Rid your vocabulary of these damaging workplace messages

Employees listen closely to the messages their managers send them. Make sure to avoid these negative messages that can create resentment and disengagement:

·     “Why should I thank you for doing your job?” Few managers actually say this, but it’s an all-too-common excuse for not praising employees unless they achieve something remarkable. Make a point of showing your appreciation for your employees’ consistent efforts whether they’re hitting home runs or not.

·    “That’s now how I used to do it.” Maybe you once did all the jobs that your employees now handle. That doesn’t mean your approach was the only valid one. As time changes, new tools and techniques emerge that make the process different. Don’t insist that employees do things exactly as you did, or that you know more than they do about how to perform their jobs effectively.

·    “Be more proactive.” What does that mean? Managers sometimes wish employees would take more responsibility, or just work harder, and express that in vague terms that employees can’t understand. Be clear about what you want: “Try to solve these problems on your own before coming to me,” for example, or, “You don’t have to ask my permission to do this.”

·    “I can do it better myself.” This should be an obvious mistake, but many managers instinctively take over when employees don’t immediately achieve the results they want. Learn how to delegate effectively, and train your employees to do their work without excessive supervision. You’ll have more time for your own job, and employees will develop skills and confidence.

All the success!

PM in the AM

Go for the gold when you coach

Leaders don’t just sit in their offices and send emails, they get directly involved in their employees’ performance. It’s a coaching role, and it takes commitment—and a few other key traits:

·    Presence. You’ve got to give employees your full attention when you coach them. If you’re not listening, or trying to coach them in a hurry, they’ll assume you don’t really care about their development. Eliminate distractions so you can focus on what’s important.

·    Concern. Improved performance helps the organization, of course, but employees will respond better if they see that you’re also trying to help them. Concentrate on the career benefits of improving performance or learning a new skill. Show you care about your employees as people when you coach them, and they’ll be more open to your suggestions and feedback.

·    Inspiration. Use your coaching sessions to get employees excited about opportunities to succeed. Encourage their creativity, and show that you value their ideas. You don’t just want them to assemble widgets faster; your ultimate goal should be to open up career possibilities for them.

·    Rigor. Coaching shouldn’t be a feel-good exercise in which you overlook mistakes and reassure employees that everything is fine. Although you should always be respectful to the people you’re coaching, you should also set explicit expectations so employees know what you’re looking for and how their performance will be measured. With nothing definite to strive for, employees won’t devote themselves to the hard work of improvement.

All the success!

Peter McLees

3 ways to sustain a vibrant culture

 

 

 

 

Warning: Trying to formalize a cool environment can make the hip factor go away.

Growing companies need some amount of process to prevent chaos, duplication of work and miscommunication. The right procedures help free up time and energy.

But the founders of Method, the cleaning products firm, asked, “How do we institute process without suffocating culture?”

To answer this question, Method interviewed six companies with cool cultures — Apple, Google, Pixar, Nike, Starbucks, and Innocent. A warning and three themes emerged.

The warning: “The greater the effort to formalize culture — to box it in with structure and guidelines — the faster that culture slips away.”

The advice:

• Make sure each interviewee’s personality fits with your culture. If not, decline the candidate even if the person’s skill set matches your job description perfectly.
• Provide up-front training on how to “live” the culture.
• Give feedback on cultural issues, not just job performance.

This wisdom sounds simple. Yet most organizations are hard-pressed to succinctly describe their culture. This entertaining book excerpt relates the process Method used to articulate its “Methodology” (corporate values).

If an outsider asked your employees to sum up your culture in an “elevator pitch,” would your staff respond with a unified voice?

Click here to read the book except in Fast Company: http://www.fastcompany.com/1778865/the-method-method-of-creating-great-corporate-culture

All the success!

Pm in the AM

The Coach K Way for Developing High Performing Teams

We recently came across a fascinating interview that academics Sim Sitkin and Richard Hackman conducted with legendary Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski (“Developing Team Leadership: An Interview with Coach Mike Krzyzewski,” Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2011, vol. 10, No. 3, 494–501). The conversation focused on recruiting and developing team leaders, creating a context for team success, and sustaining one’s own leadership capacity. We came away impressed with the broad applicability of Krzyzewski ‘s insights.

Here are a few excerpts:

·    On walking “the fine line between encouraging individuals to develop new capabilities as leaders and accepting their liabilities:” tried to meet twice a month . . . just empathizing with them, not trying to get them to be anybody different. I was concerned about insisting “You need to be this leader or that leader.” I wanted them to be a player too, and I didn’t want leading to conflict with their natural playing abilities. . . . We want to keep their strengths while working on their leadership.

·    On the connection between leadership roles and demonstrated talent: In some organizations you only listen to talent. You’ve got to be talented before you can give advice or be recognized. We’ve tried not to have that culture. If you have a guy go from freshman to senior, sometimes the freshman that you bring in is better than the senior. It wasn’t always that way; it used to be that if you’re an upper classman, you should always beat out the younger guy. . . . So how is that senior guy going to be a leader when he is not the best player.“We had a walk-on who became a scholarship player and was a 5-year player, Jordan Davidson. Guys listened to him more than anybody because he had established himself. So I think some of it is credibility.

·    On coaching your top performers: “I’ve found that when I am coaching my Duke team, I need to be the best player’s best friend. Being the best player is a lonely position. Even though you get accolades, no matter how good of a team you have, there is always some level of jealousy. Always. Because you’re competitive. A little bit of it is not bad. But I want to make sure that I’m connected with that guy because in a tense moment he also might produce better knowing that he’s not out there alone.”

·    On dealing with so-called derailer, who is undermining the morale or effectiveness of your team—do you try to save him or get rid of him: “You save him. With the Olympic team, we would never select them because you don’t have enough time to help them. It’s a different mission when you’re coaching a college team. A kid can get sidetracked, and he might be a derailer because of insecurity or for any number of reasons. Saving a kid is important, because it might just be that he lost his starting job, or he’s discovered that he’s not good enough no matter how hard he works. Part of it can be redefining what success is for that kid.

·    On ensuring that minor problems don’t become major ones, distracting the team from its focus on achieving collective goals: “I continue to pay close attention to the team’s context. Sometimes I’ll meet with my team or my staff and I’ll say, ‘I want you to think about irritants. We’ll have a meeting on irritants and let’s try to get rid of as many irritants as possible. In other words, let’s not let Duke beat Duke because every day we can’t stand something.’ I try to make sure, even with the Olympic team, ‘Ok, let’s have a meeting. What’s bugging us right now . . . food, whatever? Nothing? Good, let’s go.’ You can lead better if everybody is not distracted.”

·    On ensuring your own continuous development as a leader: I’ve learned so much from getting outside of my area. I think you need to get involved—whether it be a charity, a hospital, or working with a kid’s group—to keep actively learning. If you look, you’ll see natural leadership happening all around you all the time. You can learn about being a better leader from everybody. You can go and study an orchestra. You can go study a basketball team, a business, or whatever. . . . In developing leadership, you’re not just helping a young kid on your team become a better leader. By attempting to teach that person, you’re developing your own leadership. I learn from every speech I give.”

All the success!

PM in the AM

The No. 1 Reason Why Leaders Fail

Is the main culprit a mismatched corporate culture, poor interpersonal relationships, or failure to build a team environment? Find out what CEOs and HR pros worldwide are saying.

The No. 1 reason for a leader’s failure is the inability or unwillingness to build a team environment.

That's according to a new global survey conducted by Right Management. While failure to build a team or relationships was singled out by the most (40 percent) survey respondents, No. 2 was a mismatch with the corporate culture, which was cited by 26 percent of those surveyed.

Remarkably, not delivering acceptable results was named by just 11 percent of the survey respondents.

Right Management partnered with research firm Chally Group to survey more than 1,400 CEOs and human resource professionals from more than 700 companies globally to explore leadership effectiveness and development across regions and cultures.

The survey also asked respondents to identify the predictors of leadership success:

Predictor of leadership success (frequency cited by respondents)

• Fit with company values and culture - 68 percent
• Interpersonal skills - 66 percent
• Motivation to lead - 62 percent
• Previous experiences- 57 percent
• Lack of derailers -21 percent
• Educational background - 11 percent
• Other - 4 percent

The survey also drew qualitative input from respondents. What emerged is that leadership success is increasingly dependent on getting along with others in the organization as well as with one’s own team. A leader must be able to connect, build relationships, and be flexible enough to adapt to the corporate culture.

In addition, the findings tend to be consistent across countries where the research was conducted, which suggests that today’s organizations are increasingly similar whether Asian, American, or European.

The costs associated with failure (at worst) or ineffective executive transitions are high, and lack of adequate support for talent during crucial periods can have long-term negative impacts for both leaders and the organization. This data only hints of what's to come. When considering the evolving workforce and the increasing importance of engagement on organizational transformation, high performance and productivity, the leader’s role becomes the organization’s greatest catalyst for success. Leaders need to be supported to fully understand the impact of their efforts and, in some cases, lack thereof.

All the success!

PM in the AM

Why stretching outside your comfort zone is a good thing

Think you have big goals? Several years ago, I read an article in Wired magazine about a long-distance runner named Dean Karnazes.

Get this:

·    He ran fifty marathons in fifty states on fifty consecutive days.

·    He once ran 350 miles in three days—without stopping and with no sleep.

·    He’s run the Badwater Ultra Marathon eleven times. It starts in Death Valley, 250 feet below sea level and concludes, 135 miles later, halfway up Mt. Witney, at 8,360 feet. He won the race in 2004 on his fifth attempt.

·    He runs 100 to 170 miles a week.

·    He couldn’t find time to run 4-6 hours a day, so he began sleeping less. He currently sleeps four hours a night.

·    His resting heart rate is 39 beat per minute!

In another interview in Outside magazine, Dean makes an important point that many of us have forgotten:

Western culture has things a little backwards right now. We think that if we had every comfort available to us, we’d be happy. We equate comfort with happiness. And now we’re so comfortable we’re miserable. There’s little real struggle in our lives. Little sense of adventure. We get in a car, we get in an elevator, it all comes pretty easy. What I’ve found is that I’m never more alive than when I pushing hard and I’m in pain, and I’m struggling for high achievement, and in that struggle I think there’s a magic.

This rings true for me. I think there are three reasons why we should embrace discomfort by stretching outside our comfort zone, whether we deliberately choose it, or it simply happens to us.

1. Comfort is overrated. It doesn’t lead to happiness. It makes us lazy—and forgetful. It often leads to self-absorption, boredom, and discontent.
2. Discomfort is a catalyst for growth. It makes us yearn to something more. It forces us to change, stretch, and adapt.
3. Discomfort is a sign we’re making progress. You’ve heard the expression, “no pain, no gain.” It’s true! When you push yourself to grow, you will experience discomfort.

A few months ago, I started a daily practice of meditation. It sounded easy enough. Boy, was I wrong! It has proven to be incredibly challenging to sit for thirty minutes straight. But that’s the very reason I value it. I feel like I’m making progress by doing something that isn’t easy for me.

The bottom line is this: we can either be comfortable and stagnate or stretch ourselves—become uncomfortable—and grow. We may think that comfort leads to happiness. It doesn’t. Happiness comes from growth and feeling like we're making progress.

(Check out our post on the 'Progress Principle': http://is.gd/KlA7uB )

“Get out and stay out of your comfort zone. I believe not much happens of any significance when we’re in our comfort zone.”

                                                                       --Bob Parson, Digital Entrepreneur

Adapted From M Hyatt

30 Ideas for “Goal-Getting” in 2012

Many of us are looking into the new year and thinking about the things we want to change and/or accomplish. Resolutions or goals can be powerful catalysts for improvement. The big challenge for a lot of people is keeping themselves focused on the prize and motivated until they fulfill their resolution or reach their goal.

Most folks know the mechanics of goal setting.  What they may not know, remember or apply are the principles for "goal-getting."  These ideas are not new but they are important because they address the motivational side of keeping New Year's resolutions and reaching organizational, team or personal goals.

1. Focus On What Will Bring Out Your Very Best

Take the time to think about what stirs your passions, inspires you and gets you excited about the future. It is important to remember that goals are maps; they will guide you towards your success – the more detailed your goal setting the easier it will be for goal getting. Also, when you are in the goal setting stage understand that the goal must be better than your best yet – but it must be achievable.

Here's a 1.5 minute video that has a very powerful goal achieving technique:

Click here: YouTube - Brian Tracy: If You Could Achieve One Goal in 24 Hours

2. Think Like A Person of Action, Act Like A Person of Thought
No matter how bad you want it to happen, change will never result from thinking alone - you must take action. The world is swimming in dreamers, but only those who act on their desires achieve truly remarkable results.

3. A Daily Habit to Begin Today
Set aside at least 15-30 minutes each night or morning to review your day and plan for the next. It's a simple way to add an element of control to your life. Also, beginning this habit today will help tremendously when you begin to work toward your exciting and inspiring goals.

4. Mix It Up
The wrong routine can spell failure for your goals. To make sure this doesn't happen to you, add at least one new step to your daily routine to help break up the pattern. One new activity will set the stage for many more in the future, making it possible for you to break free of any negative routines.

5. Get Enthusiastic About What’s to Come
You are on your way to reaching your goals. Now is the time to get excited and inspired about what your future holds. Imagine achieving your vision -now make it happen!

6. Raise Your Standards
It's time to raise your standards. It's time to expect more out of yourself than anyone else. Accept nothing less than your absolute best in all that you do and you'll have no problem achieving your goals.

7. Take Ownership
Before positive changes can take place, you must take responsibility for your actions and outcomes. You are in control of your future and are the primary one who can guarantee results. If you give up control and ownership of your life, you will never enjoy the amazing opportunities that life offers to us all.

8. Whom Do You Admire?
Make a list of at least three people that you admire. With your list in hand describe what it is that you most respect about each individual. Often pinpointing what we admire in others offers insight into what we wish to become ourselves.

9. The Moment
Remember a time when everything seemed to be going just right? When nothing could get you down? When you thought to yourself, 'This moment, right now, is what life is all about.' We all have moments in life when we feel we are at our best, but most people don't utilize them. Use the special moments in your life to bring to light goals and desires that are sure to fulfill your needs. Learning from and building on these times will help you create magic moments on a daily basis for the rest of your life.

10. Get Specific
In order for you to create lasting change, you have to be super specific about what you want. Vague ideas just won't cut it. The more specific you make your desires, the easier it will be to act on them. Cloudy hopes create obstacles. You have to know exactly what you want, down to the smallest detail.

11. Small Steps to Big Success
While the nature of your goals needs to inspire, you must also recognize the fact that it takes only small steps to create big changes. The goal will lead the way, but it won't come in one giant leap. Small steps, carried out each day, will bring you to the destinations you seek.

 

12. Search for Success Stories
The stories of individuals overcoming all odds and achieving their dreams surround you. Seek out and make these stories a part of your life. You are not alone in your search for success and significance. Knowing that others have succeeded in the past can be enough to motivate you to achieve the next level of results.

13. Measure Your Progress
As you begin putting the pieces of your plan in place, be sure to measure your progress along the way. Doing so will help to keep you motivated to achieve the goal as you see real improvement taking place. You will also be able to recognize troubling areas that need more attention or successful methods that could be spread to other aspects of the goal.

14. Essentials of Change
It doesn't matter what you want, someone at sometime throughout history has desired and achieved the same thing. Not only does this prove that your goals are possible but also that you have what it takes to make them happen. People have done so much with so little, proving that the essential requirements of creating change are within you.

15. Become Aware of Your Thoughts
The wrong thoughts played enough times in your mind can sap the strength of anyone's confidence. Become aware of the things you say to yourself. Every time you come to a negative phrase stop yourself, refute the belief with logic, and replace it with a strong and empowering thought.

16. What's Holding You Back?
Take time to really think about what's holding you back from working toward and achieving your goals. Too often people get a 'feeling' and quit on their dreams. You can't fight or solve a vague feeling, but you can solve a specific problem. That's why it's critical for you to zero in on exactly what's holding you back from the level of achievement you want.

17. Share the Excitement
Don't keep your plans for a better future to yourself -share the excitement with those who will not see it as bragging or your ego taking over. This will make the goal more tangible, and include others in the picture who will ask about your progress and keep you heading in the right direction. Never underestimate the power of peer pressure.

18. If Not Now, When?
This is a simple method to adding a powerful boost to your goal-achieving project. People are gifted at the art of rationalization and procrastination. To put a stop to them ask yourself, 'If not now, when?' If you're honest, and I know you will be, you'll realize that now is as good a time as any to begin moving toward a better life.

19. Excuses Have No Uses
Excuses are scapegoats. They cover up the truth so we don't have to face it. You already know this isn't the way to a happy and successful life. You have to put a stop to excuses once and for all. Every time you catch yourself using an excuse to cover up the truth about why you aren't working toward your goal (e.g. I don't have the time), write it down along with at least three solid reasons why your excuse is completely wrong. And never use it again.

20. Fear is Part of the Puzzle
If you're waiting for a guaranteed success, you'll be waiting for the rest of your life. Fear is part of the process of success - there's no way around it. You might think that the people you look up to are free of fear as they work toward their goals you are mistaken. Everyone feels fear when they take a step outside of their comfort zone, the question is whether or not you keep going.

21. The First Step
A single step in the right direction is all it takes to put in motion great things. Every written masterpiece begins with a single word on a page. Every long journey begins with a single step. The things you desire most will be no different. Write down on a clean sheet of paper the absolute first step your goal requires - then do it.

22. The Truth about Change
You will fail. Not once, not twice, but many, many times. This is how the game works. Believing that you will be able to achieve a big goal without a hitch is like believing you can play perfect golf without a single step on a course. It's not negative, it's reality. A winner uses this as an advantage. When something doesn't go according to plan an adjustment is made and the process resumes. A short-term setback will never bring an end to your aspirations.

23. Create a Specific Strategy
When you know exactly what you want, you have to know exactly how you are going to get it. Just as a vague idea of what you want will never lead to success, a hazy notion of how you will achieve your goals will bring about the same fate. Super specific strategies will result in success. Anything less will make improvement difficult, if not impossible, to enjoy.
                   

24. Intelligent Action
Action is key to change - but not just any action. Eating unhealthy foods is action, but it is definitely not the kind of moves you should be making if your goal is to get in shape. The secret is to take intelligent action. Learn how to make the right moves and you'll be on your way to enjoying an amazing quality of life.


25. Windows of Opportunity
What you see today will not necessarily mirror the picture of tomorrow. In other words - things change. You can never know for sure how long the opportunity to act will offer itself. It could vanish tomorrow or in twenty years. The point is: Today is the certainty in your world. Make the best of it.

26. Learn from Your Mistakes
When things don't work out exactly as you had planned (this will happen) don't waste the opportunity to learn something. A short-term failure is a good thing – it teaches you how 'not' to do something, which will bring you closer and closer to the solution you seek.

27. Constant Curiosity
Be curious. The world can be a truly amazing place when you take the time to look around and learn about it. Read, converse, observe, listen, and discover the miracles that surround you. Constant curiosity is the habit that is sure to get you excited about your world, your work, and your future.

28. Your Contribution

What are you going to contribute to the world after you have gone? Living an extraordinary life requires thinking beyond yourself and giving back to the world in some way. What will your gift to the world be?

29. Starting in the Right Direction

You may not realize it, but you've already taken a massive step toward success. Simply reading these words demonstrates your success in the New Year. Now that you've taken the first step, keep it going day after day, month after month, year after year.


30. Enjoy the Ride
While you're working hard to achieve your goals, it's important to enjoy the experience. Don't just focus on the results. It's like taking a road trip through beautiful country with your eyes closed thinking only about the destination. You'll miss out half the joy of success if you forget about the experience of it all.

All the success!

PM in the AM