Author: shelleyupton

Making productive use of ‘dead’ time.

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I’ve always felt there was more one could do in the interstices between the essential ‘points of presence’ in a day and will expand more on that in the future, however this article from Lifehacker offers some sensible suggestions for ways in which we might use more productively our time on long journeys.

It contains useful links to online education sources, examples of which may be of interest to those of you considering providing some of your taught content online too.

How Can I Make a Long Plane or Car Ride Suck Less? – http://pulse.me/s/fv03o

How you feel is up to you.

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During the course of the next few days, take particular notice of how you respond to the interactions you have. By that I mean interactions with people, obviously, but less obviously, your interactions with animate and inanimate objects, the weather, everything around you.

When you accidentally drop something on your foot, what’s your reaction? Swearing and cursing? Or an acceptance that it was accidental, and accidents happen. When the car won’t start in the morning, are you frustrated or furious? Or do you patiently try again several times and work patiently through the possible causes? When your partner accuses you of failing to put out the rubbish, do you retort defensively? Or do you accept responsibility for your lapse and apologise?

You’re probably saying “It depends on the situation.” And yes, to a degree, it does. Being in a tearing hurry would make the milder response to any of these situations the unlikely one. And off you rush, out into your day in a vile mood.

How much better to take a deep breath, remember that how you feel is entirely you own choice, consciously choose a more calm and pleasant response and then head out in a good mood to meet your day, or your week for that matter!

Fix the Machine, Not the Person

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Fix the Machine, Not the Person [Behavior] – http://pulse.me/s/dHdvX This article cites the story of the old General Motors factory, which revolutionised its production by adopting a Japanese style of management characterised by the willingness of managers to listen to employees rather than berate them.

Can You Take Your Strengths Too Far?

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From the HBR Blog Network – http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/10/can_you_take_your_strengths_to.html

Can You Take Your Strengths Too Far?

by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman  |   2:04 PM October 2, 2012

For the past decade, leaders have been encouraged to focus on developing their strengths rather than always gravitating to working on a weakness. But is this too much of a good thing? Lately, a number of business thinkers have suggested so.

It’s tempting for those of us strongly committed to developing leadership strengths to ignore such dissent on the grounds that any new practice will attract critics. But the debate has practical significance to leaders. How should a hard-driving executive respond when given high scores for his ability to drive for results but low scores on building strong relationships with peers and subordinates? Is this evidence that he’s taken his strength too far?

We don’t think so. We would absolutely advise this person to keep driving for results; we suspect that his intense drive is what got him this far in the organization. But we don’t see this as a zero sum game — we don’t think he needs to stop doing one thing to start doing something else. So we’d also recommend he develop additional strengths in relating to people.

Like many of those who are raising doubts about the limits of developing leadership strengths — as Robert E. Kaplan and Robert Kaiser have done in the pages of HBR, and more recently Tony Schwartz has done on this site, we believe that a single strength by itself doesn’t serve anyone well. A leader needs several strengths to succeed. And balance is required. Strengths in combination are far more powerful than any one alone, our research has confirmed. Our data show, in fact, that possessing five strengths is a surefooted way to become an exceptional leader. One-trick ponies don’t last long in the center ring.

We also strongly agree with them that serious weaknesses should not be ignored. We’ve called these “fatal flaws,” and we certainly advise people to fix them first. That’s critical for the roughly one-quarter of leaders our data tell us appear to have such serious defects. We submit, however, that the rest should be working on their strengths.

People can and do behave inappropriately — and they do things to excess. In his blog, Schwartz describes how he learned that his own unbridled candor was hurtful and unproductive. Kaplan and Kaiser similarly described how either “forceful” or “enabling” behaviors could be taken too far and have negative consequences. They observed that if a leader overuses the “forceful” strength by being exceedingly directive — always taking charge, making every decision, and constantly pushing people — the leader’s effectiveness diminishes. That’s a conclusion that we suspect most would accept. And so do we. They also observed that a leader who is too cautious, gentle, understanding, mild-mannered, and almost exclusively focused on others will also be less effective. We completely concur.

Where we part company is in labeling any those behaviors as a strength.

We find it constructive to use a definition of “a strength” based on the work of psychologist Martin Seligman, among others. By his definition, a strength is a behavior that is:

  • Executed effectively
  • Broadly used in a variety of situations or settings
  • Lasting in its effects over time
  • Consistent in producing positive outcomes
  • Valued for its intrinsic worth, as well as its positive outcomes
  • Not specific to one culture
  • Harmonious with, rather than opposed to, other strengths

By these measures, “being forceful,” or “exhibiting righteous honesty unmediated by empathy,” are not strengths.

Our analysis of behavior that does fit our definition of strengths comes from data generated in the 360-degree evaluations of 30,000 managers by 300,000 of their colleagues. From examining 12 years of such data, we’ve identified 16 competencies that describe the most effective leaders and distinguish them from average and poor leaders. When done extremely well, these behaviors become leadership strengths. They included qualities like displaying integrity, exhibiting superior problem-solving skills, being highly technically competent, being innovative, taking initiative, inspiring and motivating others to high performance — and, yes, driving for results.

We’ve found no evidence that extremely high scores on any of these competencies has negative consequences. That is, we haven’t found anyone who scored at the 90th percentile for any one of these behaviors who was perceived by their bosses, colleagues, and direct reports as less effective than someone who scored in the 60th or 70th percentiles. We haven’t found the business results of any high scorer to be inferior to the people who received lower scores. Nor have we found subordinates and peers writing more negative comments about a higher scorer than about any individual with a more moderate score.

Instead, we find the data tell a consistent story. Those with the lowest scores on a competency receive many negative written comments, and their objective results are inferior. Those with the highest scores produce the best outcomes on everything we’ve been able to measure. If this is overusing statistics, then so be it. Our profession needs more leadership analytics, not less, in our opinion.

Some might think strengths-based development was discovered by a social scientist or consulting company, but the real credit should go to Peter Drucker, who in his classic 1967 book The Effective Executive made the compelling case for focusing on strengths. In fact, he argued, it is the role of the organization to leverage people’s strengths and to make their weaknesses irrelevant.

Unsticking people

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Six Sources of influence: Source: David Maxfield, Crucial Skills blog, August 21st 2012

People seeming to under-achieve or be ‘stuck in a rut’ is a fairly common issue that often comes to light as managers undertake staff performance reviews.

This well considered post by David Maxwell may be of help when you are trying to ‘unstick’ someone whom you feel is not achieving their true potential. On the other hand, don’t lose sight of the fact there are many people for whom work is only a part of an already satisfying and fulfilling life, and they may not be stuck at all, but just content to do their job and go home without aiming for progression!

Six Sources of Influence:

Motivation
Personal ability
Social Motivation
Social Ability
Structural Motivation
Structural Ability.

Diagnose all six sources. When people are stuck, it’s usually because all Six Sources of Influence are working in combination to hold them fast. Their world is perfectly organized to create the behavior (or lack of behavior) you are currently seeing. Here are the questions we use to diagnose obstacles in all six sources:

Personal Motivation

Left in a room by themselves, would they want to take on greater responsibilities? Would they enjoy it, find it meaningful, and aspire to it as an important part of their identity? Would they take pride in it, or see it as a moral imperative? Ideas for action:

• Invite choice. As part of the performance-management process, ask each employee to prepare a two- to three-year plan. Ask them to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) your organization and your department face. Then have them anticipate how they see your department and their jobs changing in order to take advantage of these SWOTs. Finally, have them describe what they would like to be doing in two or three years and what they need to do now in order to prepare themselves.

• Try small steps. Identify the crucial moments when it would be most helpful for your employees to step up to greater responsibilities. Think of times, places, and circumstances when you could really use their help in a particular way for a short period of time. It will be most effective if you can include them in finding these crucial moments. People are more trusting when they discover crucial moments for themselves. Then ask for their help during these brief and occasional crucial moments.

Personal Ability

Left in a room by themselves would they have all the skills they need to feel confident taking on greater responsibilities? Do they already have the right knowledge, skill sets, experiences, training, and strength? Ideas for action:

• Training that focuses on critical dependencies. Ask your reluctant employees to identify skill sets that are new, are becoming more important, or are in short supply. These skills would make a person indispensable. If they aren’t quick to identify these skills, work with them to identify the people in your organization who could help and ask your employees to interview them.

• Training that fills in missing skills. Suppose your reluctant employees did accept a greater role, what parts of an expanded job would they find most difficult, tedious, or noxious? How could you skill them up so they’d be confident, efficient, and effective in these areas? We often say, “If it’s taking too much will, add some more skill!” Maybe an ounce of skill will yield another pound of motivation.

Social Motivation

Are the right people encouraging them to take on greater responsibilities? Do the peers they respect, the managers they look up to, and their family members encourage or discourage them from stepping up? Ideas for action:

• Get them some feedback. Do they know how others see them? Most of us want to believe we are doing our fair share. Motivate change by using a 360-degree feedback tool to get feedback from their peers and customers. Make it clear that the feedback is for development—not evaluation—purposes and make sure you have solutions for whatever negative feedback they receive. Otherwise, this kind of feedback can be more demoralizing than motivating.

• Connect them with a greater purpose. Get them involved in field trips where they meet with their internal or external customers. Make the connection as personal as possible. Have them report to your team on what they learned and on how your team can improve.

Social Ability

If your employees take on greater responsibilities, are the people around them ready to lend a hand? Do they have mentors, trainers, and peers who can give advice and step in to help? Ideas for action:

• Make them coaches. Sometimes people step up when they become responsible for someone else’s success. Consider assigning them to work with another person in your group.

Structural Motivation

Does your organization provide incentives such as performance reviews, pay, promotions, and perks that could motivate these employees to take on greater responsibilities? Your employees’ job descriptions don’t include management activities so it’s hard to use the formal reward system, but there may be other routes to explore. Ideas for action:

• Recognize incremental improvements. Try small assignments, projects that can be completed within a week, and then give your honest, heartfelt appreciation when they complete them. Then gradually increase the number, size, duration, and importance of these projects. Continue to show your appreciation as you deem appropriate.

Structural Ability

Is there a way to use the environment, data, tools, cues, or systems to make it easier and more convenient for these people to take on greater responsibilities? Ideas for action:

• Discover and remove obstacles. Ask yourself (or your reluctant employees), “If you wanted to take on a few additional responsibilities, what are the biggest obstacles you would face?” One good guess would be time. If nothing else about their jobs changed, they would have to work longer, harder days. How could you change that? What could you take off their plates so they would have more time for higher-value work? Showing your flexibility may encourage them to become more flexible as well.

http://www.crucialskills.com/

Leadership and the yellow jersey

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Having just been watching the tour de France, I got to thinking about the psychological effect the visible trappings of leadership have on those who have achieved them, those who observe them and those who aspire to them.
The famous yellow jersey is awarded to the leader of each section of the race. Its winners report that wearing the jersey gives them a huge confidence boost and say they feel it improves their performance.

I learned long ago that when faced with several hundred people in a lecture hall, wearing what one or my colleagues referred to as my ‘user shell’, a sharply tailored suit (with shoulder pads – but we won’t go there) gave me the confidence to perform well and appear to have the confidence that I needed but didn’t necessarily actually possess.

And of course the first impression, what you look like, makes a huge difference to to your reception. Similarly, dressing appropriately to blend in makes those around you more comfortable and receptive.

Congruence- being consistent if you like – really is important and we ignore it at our peril.