Our daily lives offer endless communication challenges. Dealing with family and friends, clients and team members, and service providers, among others, has become a bit like walking a minefield. Here are three keys that can really make a difference in the quality of your interactions with others. Leverage human nature by applying simple techniques and avoiding common pitfalls to make your daily communication more effective.
Read MoreWhatever you think about his approach or business, DC area entrepreneur Matt Lesko has one thing that's unquestionably clear and strong: his branding.
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Thanks for reading my blog. I really appreciate it. In fact, I really want to know what you think about something.
You see, I'm doing some research for a new project I'm working on (Top Secret - for now). I'd LOVE to get your opinion. It won't take long, I promise. I value your ideas!
Just complete these three statements in the comments below.
Again: Thank you for your time and input!
Photo by Flickr Creative Commons User Marco Bellucci
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Bringing your Best Self to work
4 reasons to say NO to mediocrity
How to be happier: 4 tips from Positive Psychology (heard on the TalentGrow Show podcast)
It was very nice to see TalentGrow's annual gift featured in this guest post on WordOfMouth.org by our friend and colleague Jeremy Epstein, VP of Marketing and Social Navigator at Sprinklr. It just shows that when you give thoughtful, meaningful, authentic gifts, it really resonates with the people who receive them.
The same is true with positive recognition and appreciation; in my opinion, it is the most influential tool in any leader's toolkit. When you say "thank you" or "job well-done" to a staff member, peer, supervisor, client, associate or friend, it has a lasting positive effect, often with a multiplier effect rippling off of it.
Let's face it: NO ONE has ever felt TOO appreciated. Period.
Here's the simple formula that is guaranteed to work to make people feel truly appreciated:
In the next week, look for opportunities to 'catch' people doing things right, and for things you can appreciate about them, and provide Specific, Timely, and Sincere appreciation. It can be as simple as a spoken appreciation face-to-face or by phone, a thank you card, or a symbolic gift. Then, come back and report about your experience and reactions in the comments below. I can't wait to hear about it!
Image: my modification of a photo by Flickr Creative Commons user Claudio.Ar
Sign up to my free weekly newsletter and get more actionable tips and ideas for making yourself a better leader and a more effective communicator! It’s very short and relevant with quick tips, links, and news about leadership, communication, and self-development. Sign up now!
Also, subscribe to my podcast, The TalentGrow Show, on iTunes to always be the first in the know about new episodes of The TalentGrow Show! http://apple.co/1NiWyZo
[Vlog]: 10 conversations every leader should have with every employee
The Top 10 Conversations Every Leader Should Have with Every Employee
The 3 Secrets of Motivating and Inspiring Others
7 Tips for Building Mentoring to Develop Employees and Raise Engagement
I love learning. I love being creative. So I really enjoyed listening to recorded Creativity in Business Telesummit (CIBT) interviews with creative leaders, hosted by my friend Michelle James of the Center for Creative Emergence. I got new insights, learned new information, infused new energy into my creative thinking, and re-invigorated my passion from listening to the stories and practices shared by these various practitioners and creativity thought leaders.
All of the CIBT sessions featured some kind of an exercise or practice the expert wanted to share on how to bring more creativity to business (in addition to lots of juicy food for thought). I want to share one of these exercises with you:
Read MoreHave you ever learned new skills, and felt overwhelmed and intimidated? Did you feel unnatural and uncomfortable as you tried out your new skills? If you're like most, you might have even had doubts that you could really perform those new skills and a strong urge to revert back to your tried-and-true old habits.
In the vlog (video blog) below I share a useful analogy that likens the experience of learning any new skills to learning to drive a car for the first time. Please watch it here:
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Last week, I experienced a career highlight: I call it 'al-fresco learning' (outdoors, fresh air learning). Check out the scene in the photos. It was absolutely a joy to be in the Sarasota, Florida breezy afternoon sun, temperatures in the upper 60s, surrounded by palm trees, lawns, the pool and the bay.
But wait, there's more!
As if the surroundings and atmosphere weren't perfect enough, I was lucky enough to be doing GREAT work. It was my role to coach a group of 11 smart, engaged, and successful managers on what it means to be at their Best Self, at work. This is a subject about which I am VERY passionate. I truly believe that each of us has special gifts and strengths, and we should strive to leverage, optimize, and maximize them at work -- daily! It was wonderful to be working for a client who also believes this and is willing to invest in helping their employees get this right.
I want to share with you the exercise we worked on.
Take out a notebook, journal, or your favorite word processor and complete the following sentence:
"When I'm at my Best Self, I am..."
Some examples may include
"...adding value by suggesting creative, outside-the-box ideas to solve problems or improve products, services, or processes."
"...collaborating with others to create synergistic solutions."
"...focused and calm."
"...thinking about serving others."
List some of the potential and actual barriers to being your best self at work. What might get in your way of being creative and thinking outside-the-box, for example? Perhaps barriers for you include self-sensoring and being too critical of yourself, or maybe it's not getting enough creativity-stimulating inputs from fresh and divergent sources. If being focused and calm is how you want to be, for example, then maybe your barriers include having a very noisy environment, or not having a clear plan for your day's work.
Devise three specific routines, or habits, that you will incorporate into your daily and weekly work to help ensure you are bring your best self out as much as possible. Be specific, and phrase them in the positive (i.e., say what you will do instead of what you will avoid or stop doing).
For example, you might say, "I will read three articles each week from other industries or other professional fields to diversify my perspective and generate new insights into existing problems." Or, "I will close my door for a 90-minute stretch each morning at 10:00 a.m. and dedicated uninterrupted energy and attention to a highly important focus project."
Create accountability structures. How will you stay true to what you have committed to and how will you track your progress? Consider enlisting an accountability buddy or a peer coach to help you keep yourself accountable and stick to your plan. Another method is to keep a journal of your progress and reflect on your accomplishments and challenges.
What do you think? Are you bringing your best self to work? Do you know what it takes? What are your challenges and successes? I'd love to hear about it!
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Also, subscribe to my podcast, The TalentGrow Show, on iTunes to always be the first in the know about new episodes of The TalentGrow Show! http://apple.co/1NiWyZo
Becoming Your Best Self: Will you help me?
How to be happier: 4 tips from Positive Psychology (heard on the TalentGrow Show podcast)
Our brains experience an emotional reaction to any situation BEFORE we can experience a single rational thought about it. Therefore, it's impossible to 'leave your emotions at the door'. Instead, become more emotionally intelligent: learn to become aware of your emotions and override your 'gut reactions' with rational analysis and self-regulation. In addition, learn to increase your awareness of others' emotions and incorporate this data into your communication strategies to enhance your results.
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Whoever said things slow down in the summertime did not check in with me... not true here! Gratefully, I've been super busy with work and with arranging to speak about Employee Development on a Shoestring to new audiences around the nation. I'm happy to be busy!
Recently, ASTD featured not one, but two articles of mine on their member newsletter, ASTD Links. One provides five useful tips on how other consultants, like me, can continue to increase their productivity. The other features an excerpt from chapter five of my book - the chapter that describes how mentoring and being mentored can each be helpful employee development methods. I hope you check these articles out!
August is the month I usually take time to rejuvenate and vacation. Are you scheduling a time to disconnect and renew? It will pay back dividends, I'm told... See you in a couple of weeks and Happy Summer!
~Halelly
Photo by Dene' (Seattle) Miles via Flickr Creative Commons
Sign up to my free weekly newsletter and get more actionable tips and ideas for making yourself a better leader and a more effective communicator! It’s very short and relevant with quick tips, links, and news about leadership, communication, and self-development. Sign up now!
Also, subscribe to my podcast, The TalentGrow Show, on iTunes to always be the first in the know about new episodes of The TalentGrow Show! http://apple.co/1NiWyZo
Employee Development Done Right: ASTD Interviews Halelly Azulay
Employee Development on a Shoestring on Top Ten Summer Reading List
I was pleased to learn that ASTD Press has published a Top Ten Summer Reading list featuring Employee Development on a Shoestring.
What's on YOUR summer reading list?
Sign up to my free weekly newsletter and get more actionable tips and ideas for making yourself a better leader and a more effective communicator! It’s very short and relevant with quick tips, links, and news about leadership, communication, and self-development. Sign up now!
Also, subscribe to my podcast, The TalentGrow Show, on iTunes to always be the first in the know about new episodes of The TalentGrow Show! http://apple.co/1NiWyZo
Employee Development on a Shoestring 'trailer' [video]
Employee Development Done Right: ASTD Interviews Halelly Azulay
Is your leadership style all about ensuring compliance or engendering commitment? In this vlog (video-blog) episode, I discuss the difference in the business results and employee engagement that can result from each leadership approach. What do you think? Use the comments below to jump into the conversation - I look forward to hearing from you!
Halelly: Welcome to this episode of the TalentGrow vlog, where I’m going to discuss two concepts that come up a whole lot in my work with leaders. Those are the issue of compliance versus commitment. Now, think about this – compliance and commitment, two very different kinds of goals. But when you have employees orienting their work toward one or the other, the kind of work that results is going to be of a very different quality.
So let’s think about how do people work when their goal is to be compliant? Compliance means that you’re trying to meet some requirement that’s stipulated by policy, by a law, by procedures, by instructions, very specific and oriented toward the control of the way in which you work, so that the results match some predetermined quality. This is important, and in a lot of work places this is something that cannot be ignored. But if all of the leader’s work is oriented toward achieving compliance, something else is going to happen that they may not have planned on. How do people work when they’re trying to meet the minimum requirements? Do they give discretionary effort? Do they go above and beyond the call of duty? Typically not. Are they able to think innovatively, to change the way that they’re doing things because they have a new idea or because they think that they can improve on it? A lot of times they can’t. They don’t feel like they have the freedom to do it. So compliance gets people to work hard toward the minimum requirements and that’s about as far as they’ll go.
Now, let’s think about commitment as something very different. When people work in a way that’s oriented towards commitment, it means that they care about the results, that they have some kind of a drive to achieve a purpose or a mission that they think is important. Now, the kind of work that this generates is really different than the kind of work compliance generates. Because if you’re doing something you care about, you’re not going to do the minimum requirements. Since when do we work on something that’s important just to meet some minimum requirements? We don’t do that. Employees are going to work through commitment in a way that really gives them the opportunity to be innovative, to put their whole effort into it, to give above and beyond, because they want the results to be good, because they think that the results matter.
So as a leader, are you generating work that meets compliance? Or are you generating commitment and generating results that surpass compliance and go above and beyond? It’s in the way you lead. Think about it.
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3 Keys to Communication Success
Wow. I finally got around to reading the much-discussed copy of game design company Valve's employee handbook, which has been posted on the Internet for all to see. Probably to put all other handbooks to shame. And, I am impressed.
In a nutshell, it seems that Valve has taken some key principles of Laissez-Faire Capitalism and applied them to one company's corporate culture.
Here are just a few of the impressive highlights:
Valve is a flat organization. For real. No one 'tells you' what to do. You don't 'report to' anyone. As in a truly free society, it is a group of individuals who are not beholden to anyone, who are free to pursue their own ideas in a rational, voluntary fashion.
Employees choose their own work 100% of the time. Not like those other companies I described in chapter 11 of Employee Development on a Shoestring (e.g., Google, Atlassian, 3M, Facebook, and Twitter) that give people the choice for a percentage of their time. Valve employees are fully self-directed - they are not forced to follow the whims of others.
"you were not hired to fill a specific job description. You were hired to constantly be looking around for the most valuable work you could be doing. At the end of a project, you may end up well outside what you thought was your core area of expertise. There’s no rule book for choosing a project or task at Valve. But it’s useful to answer questions like these:
- of all the projects currently under way, what’s the most valuable thing I can be working on?
- Which project will have the highest direct impact on our customers? How much will the work I ship
- benefit them?
- Is Valve not doing something that it should be doing?
- What’s interesting? What’s rewarding? What leverages my individual strengths the most?"
Because all work is self-directed, it's up to employees to constantly communicate to learn about what others are working on and to let others know what they want to work on, what experience they've had, and what their strengths are (as seen in the funny 'Fig. 2-4 graphic above). Their desks have wheels and they can roll their desk to any location and work with any group of people they want to. And when they find something they are interested in, they can just get started working on it - no approval process is necessary. "You will be welcomed—there is no approval process or red tape involved. Quite the opposite—it’s your job to insert yourself wherever you think you should be." (p. 14)
Work-life Balance. Valve promotes a healthy work-life balance and effective time management. "While people occasionally choose to push themselves to work some extra hours at times when something big is going out the door, for the most part working overtime for extended periods indicates a fundamental failure in planning or communication. If this happens at Valve, it’s a sign that something needs to be reevaluated and corrected." (p. 17) This means that employees act with enlightened, rational self-interest, being productive and taking care of themselves to ensure they can remain productive.
Supply and demand hiring practices. "Hiring well is the most important thing in the universe. Nothing else comes close. It’s more important than breathing." (p. 44) Now that's a pretty unambiguous statement! Valve wants people who are highly collaborative and who possess skills that are 'T-shaped': broad-range generalists with a deep expertise in one area. And everyone is involved in the hiring process, since there are no 'managers'. Everyone is accountable for the results that are produced by their peers, so everyone has a vested interest in helping to ensure that every hire is a good fit and successfully acculturates. So while working in their own rational self-interest, all employees have an inherent interest in the success of others with whom they are interdependently linked to achieve a shared goal.
Finally, I liked how Valve also included an Epilogue in which they disclose what they're NOT good at, such as onboarding new people, mentoring, and disseminating information internally. These can become project opportunities for those employees who choose them as points of focus. Or they may just be 'warnings' to those who may feel compelled to complain about their absence, as in, "we told you so!"
What do you think - how similar is this to your company's employee handbook? How would you like to work in this kind of environment? What else do you think about this? I'd love to have a dialogue in the comments, below!
Image: Valve Employee Handbook Fig. 2-4
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The 3 Secrets of Motivating and Inspiring Others
May 6-9, 2012, I attended the ASTD International Conference and Exposition in beautiful Denver, Colorado to learn about the latest and greatest in the training and development field as well as to be one of the speakers and authors they featured. It was a pleasure to soak in ideas and meet amazing people (there were over 9,000 professionals from over 70 countries there with me). I came away inspired and energized. (Here's a great collection of the conference's backchannel and resources, curated by learning professional David Kelly.)
While there, I met up with colleagues Larry Mohl and Terry Barber, of Performance Inspired, who were operating an on-site BlogTalk Radio station. I was invited to record a short interview with Larry Mohl to talk about inspiration at work. Have a listen:
Listen to
with
on Blog Talk Radio
I'd love to know your answer to one of the questions Larry asked me:
What drives you - what inspires you?
_________________________________
PS - have you subscribed to my blog yet? If not - I invite you to subscribe today! It's free and easy - just enter your email address in the field provided in the right-hand column here. Thanks! ------------>
Sign up to my free weekly newsletter and get more actionable tips and ideas for making yourself a better leader and a more effective communicator! It’s very short and relevant with quick tips, links, and news about leadership, communication, and self-development. Sign up now!
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Photo by tranchis via Flickr Creative CommonsI published a guest post on the MyGreenlight blog over on Keith Ferrazzi's website. In it, I provide seven different ideas for developing employees by sending them on 'roving reporter' missions - turning them into 'Digital Storytellers'. I'd love to hear what you think about this idea and what other ideas you have in the comments - here or there!
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