Kairospl

August 31, 2009

Let’s face it—everyone has a boss. Your relationship with your immediate supervisor impacts so many aspects of your life. A solid rapport with that one person allows you to balance work/life issues more effectively, thrive in a positive environment and feel more fulfilled in your career.

On the other hand, a poor relationship with your boss can have far-reaching negative effects. It can cause you to develop a bad attitude that can spill over into your personal life after you’re off the clock. When the bond between you and your boss is weak, you develop a helpless, victim mentality. These feelings can contribute to career uncertainty, job dissatisfaction and, ultimately, they can make you question your own professional competency and goals.

Rather than suffer in silence, there are things you can do to improve your relationship with your boss. First, and foremost, you can learn to be a better leader. You don’t have to be in charge, or have a management position, to be a leader. A leader can be anyone, despite rank, title or tenure. Leadership is not about power or prestige. A leader is someone who takes control of her life to influence outcomes, which include creating a more gratifying relationship with the boss.

To work towards that ideal relationship, you can incorporate the following leadership techniques into your professional life:

§  Don’t take things personally. Your supervisor’s mood swings or snide comments may get under your skin, but they shouldn’t affect your disposition. As a leader, you’re confident about who you are and so you’re able to shrug off negativity before it weighs you down. Your supervisor’s bad attitude has nothing to do with you—so why take it personally? The less emotion you give to someone else’s unpleasant nature, the more energy you have to spread some light on your day. You can also use your optimism to make your co-workers’ days a little brighter. If you have a tough boss, chances are, he or she could also benefit from some cheering up.

§  Set an example. Your words and actions set the tone for how you want to be treated. If you want to take on more responsibility, prove yourself dependable. If you want loyalty, don’t disparage your boss to your co-workers. If you want more pay, do work that justifies your salary increase. Always hold yourself to a high professional standard, one that may even be higher than the one your boss holds for himself. When you set a exemplary example, you contribute to the creation of a more positive, professional environment.

§  Earn respect, not praise. You may never be your boss’s best friend—and that’s okay. Stop looking for affirmation from your boss and start striving for respect, which can be earned through your hard work and integrity. Likewise, you may never achieve the perfect relationship with your boss—but if you have her respect, then you’re in a great position to influences outcomes.

§  Be an Effective Communicator. If you feel your boss’s attitude has become a roadblock, have the courage to voice your concerns. Confrontation can be difficult, but it’s easier than suffering through a bad situation. Approach your boss with tact; choose your words carefully to ensure your message is clear. Come to the meeting prepared with observations and suggestions. Always have proposed solutions ready when you plan to highlight a problem. Chances are that your boss is unaware that his actions contribute to a poor work environment. You may be surprised how quickly your situation can improve.

Your efforts towards personal leadership development will help you regain control of your professional life and will allow you to develop and maintain a positive relationship with your boss. While you cannot force another person to change, by being a leader you can influence professional behavior through your solid example. Each step you take towards becoming a stronger leader brings you closer to job satisfaction. You’ll become a person your supervisors will want to promote. And as you progress professionally, you’ll gain even more influence over your own future.

By Angie Morgan and Courtney Lynch

August 29, 2009

A Manager’s Toolbox to manage stress:

You’ve got to take care of yourself and handle your own stress before you can offer your best to the people you work with.

On your way home from work, select a spot along the road. In your imagination, dump each day’s problems on the same spot. Or write down several positive things you can do for yourself in the next week. Then do them.

August 28, 2009

Your boss wants three projects done immediately, your peers are focused on hitting their department’s planned goals, your employees want raises and promotions, and your customers are demanding faster, better, and cheaper. So what are you as a mid-level manager supposed to do?

Lead.

Leadership means influencing how other people think in ways that generate better, sustainable results both for your organization and the people in it. Notice: leadership equals ability to influence, not your title.

Three Keys to Influencing Others

1. Create a leadership framework.

You only need three things to lead. You need to know your organization’s three most important desired outcomes, the three most important outcomes the person you’re trying to influence wants to improve, and ways to influence how the person thinks. Take out a sheet of paper and answer these questions:

·         What are my organization’s three HPOs (highest priority desired outcomes)?

·         What are the three HPOs for the person I’m trying to influence?

·         How can I influence that person to think in ways that will generate better results both for the organization and for what he or she wants to achieve?

Now you’re ready to lead. It doesn’t matter what your title is or what role you have in the organization. Just lead.

2. Hone the tools of influence. There are at least five ways to influence other people: demonstrate, ask, share, clarify, and challenge. Here’s a brief description of each:

Demonstrate—In everyday situations, demonstrate the behavior you want to see in others.

Ask—Ask your boss, “What is the most important business outcome you want to improve over the next six months, and what three things do you think we could do that would have the greatest positive impact on improving that outcome?” By asking that question, you have narrowed the focus going forward, and clarified where not to spend

your time.

Share—If the other person is into sports, share a sports analogy. If the person is into music, share a music analogy. Find a connection outside of the topic at hand and share a story or an analogy that could influence the other person’s way of thinking.

Clarify—Clarify the risks and rewards of taking action by asking the group, “What are the potential risks if we take this action, and what are the potential rewards if we take this action?” Simply clarifying what lies ahead can influence the group to make better decisions on what to do and what not to do to improve results.

Challenge—Ask, “Is this our best effort?” That gracefully concise question penetrates through long-winded reports and PowerPoint presentations. It forces people to be honest with each other.

3. Don’t be a mood-ring leader. To be a leader, take a stand on a given issue. Decide what you believe in, and work to influence how other people think in the way you believe to be most effective.

Remember: stick to a given issue.

By Dan Coughlin – a key speaker on business acceleration. He is author of Accelerate: 20 Practical Lessons to Boost Business Momentum.

To know more about the Principles of Persuasion, kindly click on the introductory video clip by Professor Cialdini and the flyer on the left side bar. To have an in-house workshop, please contact: ckkhoo@kairospl.com or call: 6012-4019398 for a presentation. Do not let this opportunity pass as you join other world class companies to getting “Yes!” most of the time.

August 25, 2009

As a manager, there are some definite skills you need as a coach. These are the same skills the best sports coaches have.

1. Gathering information. A good coach knows how to get information from an individual without making that person feel as if he or she is being interrogated. Such information is important in making numerous decisions, ranging from identifying a skill deficiency or the existence of any confusion about how to do a particular job to finding out an employee’s interests and aspirations so as to redesign his or her job and thereby

stimulate above-standard performance.

2. Listening. Asking the right questions means little if you don’t listen to the replies. A good coach is able to listen with a “third ear,” paying as much attention to the nonverbal signals and body posture of the speaker as to his or her words in order to determine the feelings behind the response as well as its truthfulness. That same coach also knows how to use body language to communicate interest in what the speaker has to say.

3. Being aware of what’s happening around you. You should talk frequently to your employees to see if there are morale problems or other causes of distress in the workplace that could lower productivity or generate attitudinal problems or, better, signs that an employee is not only willing but ready and able to assume more responsibility.

4. Instructing employees. A good coach is able to train employees, either singly or in a group. Even before that, he or she is able to conduct a training needs assessment to determine gaps in knowledge that must be filled.

5. Giving feedback. There is no such thing as too little time to provide praise for a job well done or to provide corrective feedback, including suggestions for improvement that tell the employee that the manager believes that he or she is capable of doing the work right. In short, a good coach doesn’t allow today’s lean organizations to provide an excuse for not positively reinforcing good work or not providing corrective feedback in a

positive manner.

Of these five, feedback may be most important. When is feedback needed? The answer is all the time—not only when errors occur repeatedly in an employee’s work, or his or her performance doesn’t meet expectations.

While you should schedule regular coaching sessions with your employees to ensure that work meets, if not exceeds, goals, you want to meet and coach a staff member in particular when his or her work habits disturb you, when progress has been made on a work problem and acknowledgement is in order, when a problem unrelated to the employee’s effort surfaces and the individual needs guidance, and when an employee asks you how he or she is doing.

Adapted from Coaching, Counseling and Mentoring, 2nd Edition by Florence Stone (AMACOM, 2007).

August 18, 2009

As from this week, I am discontinuing “Thought For The Day”. Instead I shall include valuable quotes in “Manager’s Toolbox”. “Leadership by Stories” will be changed to a new category “Leading From Good To Great”. Today is the last article under “Leadership by Stories” category. These changes are improvements made to this blog. Thanks for your support in visiting this blog.

Cheok Kau Khoo

“In business and personal life, to create true integrity and lasting effectiveness you need to develop the courage to move towards the sound of the gunfire.”

– Dr. Martin Groder

A senior executive was in pain and turmoil. His marriage had ended badly and he was estranged from his son. He realized that he had sacrificed his family on the altar of business success, thinking he was actually doing it out of a spirit of service and love. It had brought him to depression and grief.

He said, “It is too late for my marriage. But I want a relationship with my son. He is the most important part of my life and yet he will barely talk with me. I think he hates me.”

I asked, “Have you told him how you feel? Have you reached out to him?” This powerful and influential man said, “I am afraid. I am afraid of what he would say. I guess I’m afraid of his rejection and of looking weak in his eyes.”

Then he put his head in his heads.

He had to make a choice, to find the courage to risk connecting with his son or to live with fear and regret. He asked, “How do I find the nerve? This feels too hard.”

I responded, “You choose the path of heart, you choose what matters most. Is it protecting your ego or connecting with your son?”

He found the courage to invite his son on walking excursions, and then listened as the boy expressed his feelings and thoughts. He began to tell his son how much regret he had about not being there at critical times, and then of his love.

Slowly, the relationship grew. As a result, his son that had been lost to him was, as he had hoped, reclaimed. What surprised him and was an unlooked for bonus was that his business became more vibrant as the new level of personal courage he had developed led to more effective and honest communications at work. This led to a dramatic increase in the learning and performance of those around him.

As a CEO and practicing organizational development consultant, I hear more and more executives discussing their concerns over ethics and values or expressing the need to speed up learning and bottom-line implementation across their organizations.

These themes are intimately connected. The ability to truly make ethics and values operational at work, while increasing learning and speed of implementation, are dependent on a more whole-hearted approach to living and leading.

The most critical component of success in the whole-hearted framework is the presence or absence of courage. Without it, success is not possible, leadership will not exist, and personal satisfaction is extinguished.

The bottom line: where your courage stops is where your leadership stops. Why is this so?

Courage is the key to accessing, developing and engaging three of the great drivers of leadership effectiveness: integrity, passion and intimacy. Why is courage the key to bringing life to professed values and principles, to learning more quickly from mistakes, to more effective implementation?

All of them require stepping beyond our personality, ego structure and habitual patterns.

It takes courage to face our fears, doubts and to then act. It is the exercise of courage that moves us into more honest, direct feedback and more productive relationships.

It is natural to want to do what is easy, practiced, habitual and polished. It is natural to follow the path of least resistance. Yet, to lead with integrity, to learn quickly, to generate and transmit learning, and to implement effectively requires moving through the pain, uncertainty and discomfort of changing our thinking and behavior.

First we must be willing to go through our own resistance, pain and discomfort and then, having the integrity of modeling what we want, encouraging and helping others to move through theirs.

This is swimming upstream. It means moving toward the sound of the gunfire, not away from it. Without courage, we take the easier path.

While you might hold and believe core principles and values and want to be more effective, you will not live them without accessing more personal courage.

It requires staying conscious of what you most want, being aware of any ways your behaviors or ways of thinking prevent you from reaching it.

It requires choosing what you most want in spite of doubts and fears and then respectfully challenging those around you. You develop yourself as a wholehearted leader day-by-day through the choices you make.

Source: Robert “Dusty” Staub is a nationally known author, currently with two books in print, and the founder and CEO of Staub Leadership Consultants. He facilitates leadership development programs for individuals and organizations and is based in Greensboro.

August 17, 2009

Do you arrive at work each day raring to attack your “to-do” list, only to find that your boss has a completely different agenda? Here’s how you can achieve complete agreement between what you think your boss wants you to do and what you believe you really should do….

For years we’ve heard that time management is about quadrants, action items, and prioritizing tasks. In fact, go to just about any time management seminar, and the trainer will spend lots of time showing you how to analyze your calendar, log your time spent in various activities, plan your work week, and so on. At some time during that seminar you’ll do doubt realize that you do indeed spend too much time on e-mail, phone calls, and “putting out fires.” You’ll vow to plan your calendar more efficiently, organize your activities into quadrants, and prioritize your workload. But within a week you’ll most likely find yourself right back where you started.

Why does this happen? Because no matter what your job, you tend to do the things that you think your boss expects you to do. So even though you may have a page-long “to-do” list, you know that your boss also expects you to answer her e-mails within 15 minutes or to be available on Instant Messenger. Your boss expects you to pick up the phone when needed and to help senior management deal with any last minute emergencies. Very often, these expectations take precedence over the important tasks you need to do. And while communication and helping senior management are important, if you’re truly going to have the time to spend on tasks that move yourself and the company forward, you’ll have to gain more power over your schedule.

In short, you need to have a conversation with your boss about the various activities you are expected to do. The two of you must reach an agreement on what it means for you to do your job successfully. Then, you must constantly manage his or her expectations.

Manage Your Manager, Not Your Time

In order to take back your time, your career, and your life, you need to step into the realm of managing your manager. The goal is to achieve complete alignment between what your boss wants you to do and what you believe you really should do. Here’s how you do it.

1. Analyze your boss’s needs. You need to know what your boss expects of himself and what your boss’s boss expects of him. What can you do to help your boss be more successful? A lot of people in business assume that “meeting the boss’s needs” means doing exactly what the boss wants them to do—accepting the boss’s vision and direction wholesale. Wrong! This assumption is a little to simplistic and dangerous.

Real “managing upward” demands a more serious and subtle analysis of human needs, which starts with the realization that needs come in two forms – explicit needs and implicit needs.

“Explicit needs” are fairly simple. They may be stated in the organization’s strategic plan, or they may be announced by your boss whenever the team gets together for a strategy session. They generally sound something like this:

“We need to expand our business internationally.”

“We need to create a shipping policy that will save us some money.”

“We need to commerce-enable our Website.”

“Implicit needs” are more subtle. People don’t talk about them. Sometimes they’re not even aware of them. Most of the time they are things that people would deny if confronted with them. They sound like this:

“Make me look good in front of my boss so that when he gets kicked upstairs he’ll recommend me for his job.”

“Help me demonstrate my creativity by coming up with some ideas for next year’s marketing campaign that I can tweak a little and take on as my own.”

 “Help me feel more like a leader and less like the kid who was always picked last for schoolyard games.”

While explicit needs tend to run a linear path, implicit needs tend be random, triggered by emotion and circumstance. And although you will never actually talk to your boss about his or her implicit needs, it’s a fun exercise to sit down with a sheet of paper and try to list your boss’s implicit needs. Paying attention to implicit needs is serious, as these often drive the issues that’ll keep us up at night. From the first day you meet your new boss through the last day you work together, devote enough of your time to really figuring out your boss’s implicit needs. Then spend time on the needs that you can feel good about supporting to further your company’s interest as well as your boss’s career. 2. Adopt a Management Value Added Mindset. The concept of Management Value Added (MVA) is based on a simple question that you should ask whenever you’re making a decision about how to invest your time and energy: “What value does management add?

One way to start using MVA is to sit down with your boss to discuss his or her explicit needs (the ones written down as part of the company’s strategy or the division’s official mandate). It shouldn’t take long for the two of you to agree on what they are and to prioritize them appropriately. Then ask your boss, “How do you feel I can add the most value?” If your boss responds, “Huh?” you can flesh out the question with additional questions like these:

“What are the activities I am engaged in when I am contributing the most?”

“What are the activities that you and the company most need me to do?”

“What do you consider to be the best and most productive use of my time?”

“What do you think is the special contribution that I am best positioned to offer to you and the company?”

“Of all the things that I’m engaged in on behalf of this company, what are the three areas where you believe that I can contribute the most?”

Listen carefully to your boss’s answers. Using them as a guide, you can begin to understand exactly how your boss views your contributions. It’s quite likely that the way he or she measures your value differs from the way you measure it.

3. Implement what you learn. Use the information your boss shares with you to determine how to spend your time, which projects to support, and which meetings to attend. For example, if your boss tells you that your most important areas of contribution are your ability to hire, nurture, and guide talent; build capacity; and stay close to customers, then before committing to any new activity, you can ask yourself, “Will this activity help me achieve my priorities? Will it help me put the right people in the right jobs? Will it help me build capability? Will it help me know and connect with our customers?” If the answer is no, avoid the activity—even if it sounds otherwise interesting appealing, or fun.

Implementing the MVA concept helps you maintain a focus on the things that matter while earning the support of those you serve. Then, when your boss or someone else in the organization asks you to commit time or energy to an area that falls outside of the MVA priorities you’ve established, you can talk to your boss about how the new commitment may affect your main goals and reach a joint decision as to whether a shift in priorities is warranted. Each time you and your boss are out of alignment, you have an opportunity to further understand your boss’s needs and goals. Expect this approach to help you remove many useless meetings from your agenda, but also realize that sometimes, often as a result of implicit needs, you’ll be required to go along for the ride.

Manage Your Future for Success

When you follow the process outlined here you’ll have a clearer understanding of where your focus should be each day. Along with this clarity you’ll acquire a renewed sense of purpose because you’re now spending your time on what really matters—both to you and to your boss. And when everyone’s needs are being met in a way that supports the company’s vision, the result is a more productive, happier work environment.  

(Source: Vince Thomas)

 Cheok Kau Khoo is the Principal Trainer/Consultant for Kairos Performance Learning with working experience in education, manufacturing and service industries. He had been personally trained by Dr. Robert Cialdini who is the most cited expert in the Principles of Persuasion. He is certified in numerous training programs and is listed in the International Who’s Who of Professionals.

 To know more about the Principles of Persuasion, kindly click on the introductory video clip by Professor Cialdini and the flyer on the left side bar. To have an in-house workshop, please contact: ckkhoo@kairospl.com or call: 6012-4019398 for a presentation. Do not let this opportunity pass as you join other world class companies to getting “Yes!” most of the time.

August 07, 2009

The TV quiz show The Weakest Link first appeared almost 10 years ago. It quickly became a worldwide success being broadcast on TV screens in dozens of countries worldwide. In the quiz, contestants work collaboratively to accumulate prize money before voting one another off to leave one contestant to pocket the cash bank. In order to win it seems that players need to develop a clear strategy, hold their nerve, and of course possess good levels of knowledge; skills that any business person will recognise as important ones.

But is there another less obvious factor that could influence the result, and what might it tell us about ensuring that our influence attempts end up on the winning side?

In a 2006 study that appeared in the Journal of Organisational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes researchers Priya Raghubir and Ann Valenzuela wanted to find out if managers and executives who “sat in middle positions” in interview panels or in board room meetings held a greater influence over others in the same group by virtue of just sitting in that position. The researchers argued that this might be the case because of people’s learned associations and beliefs that ‘the most important people are expected to sit in the middle of the table.’ (e.g. the CEO at board meetings, the bride and bridegroom at a wedding etc.).

As part of their studies Raghubir and Valenzuela analysed past episodes of The Weakest Link and found that contestants who were randomly assigned to one of eight positions in the shows familiar semi-circular shape were much more likely to win the game if they started off in one of the two central positions. In other words it wasn’t just strategy, knowledge and nerves of steel that played a part in winning the show. The position where a contestant was standing also played a role in whether they won or lost.

Raghubir and Valenzuela suggested that these results had some noteworthy implications for managers and leaders too. If a tendency to believe that ‘important people sit in the middle’ exists then people might pay less attention to the potential errors and mistakes made by those sitting in the middle compared to those sitting elsewhere in the group. Consequentially the lack of detailed attention paid to those sitting in such a position may lead to a flaky opinion or a less than well thought through policy being less likely to be challenged or debated. A phenomenon the study authors referred to as that person becoming the “Center of Inattention”.

Not only does this research provide a useful reminder of why it’s a good idea to routinely rotate and swap people’s usual seating positions in meetings, in a new study published in the latest issue of the Journal of Consumer Psychology, the same researchers suggest that, when it comes to displaying products, this “center-stage effect” can have an influence too.

In a series of studies participants were asked to choose one of three simultaneously presented packets of chewing gum. The gum offered was available in three different flavors (Spearmint, Peppermint and Winterfrost) and were physically arranged differently. No matter what the physical arrangement, it was the gum that was placed in the middle that was selected significantly more often than the other two. When the researchers extended the choices to 5 different varieties of different products (all priced the same to control for any price inference) they found the same effect. The option positioned at center stage was selected significantly more than chance.

The researchers went on to explore some of the possible reasons for this center-stage effect. Perhaps people typically paid more attention to options that are placed in the middle of a physical array? Or maybe people found it easier to recall or to remember the center options more often?

In fact it turned out that neither of these explanations held true. The reason that the center option was chosen most often was due to people employing a ‘consensus based’ decision trigger. Simply put, people tend to believe that products positioned in the middle of an array are purposely placed there because they are the most popular of the alternatives and, as we have shown in many previous Inside Influence Reports, choosing the most popular option can be a very efficient decision making shortcut – especially when someone is uncertain of what the best choice is. In fact when Raghubir and Valenzuela provided additional detailed information about each of the choices as a way to reduce uncertainty about the features of the options, this center-stage effect was lessened due to the decision makers having more knowledge of the respective offers than their mere popularity.

So perhaps this consensus based ‘center-stage effect’ provides further evidence that in our busy information overloaded world product position does effect consumer choice–not due to where people place their attention but due instead to the perceived popularity of such choices.

So if you are looking to generate new thinking and ideas in the boardroom the advice seems to be mix up seating arrangements from meeting to meeting. However when persuading people to choose from a range of available products or services, this research suggests that physically displaying your most popular options in the middle of your offerings can be an effective thing to do. In fact, honestly pointing out that your middle-placed option is also your most popular one should give your message extra traction and ensure that your influence becomes the strongest rather than The Weakest Link.

(Source: Steve Martin, CMCT)