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.

Leadership

How to Use Your Super Powers for Good

We can make people feel good or bad by as simple a thing as a gesture, an expression, a word, or a tone of voice. Like the common cold, emotions are contagious. This is particularly important to understand for people in positions of authority because leaders, more than anyone, set and spread the mood. And mood affects performance. Read the full article at Fast Company.

New Research

Influencing Others by Showing Emotion

We all know we are influenced by the emotional reactions of those around us. In a workplace where performance is dependent on managing relationships and coordinating efforts, what are the implications and how can we develop this ability? For starters, the authors theorize that it is important to display the appropriate emotion for the situation, consider the communication medium that best portrays the emotion, and exhibit the emotion authentically. Read the full-text PDF at Sage Journals Online. Read the review at BPS Occupational Digest Blog.

Quick Tips

Is Your Email Emotionally Intelligent?

1. Never press send in anger.
2. Show compassion.
3. Limit e-mail shortcuts.
4. Use humor-isms carefully.
5. Know when to take it offline.
6. Clear the clutter.
7. Limit the cc.
8. Look for silver linings.
9. Explain your decisions.
10. Document all expectations.
Read the full article on CIO Insight.

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

The Right Match
The tricky thing about passion is that we are all motivated by different things. This is why one can be satisfied with a career in accounting while others are driven toward more creative pursuits.

A Sense of Purpose
As humans, we have a need to do important work. Often this takes the form of personal or leisure activities — becoming a parent, coaching a local youth team, volunteering. But when we are able to make a difference in our place of employment, we can fulfill our search for meaning while earning our living.

Challenging, Yet Attainable
Anyone who has ever manually entered data or even hand washed dishes knows that simple, redundant work is not intrinsically motivating. Interestingly, overly challenging work can put a damper on our passion as well. After all, most of us do not enjoy failing. We do our best work when we have confidence in our ability to succeed.

Feedback
Last, but certainly not least, we need feedback about our performance. Frequent, timely, positive feedback stimulates our intrinsic motivation for a task, even if the task itself doesn’t meet the aforementioned criteria. Negative feedback is helpful if it teaches us something new about how to attain positive feedback next time.

Quick Tips

Match people’s skills, talents, and interests with jobs and projects that let them shine.

Connect the dots – how does the work of the individual, the team, or the company affect the bigger picture?

Small quick wins at the start of a project provide momentum and the confidence needed for continued success.

Provide as many feedback channels as possible – from different sources and via various modalities.

Words of Wisdom

“Be passionate about what you do. If you aren’t passionate about your job and career, there is a line of people standing behind you who would love to have your job.”
~Jeannene H. Allen, Human Resources Director, CVS Caremark

“Engage people’s hearts and create communities. Otherwise, you’ll have peoplerenting jobs rather than owning jobs.”
~Anne Feller, Organizational Development, Cox Communications

“Be willing to develop and inspire others. Lighting one’s candle doesn’t diminish your own fire.”
~Debra Gmelin, Corporate Director Leadership Institute, Humana

Quotes are from Chapter 10 of EPowerment

Is Your Company Prepared?

1. What is your plan for creating passion and purpose in 2011?
2. Does every employee know the bigger picture of how their role fits with the mission of the company?
3. How do you evaluate if work is challenging enough?
4. How is passion a part of your culture?
5. What is more important – enthusiasm or raw talent?

Photo thanks to Camera Slayer

You can look at rewards and recognition from three perspectives:

The Carrot
The carrot is the tangible reward. It is the raise or bonus or the annual high performer trip. It serves as the bar which you aim to reach and the motivation when you feel stuck.

The One-to-One Feedback
With one-on-one feedback, you tell an employee, a boss, or a coworker how they are doing. When it occurs between a supervisor and their subordinate, it should be an honest and candid two-way conversation that covers not only strengths and weaknesses, but also career aspirations and a personal and professional development plan. But upward feedback is also appreciated. And letting co-workers know know when they have impressed you or done an outstanding job is an excellent way to build trust in the relationship.

The Public Acknowledgment
While a private conversation about performance is effective, one way to really show respect and acknowledgment for exceptional work is to add in public praise that tells others inside and outside the company how well someone is performing. This is the ultimate way to elevate one’s status, one of the best motivators and drivers of engagement in humans.

Words of Wisdom

“Give generously to others. Give information, recognition, praise, feedback, and support. It will help you to savor all that has been given generously to you.”
~Patricia Crull, Chief Learning Officer, Time Warner Cable

“Work toward total engagement. The leader or organization that can treat people in a way that they voluntarily bring their whole selves to their work will have an enormous advantage. People need and have always needed to be appreciated, understood, and encouraged to contribute in meaningful ways. This will become increasingly important as the machinations of modern markets churn across the globe.”
~Nolan Godfrey, Organizational Development, Boehringer-Ingelheim

“Create an environment of open communication, share your knowledge, praise publicly, and ensure your team provides feedback to you continuously.”
~Suzy Domenick Burnham, Vice President of Human Resources, Prudential

Quick Tips

Link recognition to company leadership principles or business objectives.

Provide that which is most valuable to the individual, whether it is more challenging assignments, visibility, or a flexible schedule.

Extend your motive beyond increasing productivity and into genuine goodwill and appreciation.

Is Your Company Prepared?

1. Is giving praise a common activity in your culture?
2. Do leaders make the effort to recognize and reward?
3. Is there a formal rewards program and is everyone aware of it?
4. Is there an easy way to document, collect, and share recognition?

The premise of receiving upward feedback is that you are only as good of a leader as your followers think you are. From an employee perspective, giving upward feedback is a proactive way of improving your job, your boss’s job, and even your organization. If leaders do not know how they are perceived, organizational performance will suffer—yet, the higher one’s position in an organization, the less honest feedback a leader receives.

It can be difficult to give your boss feedback. Here are some quick tips for giving effective upward feedback:

• Consider if they are open to feedback.
• Frame the issue in terms of business impact.
• Deliver feedback with good intentions.
• Consider if there is trust in your relationship.
• Provide suggestions and offer to work on solutions.
• The times your boss is most likely to be receptive to feedback are during times of change. For example, when working on a new project or with a new client.
• Prepare for the possible reactions you may receive and practice your responses.

Is Your Company Prepared?

1. Is feedback part of the culture?
2. Are leaders trained on how to receive feedback?
3. Is there a formal upward feedback process in place?
4. How do you know feedback is effective at your company?

Best Practices

“When you have feedback, you have to own that—they are your perceptions and your feelings and you have to be willing to own that resolution.”
~Emma Oberdieck, YUM! Brands

“Your immediate job is to help your boss achieve outcomes. If those outcomes are being compromised or the performance of your team is at stake, you have a responsibility to bring the cause to your boss’s attention. But, your boss has to be receptive.”
~Kim Kochurka, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana

For a webinar recording on this topic, please check out the HR Professionals Webinar Series

Photo thanks to Dimitris Papazimouris

The specific metric ROI is becoming less important, but that doesn’t mean outcomes are unimportant. Quite the opposite. However, we are finally recognizing that it is becoming increasingly difficult to measure ROI in a straightforward manner. Just twenty-five years ago, intangibles accounted for less than a third of the value of the S&P 500. Today, intangibles make up over 80 percent of the index value. CEOs reported that they would rather see business impact from learning over ROI.

Making the connection between learning and impact to business is what outcome-based learning is all about. That is not to say that continuous learning is a flawed model or that the genuine attempts to improve it are unwarranted. Continuous learning with a direct connection to application of that learning-what some call action learning-to a business issue is significantly better.

Learn something to change something, to make something better, to improve something, as opposed to learning something because it just feels good to learn something is the difference between gaining knowledge and gaining wisdom. Wisdom is knowledge in action.

Is Your Company Prepared?

1. Does learning have a purpose?
2. What are your learning metrics?
3. Are you measuring progress over time?
4. Is learning relevant to the learner and the organization?

Best Practices

“When we develop a leadership meeting or full training session, sustainability is included in the up-front design as opposed to being an afterthought.”
~Susan Richter, Director of Human Resources, Food Lion, LLC

“We implement project-based learning. People come together and drive organizational priorities forward at the same time that they receive a learning experience.”
~Michelle Marquard, Fortune 100 Information Technology Company

“Learning is not an event, it is a process—a process that plays out over time; it is not just the events you schedule. It takes people changing their brain chemistry over time to learn so you want to reinforce that learning through multiple streams and multiple time periods, this is the way to do it.”
~Karie Willyerd, Sun Microsystems/Oracle

Besides person-to-person differences in preferences, our own learning needs change as well. When you show up at work on a Monday morning, the best way for you to learn at that time may be to read an article. On Tuesday morning, you may prefer to talk with someone. On Wednesday, you might want to watch a video. On Thursday you might learn from collaborating in a team environment. And Friday’s learning needs may call for accessing large amounts of information via a database of best practices, case studies, and research.

How you prefer to learn on any given day is dictated by factors such as events in the workplace, our moods, style, and the context of your learning moments. The more modalities of learning that are available to us, the higher the probability that we will pick one that is applicable to us at that specific point in time and is relevant to meet our specific need.

Quotes to Contemplate

“To create the most effective learning environment, organizations can’t rely on just one modality. One way of learning may not be enough for an individual. A learning method that engages a more visual and conceptual learner may not do so for a kinetic or auditory learner.”
~Ruth Kennedy, Director of Organization Development, VF Corporation

“There will be a transformation in the future, where large organizations will be connected, but not as one company. The learning function must have agility to deal with that; it must be prepared to move and change as an organization changes.”
~Effenus Henderson, Chief Diversity Officer, Weyerhaeuser

“We must make learning more accessible, including learning on-demand, e-learning, global systems, etc. People need info that they can easily and conveniently pull up at the point of transaction, with step-by-step instructions to help when they need it. That on-demand capability puts into learners’ hands the opportunity to pull learning as they need, and technology allows for that.”
~Jane Luciano, VP of Global Learning and Development at Bristol-Myers Squibb

Learn Now

TED Talks
30 Second MBA
Personal MBA
Harvard Business Blogs
HBS Working Knowledge
Academic Earth
MIT OpenCourseWare

Now that social media and emerging technologies can connect us to new people, communities, and sources of knowledge, the constraints of mentoring itself can be revisited. Mentoring is not an outcome. It is a process. Consider a new definition of mentoring to be “a process designed to provide access to knowledge from wherever it exists, whether from a person, a community, or a source of knowledge, to whoever needs it at the time they need it.”

If mentoring is a process, then the outcome under the new definition is an EPowered individual: one capable of attaining high performance.

Is Your Company Prepared?

1. Do leaders and managers have mentors?
2. Are high potential employees provided with guidance and support in a way that is useful to them?
3. Does it matter who, what, or where the source of learning is?
4. Does it matter if new knowledge is acquired internally or externally of your company?
5. Is the best source of wisdom a person, a community, or a knowledge source?

Quotes to Contemplate

“Mentoring is often misunderstood and not presented effectively. What happens is usually the company identifies a mentor and the needs. But mentoring is dynamic. One can have multiple mentors-a technical mentor, an EQ mentor, an on-boarding mentor. Mentoring can’t be prescribed. It must be embraced by employees who understand their developmental areas.”
~Effenus Henderson, Chief Diversity Officer, Weyerhaeuser

“Love and caring are elements of a good mentoring relationship. Negativity is a reality of organizational life. Mentoring is a kind of caring that individuals feel for others that make them want to help them.”
~Bill Hodgetts, VP of Corporate Leadership Development, Fidelity

“Mentoring and coaching, which, in my opinion exist on the same spectrum, are about the development of someone. That accountability to another (the mentor or coach) makes the learning stick. Whatever you call the method, it can be an accelerant in setting up a team for success as they go, especially as you are trying to move to a new culture, structure, or process.”
~Jane Luciano, VP of Global Learning and Organization Development at Bristol-Myers Squibb

When you ask leaders what their company does to make sure their employees are safe, the list of security interventions is long, as it should be. But ask the same people what they do for the emotional safety of their employees, and you will likely get a blank stare.

Though we may conceptualize emotional safety and physical safety as quite different, a lack of emotional safety is physiologically perceived exactly in the same manner as a lack of physical safety. It is seen as a threat to our well-being and livelihood and our nervous system reacts appropriately.

How clear is your thinking and how rational are your decisions when you work in perpetual fear of being randomly injured or attacked? Clearly, emotional safety is essential in an environment that encourages participation in decision-making, innovation, and collaboration–emotional safety is a key component of creating a truly empowered culture.

Is Your Company Prepared?

1. Do you have emotional safety guidelines and interventions?
2. How can you create a climate of emotional safety on your team?
3. What is your back-up plan if a colleague creates an emotionally unsafe environment during a meeting?
4. What can you personally do to help others feel safe to challenge your ideas?

Threats to Emotional Safety

• Hierarchy
• Internal Competition
• Personal History/Experiences
• Personality Differences
• Value Differences
• Fear of Failure
• Diversity
• Conflict
• Emotional Labor
• Performance Anxiety
• Professional Status
• Financial Instability
• Downsizing

Quotes to Contemplate

“To make a good decision, you have to have the courage to say “no” in front of a whole room of people saying “yes;” you must have the courage to voice a point of view that is the opposite and the courage to ask, “Have you thought of this?”
~Jane Luciano, VP of Global Learning and Organization Development, Bristol-Myers Squibb

“People are naturally emotional and need an outlet. When companies allow employees to express their emotions, relationships between people in an organization are better.”
~Leticia Knowles, American Express

“Employees can’t be authentic if they don’t feel like it’ll be respected.”
~Kelli Price, SVP of People, Premier Inc

If you enjoyed this article, you may also like:

• EPowerment Principle #2 – Emotional Safety
• Emotional Safety — Revisited
• Corporate Courage
• Corporate Courage & EQ

What are the odds that a learner is ready to accept the material presented, is motivated to learn in the modality designed, and is prepared to apply what was just learned? The likelihood that these three elements will all spontaneously occur at a pre-determined date and time is slim to none. Moreover, it is a scientific fact that information learned over a period of time is retained better than information that is learned in one sitting.

Extended learning models, as opposed to event-based learning models, provide a much larger window of opportunity to grow, both personally and professionally.

Research

• 40% percent of training content is transferred immediately following training
• 25% of training content is retained after six months
• 15% of training content is retained after one year

Source: Kenneth Wexley and Gary Latham. Developing and training human resources in organizations.

Is Your Company Prepared?

1. Is your training and development comprised mostly of events?
2. How can you create an extended learning experience for yourself or for your team?
3. What can you do with seminar or workshop content to transform it into an extended learning period?
4. How do you learn each and every day?

Quotes to Contemplate

“Curriculum by itself doesn’t provide depth and breadth-you must include self-initiated learning that is self-paced and tied to your needs.”

~Effenus Henderson, Chief Diversity Officer, Weyerhaeuser

“Until people gather their own data and see a disconnect between where they are now, and where they could be-until that click occurs, the best learning tools and workshops will not produce behavioral change.”

~Troy Heflin, VP of Organizational Development, Volvo

Can we apply this knowledge to our bad leadership habits? See for yourself! Do you recognize going through any of these stages when you have made changes in the past?

Let’s work with the example of someone who is overly negative.

PRECONTEMPLATION- I am unaware. There is nothing wrong with me. I have a realistic perspective, and everyone else is too optimistic. I have no intention of changing my attitude or my behavior.

CONTEMPLATION- I am thinking about it. It has been brought to my attention that I can be a downer when it comes to teamwork and collaboration. I have been thinking that maybe I shouldn’t always cut in with my opinion and extensive explanations of why things won’t work.

PREPARATION- I am doing some research. I’ve decided that I shouldn’t be so negative. I’ve started observing people I admire, reading books on positive thinking, and watching videos on how to deliver feedback

ACTION- I am making it happen! The other day, I stopped myself from interrupting a coworker’s idea. That’s great, but I’m a long way from making this a habit — putting those suggestions I’ve read about into practice is a whole different story.

MAINTENANCE- I am focusing on my success. I have changed my pattern of negativity. I now know how to acknowledge ideas in an empathetic manner.

RELAPSE- I slipped up. I was doing well, but then my coworker brought up a touchy subject and I interjected with my unsolicited and possibly hurtful opinion.

TERMINATION- I have changed and it’s noticeable. I have struck a good balance. I know how to give constructive criticism as well as positive affirmation, as well as when each is needed.

Is Your Company Prepared?

1. What leadership behaviors do you want to develop?
2. Is behavioral change a part of your leadership development program?
3. What support is in place to help people through change?
4. How can you apply the stages of individual change to stages of organizational change?

Brainstorming: What is Your Bad Habit?

• Micromanaging
• Stubborn tendencies
• Making excuses
• Judgmental of others
• Setting vague expectations
• Not prioritizing
• Anger issues, bad temper
• Knowledge hoarding
• Unrealistic expectations
• Poor listening skills
• Negativity/naysayer
• Complaining
• Not saying thanks
• Blaming others
• Taking credit for others’ work
• Indecisive/delaying decisions
• Untrustworthy/false promises
• Weak leadership ability
• Wishy-washy positions
• Inconsistent
• Missing the big picture
• Quitting too soon

Quotes to Contemplate

“Most leaders don’t need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop.”
~Peter Drucker

“The 20 flaws that hold most people back are rarely flaws of skill, intelligence, or personality. They are challenges in interpersonal behavior, often leadership behavior. They are the egregious everyday annoyances that make your workplace noxious. They are transactional flaws performed by one person against others.”
~Marshall Goldsmith

“Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.”
~William James

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
~Charles Darwin