Posts filed under 'Insights on OC'
Are you falling behind your competition due to slow-moving processes and lack of alignment & innovation?
Do great ideas get bogged down by endless meetings and red tape?
Does getting to market sound like a great idea - if only everyone could get on the same page and GET THERE?
Then you need to ENGAGE! your organization.
Create an engaged and optimized workforce that produces outstanding results: The ENGAGE! process is an award-winning system that involves your entire workforce in creating successful change. It includes a unique approach to organizational vision, scorecard, and strategy, and a comprehensive coaching component.
ENGAGE! is a proven four-part system to launch successful change in your organization. It includes preparation activities and guidance for CEOs, executive teams, and coaches who have key roles in a change effort.
October 13th, 2005
I am reflecting on the book The Power of Full Engagement, by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz (See below). Here is the second in a sequence of blogs that address some key points in the book and the thoughts they inspired in me.
Multi-tasking arises out of distraction itself. Marilyn vos Savant
If you don’t have the feeling of accomplishment at the end of every day, this article is for you! In our world of distraction, many of us get to the end of the day and feel overwhelmed with all the things that did not get done. And, at this point you may agree that multi-tasking is highly overrated. The distractions come in many forms; emails, phone calls, visitors, other people’s priorities, the list goes on. In many cases these things are part of our job; but if we don’t know how to manage or turn them off, they wash over us like a continual tidal wave; and while we may stay afloat, we drift further and further from our critical goals.
Here is a suggestion: develop the habit of victory for at least one of your priorities. This means that no matter what, you will have a sense of completion on something important to you. Once you have this habit, you can then apply it to more than one of your priorities and have a better sense of personal leadership and self management.
Here is how:
1. Pick a goal. Select an item from your list of priorities that are aligned with your key goals.
2. Break it down. Break it down into manageable parts and estimate the time required for each part.
3. Start at the beginning. Start with the first part and block out the time required. (Sixty-minute increments work well.)
4. Stay focused. Set yourself up to say “no” to all distractions. This can involve alerting others that you are not available, put your phone on silent, close your door, turn off your email alert, etc.. Give yourself permission to be in focus.
5. Write your intention. Write on a card or piece of paper these words, “For the next ______ (minutes, or hours, etc), I am completing ________.” Describe what your work product. Having the vision of the completed part is important. Again, Sixty-minute increments are a good rule of thumb for this approach.
6. Set a timer. Set a timer for your allotted time and place it on the intention you just wrote. The reason for this is to free your mind completely from even having to keep track of time.
7. Stop. Pause when the timer goes off. You may be surprised that the time went by so quickly and you may want to continue your project. If that makes sense, then do so. You will likely have accomplished far more in an hour than usual.
8. Celebrate. Once you stop working on your project, take a break. It can be a short one, but it is important to give yourself a moment of pause and quiet celebration; you are developing the habit of victory in a world of distraction.
Once you feel the confidence in this habit, you can use it whenever you need to. To your victory and the feeling of accomplishment that you will have at the end of the day!
November 13th, 2007
We can’t do really big things every day. If we’re really serious about walking the talk…, we have to focus on the small stuff. Let the jouney begin. Eric Harvey and Alexander Lucia
Does it feel to you like you are going at perpetual high speed? We have co-created a culture that supports that – so it is up to us to minimize the inevitable damage that goes with that kind of life style: failed relationships, burnout, illness, decreased productivity.
I am reflecting on the book The Power of Full Engagement, by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz (See below). The next sequence of blogs will address some key points in the book and the thoughts they inspired in me. Here is the first one:
Focus your way to better results. Are you finding it hard to focus on one thing without getting distracted by many more? Do you start out to do something and stop on the way to do one more, and then one more, etc. and eventually forget what you set out to do in the first place? You are not alone. Try this – a Focus Awareness Chart.
A friend and mentor, Teri-E Belf, founder of Success Unlimited Network, introduced me to the awareness chart tool. Here is how I use it:
1. Make a commitment to increase your awareness of the power of focus. The more you use this power, the more you will have increased sense of ease, satisfaction, and productivity. The principle at work is that when you are aware of your behavior, you are more likely to change your behavior, if that is what you want to do.
2. Get a small calendar that gives you space to write a score of 1 (low) to 10 (high) plus some comments if appropriate. Keep this calendar by your bedside. Before retiring for the evening, take 10 seconds to reflect on your day. Think about your level of awareness of focusing during that day and give yourself a score of from 1 to 10. There is no judgment – just awareness of what it was.
3. Optional - If anything in particular happened that day that impacted your score, jot down those notes.
4. At the end of the week, see if there are any trends and impact from your increased awareness of focus.
You will be amazed at how much you’ll increase your power of focus. A positive change in behavior is sure to follow. Keep this process up until you have developed a solid habit. A minimum of one month.
Read my blog below on Focus – Key to Organizational Success 9/27/05
October 14th, 2007
Do not lose your inward peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset. Saint Francis de Sales
Stress worms its way into the fabric of our lives and has costly or potentially costly effects. The increasing incidence and potency of stress is commonplace among today’s executives. Some are better at dealing with it than others; some are better at hiding it than others.
A typical scenario: Alex is a successful executive. He has great emotional control. At a recent board meeting, no one would suspect that he was raging inside….until he got home and did battle with his wife and teenagers. He went to sleep with a sour feeling in the pit of his stomach.
One of the assessments I use, the Attribute Index part of the TriMetrix™ package, has several attributes (out of the 80) that relate to how you handle stress. Internal self control is one of those attributes. Internal self control is the ability to be composed internally even in the face of stressful external circumstances; it is not letting those circumstances have a negative impact on internal emotions. This is distinguished from emotional control which is the ability to maintain an outward “even keel” regardless of what is happening internally (which could be in a raging mess).
When internal self control tests out as being lower than desired, my clients often ask me what they can do to improve. One of the first steps is to better understand the dynamics of internal self control. There are undeniable physiological reactions to personal triggers in our environment that are part of the fight or flight instinct. And there are two major paths to increase internal self control: One is to deactivate the triggers and the other is to increase emotional conditioning and stamina. They are both important.
We develop our own favorite triggers. For one person, it could be the guy in the next cubicle, or people being late for a meeting, or signs of disrespect. For another it could be the seating arrangement at the board table, etc. So the first step is to have a greater understanding of what is setting you off and then take steps to minimize the power it has over you. (How to do that is a topic for another article.)
Here are just some of many practices to increase emotional conditioning and stamina. As a start, pick at least 2 to incorporate in your daily/weekly practices.
1. Daily exercise (my belief is that this one has the most impact on internal self-control)
2. Practice playing the “observer” (step outside of yourself to see what is going on) so that you can do this when in a challenging circumstance.
3. Fresh air
4. Meditation
5. Use any one of the parts of the STRESS EMERGENCY KIT™* (Humor, Breathing, Do Something For Someone Else Quick, Gratitude)
6. Have a trusted advisor that you can talk to when things start to heat up.
7. Prepare yourself well when you are going into a situation you anticipate will be challenging.
8. If you are in a hot situation, find a way to temporarily remove yourself (go make a phone call, “find something,” etc.)
*Send a request by email and I will send you the Stress Emergency Kit article. (egagne@is-consulting.com)
December 11th, 2005
Success follows doing what you want to do. There is no other way to be successful. Malcolm Forbes
A friend of mine interviewed me for a book he is writing. The topic was “vision.” In responding to his questions I had this realization:
Commitment is work; passion is joy. Both are paths to achieving a vision. You can be successful through either one, but you will rarely fail if that path is passion. Have you ever been passionate about something and felt tireless in moving toward that goal? Have you had the experience of weaving that goal into everything you did and even thought? There is nothing more compelling than that kind of a full court press that passion brings. Things just happen in those circumstances that propel you toward your goal.
Commitment on the other hand takes deliberate discipline and focus. And commitment is essential when implementing any action plan. In fact, when my coaching clients say they are ready to make a change, I ask them, “On a scale of 1 – 10 (10 being high and 1 being low), how much do you want to make this change?” If they do not say “10,” we continue to talk until we either find someway to reduce what ever obstacle is in the way, or the client realizes that he or she really does not want this change enough to follow through. So we drop it rather than waste time pretending that it is important.
Now, as I reconsider these thoughts, I realize that the critical combination may be a dance of these two elements─both passion and commitment.
What do you think?
December 1st, 2005
The work praises the man. Irish Proverb
I was cleaning out a pile of magazines and came across this tip from Business 2.0 Dec. 2003. I thought it would be useful for some of my clients, so here it is:
“We wrote a program that asks every engineer what they did every week. it sends them e-mail on Monday, and concatenates the e-mails together in a document that everyone can read and it then sends that out to everyone….”
The article went on to indicate that those who do not publish activities are noticeably absent. The result is a running history that records what everyone did. The benefits are that: the “what gets measured gets managed” element comes into play; performance reviews are easier; it is a great accountability system; and if you are new to the company or the team, you can get a great overview of team activities in a short time.
October 13th, 2005
The world is moved not only by the mighty shoves of heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker. Helen Keller
The air waves are filled with criticism and hind-sight in relation to Katrina─the recent tragedy burned in hearts and minds around the globe. I think the real question is how would we (our organization) handle our own Katrina?
Are your people, systems, and processes strong enough to bear the “perfect storm?” Does your leadership factor in the worst case scenarios in addition to the best case scenarios? Is your organization transparent enough so that each part knows the relevance of other parts and how they depend on each other? Would they pull together or apart in a time of crisis?
These and other questions are essential for organizational leaders today. And the answers lie in engaging the entire organization in becoming adaptable to a changing environment─whether it be a slow evolution or one with the speed and power of Katrina. The workforce today is not merely about machines, brawn, or even brain. Successful organizations also engage the heart elements like creativity, passion, commitment, and loyalty. Leadership cannot survive without these elements.
Ah, there is the rub. It is far easier to tell than to ask; to deal with small numbers of executives than with the masses of workers and other stakeholders. The organizations that can successfully work in the new equation are the ones that will survive the storms.
To learn more about how your organization can become more adaptable, see ENGAGE! Roadmap for Workforce-Driven Change in a Warp-Speed World.
October 7th, 2005
The difference between mediocrity and greatness can lie in the power of a thought or symbol that has roots in the soul. anon
This morning, Sally Cudrik made the news! Sally is “the one in the white cap.” She is a (Colorado Springs) Memorial Hospital patient care-coordinator with 37 years of nursing experience. Sally is one of very few nurses who wear the starched white cap anymore. For her, the cap represents all that is good about the nursing tradition. And she is not giving it up in spite of the ribbing she gets and minor discomfort in wearing it. She is famous at Memorial Hospital with patients and staff because of her cap.
This got me to thinking of the power of symbols and a conversation I had with a nurse who had her cap in a prominent place in her office to remind her of the dedication and achievement the cap represented for her. The cap inspired her and symbolized her strength and competence─qualities she can call on anytime she needs to.
For reflection, what are important symbols in your life that you want to deliberately re-energize on your path to excellence?
October 6th, 2005
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