Resolution - Make Feedback a Priority - Fast Feedback for Managers

Summary: The best managers constantly seek out feedback. Here's some advice on how.

You talk to your direct reports on a regular basis, and none of them have raised concerns or complaints about your job performance. So you can go on in confidence that you're managing them well, right?

Well, maybe not. According to Scott Eblin, author of The Next Level: What Insiders Know About Executive Success, "The higher you rise in an organization, the less likely people are to tell you what's really going on." If you're an executive and you want to avoid blind spots about your organization's performance as well as your own, "You need to regularly ask for feedback."

Another reason to seek out feedback: By doing so, "You send a strong message about the kind of organization you want to lead—one that's collaborative, open to new ideas, and gets things done," Eblin says.

To establish that kind of atmosphere, the traditional yearly performance review isn't enough. It's outdated, Eblin says, and "Things move too fast for any feedback generated on an annual basis to be meaningful."

Instead, he suggests working to create a culture of continuous feedback within your organization "so positive behaviors can be reinforced and less productive behaviors can be corrected."

Once you start fielding that continuous feedback, "Don't debate it," Eblin says. "Take note of it and look for patterns around what you should keep doing and what you should do differently."

And don't be shy about the progress you're sure to make as a result. After all, Eblin says, the best way for executives to create a culture of continuous feedback is to "seek it out and then demonstrate that they're doing something with it."

Originally Found on http://www.asaecenter.org/

Celebrate Success

4 reasons you should celebrate your success

A friend and I were talking recently about growing up watching ABC's Wide World of Sports on the weekends. While one mention of the line from their intro - "the thrill of victory...and the agony of defeat" - immediately brought to mind the image of a ski jumper biting it on the way down, I realized that I couldn't for the life of me remember what the accompanying clip for the thrill of victory was. 

Unfortunately, a lot of people live their lives that way. They remember the failures and face plants. Sometimes they even obsess on them. But when they do something well, they scarcely pause to acknowledge it, much less remember it down the road. 

When it comes to pursuing their passion, focusing on the negative and ignoring the positive can be a dream-killer. It's vital that you celebrate your success along the way. Why? Because when you focus on the negative and don't reinforce the positive...

It eats away at your self-confidence. 

When you jump off the cookie cutter path and pursue a career that is uniquely right for you, it is almost by definition about taking the road less traveled. And navigating that road successfully takes self-confidence. 

Dwelling on the failures and face plants along the way does anything but build self-confidence. It repeatedly sends the message, "You're not good enough. You can't do it right. When you try, you fail." Even if most of your efforts result in success, focusing on your failures is guaranteed to paint a dismal picture. 

It distorts reality.

Minimizing (or ignoring) your successes and enlarging your failures distorts your picture of reality. It's like one of those fun-house mirrors that make you look short and fat or tall and skinny. And because your experience of reality is created by your perception of it, everywhere you look you see the negative element relentlessly confirmed. 

It creates a falsely negative pattern.

When the majority of your attention is aimed at the face plants, that's the pattern you will see. Each failure becomes a clear confirmation that you don't have what it takes. After all, look at all these other botched efforts you can point to to back that up, right? 

It numbs you to your positive achievements.

When you're not in the habit of acknowledging the positive, it takes an ultra-blast of success to get your attention. Run-of-the-mill achievements scarcely make it onto your radar screen as you turn your attention to what's next. 

The more you practice acknowledging the positive, the more positive you will notice. It's a bit like when I start making an effort to remember my dreams in the morning. When I do that consistently, after a few days my brain will automatically start going over the dreams when I wake up. When I focus on remembering dreams, eventually the number of dreams I remember shoots up. 

Try this: Start training your brain to acknowledge your successes, both large and small. For the next week, challenge yourself to find at least three things you did well each day. They could be work-related, or relationship-oriented, or hobby-focused, or any of a bazillion other ways you show up in life. 

At the end of each day, write them down. Spend five minutes acknowledging to yourself that you did them well. Better yet, acknowledge to someone else that you did them well. Get it out of your brain and into the open. 

One last idea to help you tilt the scale in the direction of a positive perception. Every time you find yourself dwelling on something you did wrong, stop yourself and ask, "OK, what have I done right today/this week/this month?" Redirect your mind and celebrate your successes.

-- Originally Found on http://mapmaker.curtrosengren.com

Resolution - Increase Employee Engagement - Video 1 Second of Your Work Day

(From Fastcompany.com) Two days after launching a Kickstarter project, Cesar Kuriyama found himself bombarded with questions and requests. It was tempting to work around the clock. But at 6 p.m., he got up from his desk and went for a bike ride. Because he needed to find a moment worth recording.

Kuriyama is fundraising for an app that makes it easy for anyone to record one second each day of their lives. It’s based on an experiment he has been conducting on his own life since February 20, 2011, when after saving for years, he quit his job to take a year off from work. To chronicle what he assumed would be the most adventurous year of his life; he started selecting one second of video footage from each day. His plan was to compile the moments into a six-minute memento. Soon, however, he found the project was doing more than documenting his life--it was changing the decisions he made about how to spend time.

Click Image Above to Watch His Video

“[The project has] made me realize I need to do one interesting thing to make today count,” he says. “It’s been an incalculably positive influence on my life. The reason that I’ve really decided to stop everything and try to build this thing is that I genuinely think it can have that same influence for others." Here’s how he believes chronicling a life in one-second chunks can change it.

Business Resolution  –  Record 1 second every  work day for a month – the good and the bad.

 How can this change the way you work and the way that your employees work? It makes you very conscious of your actions. Were they good? Were they bad? Were there any employee successes? Were you motivating? Were you prepared?

Use this as an experiment in your company. Try it for a month and get the entire company involved, no matter your size company 1 – 1,000, video one second of every day. Find out if there is anyone that can stitch them together in your company, since the app isn’t created yet.

After the month is over, make sure that you have a special meeting where everyone can watch them, especially if multiple people are recording these 1 second tidbits. In the meeting, get feedback if it was successful. If it was successful, continue it and see how people’s attitudes change when they realize they need to record 1 second every day. This will be sure to increase employee engagement!

Resolution - Increase Employee Productivity - The Largest Risk in Your Business

In a recent Taleo Research Study, they reported that the largest risk to their company’s bottom line and brand is low employee engagement and productivity. Most companies are asking people to do more with less because companies can no longer afford to have suboptimal performance from any employee.

No one argues the fact that there is a direct correlation between engagement and productivity. The real question is, how do we sustain high levels of productivity on the job while keeping people engaged?

The first step, in an ongoing sustainability process, is to teach the employee to become goal-oriented. All of our Leadership and Management Development Courses are goal-oriented and we teach people how to get results. Performance and productivity enhancement is defined as our desired outcome.

The second step is to align the business goals to talent goals. Executive level management must provide the vision and articulate the strategy. Mid level management must provide a work environment that allows the strategy to be driven while presenting a responsibility, accountability and self-empowerment culture to support this highly engaged workforce.

Our Making of an Effective Manager helps mid-level management get executives and employees on the same boat while keeping it on the straight and narrow path to success. Middle Management is what makes things happen. If they are not trained, they will not understand the value of setting goals, and nor will they know how to get employees to realize they are part of that goal.

It is documented that 85% find linking talent management to corporate goals challenging. The reason for the high percentage is that most people are not goal-oriented and until they learn the competency that will help them get the desired results, they will struggle.

The value from engagement and alignment can pay big dividends for your company’s future. As an owner and/or HR professional, it is your job to drive the process and select the right tools to achieve the desired results.

Call Innovative Leadership now to help you define your plan of action for engagement and alignment at 609.390.2830. Or click here to learn more about The Making of an Effective Manager.

7 Signs Your Employees are NOT Engaged

1.       Employee tells the boss that the company does not have a vision or mission statement.
2.       Employee states that the core values of the company do not make sense.
3.       Employee blames another employee for the mistake.
4.       Employee finds no meaning in their work.
5.       Employee sits alone in the cafeteria and never socializes in the workplace.
6.       Employee doesn’t find anything positive after a presentation by the CEO or senior staff.
7.       There are no other employees on their facebook page.

Multi-tasking is Zapping Your Energy

According to an article, “The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time”, Harvard Business Review –March 2012, 25-50% of all workers are feeling overwhelmed or burned out at work. It claims that we have lost all of our stopping points and we can no longer get away from our work. We are creating an “ever busy” environment and this environment is draining our energy and not allowing us to build up our reservoirs for later use. Individual productivity is waning proportionally with our energy. We are spiraling downward……with no rest in sight! In this article, they recommended three policies worth promoting:

•  Maintain Meeting Discipline
• Stop demanding or expecting instant responsiveness at every moment of the day, and
• Encourage renewal.

I think the time is now to formulate your plans to do just that. 

5 Tips to Focus and Promote Productivity:

Trust: A Bond that Holds a Team Together

Trust is an indispensable force in any relationship, and it is a powerful bond that team members can form to help them reach their team goal. Trust is the combination or convergence of three separate beliefs:

◆ First is the belief that your team members are competent and that they have expertise in the areas you trust them in.

◆ Secondly is the belief that others are concerned, that they care for you and have your best interest at heart.

◆ Third is the belief in others commitment — that they will do what they say and follow through on their commitments.  Trust in others and in one’s self is developed only when team members are interdependent – they are respectful, encouraging, loyal, and hard working.