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The Key to Lasting Behavioral Change: Think Goal, Not Tactic
by Elizabeth Grace Saunders | 12:00 PM April 7, 2014
Even the most motivated people can get stuck, frustrated, and lose hope during the process of behavioral change. As a time coach, I see this happen when clients become so fixated on specific tactics — getting up at 5 am, say, to make time for the gym, or a hard-and-fast rule that they never check email before 10 am — that they lose sight of the fact that many methods could lead to achieving their larger strategic goals.
Yes, habit change takes discipline, patience, and practice. But no, it shouldn’t feel like you’re constantly trying to force yourself to do something you really don’t want to do. That’s unsustainable. To make new habits stick, they must work with the reality of who you are and what’s best for you.
To identify tactics that will actually work for you and keep your focus on your big objectives, start bydetermining where you’re stuck. Identify a few areas where you’ve seen little-to-no behavioral change despite your best efforts — for example, blocking out whole days for big projects or going to the gym first thing in the morning. Then zoom out to determine your real goal. Why was this activity important to you in the first place? Maybe you want to feel like you’re finishing priority tasks, or have a healthier, more physically active life.
Now brainstorm other tactics you could use to achieve those goals. If you’ve never managed to block out an entire day for your major projects, try finding two half-days instead. If you hate the gym or aren’t a morning person, don’t expect yourself to go there first thing in the morning! Instead, consider options like a bike ride after work or exercises you can do at home before bed. Identify activities that align with your natural tendencies.
You may need to try out a few different tactics until you discover when you can be most consistently effective. Test one of your hypotheses each week. For instance, you could try going for a bike ride after work for one week, and then the next week see if you can do exercises at home before bed. Observe what seems to fit most naturally with your schedule and motivation levels. Arrange your schedule in different ways and see what produces the best results. Once you’ve identified that sweet spot, guard that time from meetings and other activities.
If you need accountability, get it. Top performers embrace this reality and surround themselves with strong teammates and assertive assistants. They know that these individuals will help shore up any weaknesses and allow them to fully use their strengths. There’s no shame in surrounding yourself with people who will check in on you and ask you about the status of key projects or goals, whether that means hiring a good project manager or a motivated personal trainer.
But if there are tasks that you really struggle to do, delegate them or outsource them. It’s better to not spend willpower energy forcing yourself to do what other people can do for you. Save that effort for activities you can’t transfer to anyone else. Make a list of activities that you tend to fall behind on, such as filing expense reports, setting up meetings, or updating tracking documents. Then, see if you can find someone within your organization, an outside contractor, or a technology tool that could take these items off your list. If necessary, clear this strategy with your boss before proceeding. When it comes to chores like errands, you can do everything from ordering groceries to having shampoo delivered automatically online from Amazon. You can also hire assistants to do activities from organizing an event to picking up dry cleaning through companies like TaskRabbit or Fancy Hands.
By staying focused on the goal and experimenting with tactics, I’ve seen people who have never kept routines start to exercise consistently, make progress on priority projects, get on top of e-mail, and accomplish all sorts of other goals. Keep these principles in mind, and you can—and will—achieve lasting behavioral change.
source: Harvard Business Review
A good leader
“If you really want to do something, you'll find a way. If you don't, you'll find an excuse.”
― Jim Rohn
4 Ways to Inject New Energy Into Your Employees
The longer employees stay with your company, the less engaged they become.
Engagement levels also drop the lower you go on a company's hierarchy, according to a recent survey by Bain & Company, which analyzed responses from 200,000 employees across 40 companies in 60 countries. Even more striking, the lowest levels are found among sales and service staff--the employees who have the greatest interaction with your customers.
So how can you prevent the potential problems caused by employees who aren't engaged with the business? Rob Markey, the head of Bain & Company's global customer strategy and marketing practice, writes in the Harvard Business Review about how senior executives need to take the reins and help reenergize their staff.
"It seems obvious: Direct supervisors who set their teams up for success, observe them in action, ask for feedback, identify the root causes of employee concerns, and then follow through with meaningful improvements have happier, more engaged employees," Markey says.
Below, read Markey's four suggestions on how you can engage both your long-tenured staffers and new hires in entry-level positions.
1. Don't leave it to HR.
If you're not a likable boss, that's part of the problem. The survey found that employees weren't engaged if they didn't trust or like their superiors. "That's why it's critical for supervisors to treat team engagement as a high priority--and why their bosses, the senior executives, can't merely prescribe rote solutions," Markey writes. "Instead, senior leaders give supervisors the responsibility and authority to earn the enthusiasm, energy, and creativity that signal deep employee engagement."
2. Learn how to discuss issues constructively.
If you and your managers don't know how to get your employees to talk openly about what's bothering them, you must learn. Markey says successful companies hire trainers and coaches to teach them how to "encourage constructive discussions" with staff. You need to be able to talk about things like salary increase requests, employees' worries about being outsourced, or dealing with negative coworkers. "The training also stresses the importance of taking the right actions quickly and then telling employees how their input contributed to the improvements," he writes.
3. Take the temperature regularly.
Don't wait a year between employee surveys. "Short, frequent, and anonymous online surveys (as opposed to a long annual survey) give supervisors a better understanding of team dynamics and a sense of how the team believes customers' experiences can be improved," Markey writes. While most small companies aren't large enough to warrant a formal employee survey, you can ask for opinions through email or using low-cost or free online tools such as SurveyMonkey. Markey notes that the specifics of the results are actually less important than the resulting discussions. After you collect feedback, talk openly about the "root causes" of issues.
4. Focus on the customer-facing employees.
You need to focus your attention on those employees closest to your customers. Speak to your sales teams, call center reps, and employees in the field. They are the ones who "know intimately which aspects of the business annoy or delight customers," Markey says, so it's critical to find out those details. "The companies that regularly earn high employee engagement tap that knowledge by asking employees how the company can earn more of their customers' business and build the ranks of customer promoters," he writes. Listen, take action, and give your employees updates.
source; inc.com
16 Ways to Lose the Respect of Your Employees
If the people you work with (or who work for you) don't respect you, they'll question your every decision--and keep one eye on the door as they continually look for somewhere else to work.
Based upon the newly published book "Culture Without Accountability--WTF" by Julie Miller and Brian Bedford, here are some respect-killing behaviors to avoid at all costs:
1. Be disrespectful yourself.
Expecting other people to respect you when you're disrespecting them is an exercise in futility. With respect, you reap what you sow.
2. Permit disrespect to others.
Continuing to employ a jerk who disrespects coworkers is the exact same thing as disrespecting them yourself. Same thing with tolerating disrespectful behavior in a coworker. Remember: you're always defined by the company you keep.
3. Show up late repeatedly.
While there are legitimate reasons (e.g. a sick child) why even the most responsible person might run late, those few and far between. If you're frequently late, people will know you don't respect them, lowering their respect for you.
4. Fail to meet commitments.
People don't respect those who are all talk and no action. While you can miss a deadline or forget a task once in a while, everyone will eventually figure out that you're not accountable and thus unworthy of respect.
5. Become defensive when questioned.
If you get bent out of shape when somebody points out that you screwed up (like by showing up late), you're telling them that you're not just a screw-up, you're a screw-up with a bad attitude.
6. Cover up your mistakes.
You may think you're smart for hiding the evidence, but the truth has a nasty habit of getting out. As with any scandal, people view the cover-up as an act of cowardice that's worse than whatever's being covered up.
7. Deflect blame onto others.
Blaming somebody else for your mistakes is worse than trying to cover them up, because somebody else ends up taking the heat. Word will get around that you're both thin-skinned and shifty.
8. Ask people to lie for you.
When you ask people to lie for you (like to get out of an irksome task), you're communicating two things: 1) you are a liar and 2) you believe the other person is a liar and stupid enough to lie for you. It's adding insult to insult.
9. Do the bare minimum.
You may think you're being smart but rest assured that "people are noticing your laziness, and it will affect your reputation, which can lead to very negative consequences in your professional life," explains Miller.
10. Provide a lame excuse.
"The dog ate my homework" is sort of cute when a school kid says it. When a professional says it, not so much. Look, everyone knows that you didn't really have "a flat tire." Expecting them to believe it just makes you look stupid.
11. Brown nose.
There are few things more disgusting than watching somebody else kissing up to a boss, a colleague, or a customer. Even the person on the other end of the brown nosing usually thinks it's creepy. Yuck!
12. Gossip.
Spreading stories about the personal lives of the people you work with tells everyone that 1) you can't be trusted with a secret and 2) you'll be gossiping about them at the first opportunity.
13. Expect an "A for Effort."
You're accountable for your results, not your activities. In fact, you should be graded down even further if you expended a great deal of effort without creating useful results.
14. Require reminding.
If people must email you repeatedly to get you to do something (like give them the feedback your promised), you might as well wear a nametag reading "Not Worthy of Respect."
15. Be a victim.
Is there anything more pitiful than being the person who's always part of the problem and never part of the solution? Yes, there is something more pitiful: being the person who's always complaining about the problem. Argh!
16. Adopt a "me-first" attitude.
Cutting in line, phone-yakking in public, smoking around non-smokers, and so forth, tells people that you're inconsiderate, selfish, and maybe even dishonest.
source: inc.com
Are You the Smartest Person in the Room? Let's Hope Not.
By Jack and Suzy Welch
The best thing that can happen to you as a boss is hiring a person who is smarter, more creative, or in some way more talented than you are. It’s like winning the lottery. Suddenly you’ve got a team member whose talent will very likely improve everyone’s performance and reputation. Including yours.
Yes, it’s human nature to feel fearful that a “superior” employee could make you look, well, inferior, and perhaps slow down your career progress. But in reality, the exact opposite usually occurs.
The reason is that leaders are generally not judged on their personal output. What would be the point of evaluating them like individual contributors? Rather, most leaders are judged on how well they’ve hired, coached, and motivated their people, individually and collectively—all of which shows up in the results. That’s why when you sign up top performers and release their energy, you don’t look bad. You look like the goose that laid the golden egg.
So keep laying them. It is a rare company that doesn’t love a boss who finds great people and creates an environment where they flourish. And you don’t have to be the smartest person in the room to do that. Indeed, when you consistently demonstrate that leadership skill and come to be known as the person in your company who can land and build the best, watch your career take off.
Now, we’re not saying managing “superior” employees on your team is necessarily easy. We received a question from an audience member at a speech in Chicago several years ago who said two of his seven direct reports were smarter than he was. He asked: “How can I possibly appraise them?”
“What the heck happened to the other five?” was our attempt at a lighthearted response. But we took his point.
Yes, it’s human nature to feel fearful that a “superior” employee could make you look, well, inferior, and perhaps slow down your career progress. But in reality, the exact opposite usually occurs.
The reason is that leaders are generally not judged on their personal output. What would be the point of evaluating them like individual contributors? Rather, most leaders are judged on how well they’ve hired, coached, and motivated their people, individually and collectively—all of which shows up in the results. That’s why when you sign up top performers and release their energy, you don’t look bad. You look like the goose that laid the golden egg.
So keep laying them. It is a rare company that doesn’t love a boss who finds great people and creates an environment where they flourish. And you don’t have to be the smartest person in the room to do that. Indeed, when you consistently demonstrate that leadership skill and come to be known as the person in your company who can land and build the best, watch your career take off.
Now, we’re not saying managing “superior” employees on your team is necessarily easy. We received a question from an audience member at a speech in Chicago several years ago who said two of his seven direct reports were smarter than he was. He asked: “How can I possibly appraise them?”
“What the heck happened to the other five?” was our attempt at a lighthearted response. But we took his point.
How in the world do you evaluate people whom you feel are more talented than you?
You don’t. That is, you don’t evaluate them on their intelligence or particular skill set. Of course, you talk about what they are doing well, but just as important, you focus on areas in which they can improve. It is no secret that some very smart people have trouble, for instance, relating to colleagues or being open to other people’s ideas. Indeed, some struggle with becoming leaders themselves. And that is where your experience, self-confidence, and coaching come into play.
In that way, then, managing superior employees is just like managing regular types. You have everything to gain from celebrating their growth and nothing at all to fear.
You don’t. That is, you don’t evaluate them on their intelligence or particular skill set. Of course, you talk about what they are doing well, but just as important, you focus on areas in which they can improve. It is no secret that some very smart people have trouble, for instance, relating to colleagues or being open to other people’s ideas. Indeed, some struggle with becoming leaders themselves. And that is where your experience, self-confidence, and coaching come into play.
In that way, then, managing superior employees is just like managing regular types. You have everything to gain from celebrating their growth and nothing at all to fear.
source: linkedin.com
