning. However, when applied to a specific situation, it can help determine what the immediate priorities are for a project or situation.

Insubordination: How Do Leaders Handle It?

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Most organizations and teams are not pure democracies, in the end there is someone who is in charge. More often than we like to think this person in charge is asked to discipline a peer in cases of insubordination. Though we don’t like to think about it, insubordination does happen. Whether it is just the nature of a particular team member’s personality or someone just having a moment of rebellion how does a leader deal with insubordination adult to adult?

First and foremost having a standard in place with dealing with general and/or specific types of insubordination is key. In the corporate world this often comes in the form of an employee handbook—a document like this can be invaluable even for a very small business, that may be run more casually. It is far easier to have rules in place then to try to enforce something without precedent.

Some leaders, managers and bosses will accommodate successful team members who have rebellious personalities if they are getting the job done and fundamentally respect the leader, other team members and the organization. However, leaders should know that some team members may be annoyed or resentful by the accommodation style and leaders who use this style may loose their credibility with other team members if they are too loosey-goosey.

At the other end of the spectrum there is a strict leadership style in which decorum is of the upmost importance to the leader—sometimes to the point where any questioning of the leader is considered insubordination. Team members typically know exactly where the line is when this style is employed, however leaders will loose out on honest, critical feedback and may foster an atmosphere of fear and low morale.

While both these extreme styles have potential benefits and drawbacks, staying consistent is important. Inconsistent treatment of insubordination will inevitably lead to chaos, low morale and loss of respect. Playing favorites or allowing something on Tuesday, but then not on Thursday is a quick way to lay waste to any respect or credibility a leader as earned from her team.

Some believe the best way to handle insubordination, adult to adult, in a leader-to-team-member relationship is through immediate constructive criticism. Address the behavior politely, but firmly. Be as objective as possible about the transgression. While for many this will feel like the most uncomfortable and difficult option in the short term, in the long term this style may reap the most healthy team environment.

Why is Maintaining Motivation So Difficult?

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In a recent article by the Quiet Leadership Institute, they take a look at the concept of “deliberate practice” from the book Peak: Secrets of the New Science of Expertise by K. Anders Ericsson, PhD, a leading psychologist in the area of expertise and Robert Pool, PhD, well known science and living writer.

The QLI defines deliberate practice as the “breakdown of expertise into a series of smaller, attainable practices.” And states that a deliberate practitioner creates and follows through on structured activities that focus on a small area to improve on within their expertise. This concept is somewhat like the mindfulness training that practitioners of Eastern philosophies use.

The QLI article quotes a section of Peak that focuses primarily on motivation. The excerpt tells readers a hard truth we can all recognize – that when we decide to learn something new, like playing the guitar or learning a new language the initial energy, motivation and interest we feel can lessen over time, sometimes very quickly, and we stop practicing as often.

Ericsson and Pool tell us that there are two primary mental road blocks. First, that when we think about expert practitioners in our fields we often assume they have “some rare gift of willpower or ‘grit’ or ‘stick-to-itiveness’ that the rest of us just lack.”

Ericsson and Pool assert this is a mistake for two reasons. First, there is very little evidence to support the idea that we have a quantifiable pool of willpower from which to draw.

However, Ericsson and Pool write that the bigger problem of will power is:
“the myth of natural talent … once you assume that something is innate, it automatically becomes something you can’t do anything about. This sort of circular thinking – “The fact that I couldn’t keep practicing indicates that I don’t have enough willpower, which explains why I couldn’t keep practicing” – is worse than useless; it is damaging in that it can convince people that they might as well not even try.”

The authors analogize improving performance to weight loss saying that those who are successful in losing weight over the long term are people who have “successfully redesigned their lives, building new habits that allow them to maintain the behaviors that keep them losing weight in spite of all of the temptations that threaten their success.”