Emotions in Performance

Personal Effectiveness

Make Stress Work for You

In a well-intentioned attempt to bring attention to the issue, for the past 30 years, trainers and coaches have underscored the negative effects of stress. But what if this negative focus is actually making things worse? Our body’s stress reaction can actually have performance-enhancing benefits, if we can re-frame it, harness it, and use it to our advantage. Read the full article at HBR.

Passion in the Workplace

Creating passion and purpose in the workplace is the essence of great leadership and the hallmark of a best-in-class organization. Passion in the workplace fundamentally comes from the EQ component, motivation.

Let’s look a little more closely at the factors that lead to passion for our work.

Reward and Recognize

In the spirit of the month of Thanksgiving, this month we take a look at rewards and recognition. The beauty of rewards and recognition is that anyone can do it–a budget isn’t needed and neither is authority.

You can look at rewards and recognition from three perspectives:

Giving Upward Feedback

Upward feedback is feedback from subordinates to managers. It can be structured, as part of an organizational process or 360 assessment, or it can be unstructured, where it is delivered spontaneously.

Business Impact of Learning

As we have seen in recent times, a tough financial situation inevitably leads to budget cuts and almost always, training and development budgets get cut first. The reason for this is that it is not clear to the executives, and CFOs in particular, how continuous learning impacts their business. To those outside of the human capital profession, it is not very intuitive that in tough times, the right answer is actually to invest more in professional development so that new ideas are explored and harnessed, and therefore can manifest necessary business changes which can help the company get out of the downturn faster and come out better prepared for the new business climate.

Multiple Learning Modalities

We all learn differently. Personality differences, motivators, and previous experience with the content all interact to create a unique personal learning style. Extraverts may prefer collaborative learning in a face-to-face atmosphere. Assertive individuals may clarify their thought through a stimulating debate. Introverts may find their learning moment as they reflect on their own thoughts after writing them down. Visual learners may need to see a video before the new information clicks.

Mentoring and Career Success

Classical mentoring in the form of apprenticeships used to be quite common. Historically, the desired goal was to transfer experience, knowledge, and wisdom from people who had it to those who needed it. But after the industrial age, the amount of different jobs that existed increased exponentially. So to find a person who has done what you want to do in within your locale has become quite the challenge. And now through the information age, there are new industries, vocations, and specialties being created as we speak.This constant change in jobs and roles also means there might not be any available people who have done what you are trying to do.

A Different Kind of Safety

Most of us have little to fear regarding our physical safety at work. We are not afraid when we walk into a building that the building might fall on us or that we will get robbed in the elevator. Physical safety, often an unspoken expectation, is critical for people to show up at work.

Learn More When You Learn Over Time

Over the past thirty-plus years, we have experienced event-based learning models comprising conferences, seminars, workshops, speakers, and newer versions of events including Webinars. Without technology, students of all types gathered in a room and listened to an “expert,” and perhaps that expert was a teacher, a professor, a consultant, a researcher, or the boss. But when learning is constricted in time, spanning a few contiguous days, a few hours, or a few minutes, knowledge learned is soon lost.

Change Your Bad Habits

The science of health psychology has a unique perspective on how people make behavioral changes toward healthier habits. One popular model of change, outlined below, has been used successfully to beat addiction, overcome bad habits, and instill new healthy behaviors.