Some individuals are thrust on to a big stage and summon the strength to lead others through perilous times. For the rest of us, we are faced with almost daily opportunities to step-up and lead on the small stage. Some look the other way and others summon the strength from somewhere inside themselves to do the right thing.
In honor of Veteran's Day 2018.
If you’re feeling that tug of “It’s time to do something different,” it pays to spend some time sorting through whether you are best served by a job change or a wholesale career shift. As you might imagine, the two paths are radically different in scale, scope, timing, effort, and risk.
When your usual positive attitude takes a holiday and leaves you alone with your grumpier more cynical self, it’s time for action. And while the idea of turning in your resignation after telling off the higher-ups is a nice fantasy, it’s placing the blame squarely where it doesn’t belong. Instead, try this simple but powerful hack to bring your positive attitude back to life:
Imagine there was a tool at your disposal that would help reinforce in real-time the behaviors of group members that moved the performance numbers in the right direction. Or, a tool that would get people motivated to learn, grow, and leave behind less-than-ideal behaviors in favor of new approaches and continuous improvement. Wouldn’t this be helpful? Well, there is. It’s called performance feedback. And sadly, it’s often missing-in-action, misapplied, or, applied inconsistently, and that’s just leaving money and morale on the table.
We have all become unwitting participants in a massive unregulated social experiment. For a little over a decade, we have forced ourselves to evolve from beings who communicate face-to-face, to beings who spend a significant portion of our work and personal lives communicating virtually. What’s to be done? There is no single cure. Instead, we need to learn a new language of emotion, one that begins to replace the human intent that’s left out of the virtual conversation.
Few of us relish being on the receiving end of constructive feedback. And many of us go out of our way to delay delivery of difficult feedback to colleagues or employees. To top it off, our brain is working against us on much of the processing around feedback. Yet, you can create incredible performance gains for yourself, your coworkers and your firm if you take control of your feedback universe. Here are eight ideas to help you get started:
It's a great vote of confidence when your boss picks you to lead the turnaround of a struggling team or function. You're the management fixer, charged with figuring out what's not working and how to fix it. And while this is a great career opportunity, there are a number of ways you can misfire in this role. This article offers 7 hard won ideas to help you make the best of a team or function turnaround opportunity.
For many of us, the idea of an encore career is an appealing fantasy that never grows closer or more tangible. At least part of the problem for why we remain locked in place stems from our attempt to answer the wrong question. Try a simple reframe of the question, "What do I want to be when I grow up?" to open the floodgates of ideas essential to help us move from fantasy to reality. We have some great design thinkers to thank for this simple, powerful reframe.
For individuals involved in the world of design and design thinking, reframing vexing problems is a standard part of the process. For the rest of us, a bit of design thinking focused on reframing is invaluable in our daily labors. Here are some ideas to help you jump-start your reframing activities in pursuit of better solutions in the workplace:
