Why We Fail

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Why We Fail

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Emotional Intelligence

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Emotional Intelligence

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NADA ES IMPOSIBLE !!

Visual and Creative Thinking

GREAT PEOPLE DECISIONS: WHY THEY MATTER SO MUCH, WHY THEY ARE SO HARD, AND HOW YOU CAN MASTER THEM, by Claudio Fernández-Aráoz

Executive Summaries


A Resource for You
Executive brief chapter 1

Claudio Fernández-Aráoz begins his book with an intriguing and provocative question: what makes a person successful? Although luck undeniably plays an important role, it is by no means the only factor defining an individual’s professional advancement. Based on over 20 years of experience in recruiting for high-level positions and analysing great leaders, the author identifies the formula for career success, which has four elements. The single most powerful contributor to career success, however, is the ability to make great people decisions. Are strong people choices basically down to gut instincts, as common wisdom would have us believe? Not according to Claudio Fernández-Aráoz

Making people decisions is a craft and a discipline that can be learned and should be learned for your success, argues the author. And a little learning goes a long way. You don’t need deep expert knowledge of competencies to become much better at people decisions, as this chapter illustrates. In fact, making people decisions is a disciplined process that involves identifying, checking key indicators and assessing their importance. Yet most of us receive very little formal training to help us make such judgements. This book is primarily a tool to help readers improve their people decisions, enabling them to recognise and recruit high-performers. Great people decisions not only foster individual success. They also provide the key to sustained organizational performance, as shown in the second chapter of the book.

A Resource for Your Organization

Executive brief chapter 2

What drives organizational performance? In the second chapter of GREAT PEOPLE DECISIONS, Claudio Fernández-Aráoz provides a detailed review of top academic research into this question, including the work of best-selling author Jim Collins and Harvard’s Nitin Nohria. Their work clearly demonstrates that strong people choices are the foundation of almost all great organizational performance. It is great people decisions that make the difference. This research perspective is also fully supported by the best practitioners on the front lines of business, including Jack Welch, the former General Electric leader, in interviews with the author.

So just how valuable are great people decisions and how can we quantify a return on investment in them? Studies show that the leader effect can account for up to 40 percent of the variance in corporate performance or value. In many cases it is also the largest actionable source of company value. Looking ahead, the author clearly shows why the importance of making great people decisions is set to grow. In summary, great people decisions not only determine individual career success, as shown in chapter 1, but are also the key to outstanding organizational performance. Yet such decisions require active management to achieve their full potential. In chapter 3 the author goes on to discuss why great people decisions are so hard.

Why Great People Decisions Are So Hard

Executive brief chapter 3

Why is it so tough to pick winners? This chapter begins by describing four major barriers to making people decisions and offers general principles for avoiding these traps. According to Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, the statistical odds are against any company looking for a leader because top talent is rare. Moreover, senior managers are often distinguished by their soft skills, which are very difficult to assess objectively. On top of these factors, the author identifies over ten psychological biases and emotional traps that sabotage people decisions. These pitfalls include overrating capability and making snap judgements.

It is not easy to combat such biases, but building awareness and getting the right advisors to support people decision-making can help, argues the author. According to best-selling author Jim Collins, great leaders make a series of good decisions that are supremely well-executed over a long period of time. Building true greatness into a company calls for managers with the discipline to analyze and implement every important decision, including people decisions. Avoiding the traps described in this chapter is just the first step towards that goal. To pick winners consistently you need to master all stages of the people-decision process described in the following six chapters of the book.

Knowing When a Change Is Needed

Executive brief chapter 4

Figuring out when a change at the top should happen is a major challenge, warns Claudio Fernández-Aráoz. Executive turnover is often precipitated by poor performance, but this should not be the only driver of change, he adds. Unfortunately, many companies tend to postpone making key people decisions until it is too late and need to adopt a more proactive attitude to upgrading their senior talent. This chapter focuses on identifying the kind of situations that call for change. These situations can be driven by macro and industry-level forces, as well as discontinuities. Discontinuities include: launching new businesses, M&As, developing and implementing new strategies, dealing with performance problems and coping with growth and success.

Closer examination of these scenarios reveals that strategy changes often catalyse people changes. The bottom line: in a rapidly changing world, organizations must periodically look to the future and decide whether they have the right people in place to tackle the challenges ahead. But even when people changes are justified, they can be tough to implement, warns the author. Rigour without ruthlessness and honesty without brutality are excellent watchwords when making such changes, he adds. Once the difficult decision to replace a manager has been made, chapter 5 explores the next stage - defining what exactly you are looking for in a new leader.

What to Look For

Executive brief chapter 5

The realisation that a "people change" is needed opens up a new path in front of you. The first step along that path is figuring out what to look for, explains Claudio Fernández-Aráoz. Although this first step is rich with potential, it also involves many pitfalls, warns the author. The first challenge involves prioritising the best predictors of successful performance in a job. In other words, you need to know exactly which competencies you are looking for. The ideal candidate for the job probably doesn't exist, meaning that trade-offs will be required. To make such trade-offs successfully, it is crucial to identify both critically important strengths and weaknesses that aren't fatal.

Based on his extensive experience of global executive search, the author identifies a key skill set for top leaders. These characteristics - a high IQ, relevant experience, emotional intelligence, potential and values - and their impact on successful recruitment are discussed in detail. Above all, a highly disciplined search process must be followed, stresses the author. This involves confirming managerial priorities, identifying the key competencies required, clearly defining them in behavioural terms and agreeing on the relative weight of each key competence. After establishing a clear consensus about what you are looking for, the next step is deciding where to look for suitable candidates. This question lies at the heart of chapter 6.

Prosperidad y felicidad: ¿juntas o separadas?

Por Xavier Serbia

Me sorprende cuando algunos grupos llenan los espacios de discusión para indicarnos que tenemos que vivir en un submarino amarillo cantando "all we need is love" para ser felices.

Las críticas llueven. Que si los que viven en los países ricos son desdichados, enfrentan desintegración familiar, viven en estrés todo el día trabajando, no tienen valores familiares, mucho robo, matanzas y la lista sigue. Todo culpa del maldito dinero y por querer tener crecimiento económico.

O sea, que los que viven en los países más prósperos son infelices y los que viven en las hermosas tierras del Togo junto a la naturaleza son las personas con más amor, unión familiar, menos matanza y robos en el mundo. Ellos no tienen nada de estrés porque viven con las comodidades que la pacífica naturaleza les ofrece. Como si la historia de Caín y Abel, Hamlet, de Antonio o de Shylock son materia prima de las sociedades prósperas.

Entonces, siguiendo esta línea de pensamiento, no sería descabellado concluir que la prosperidad no hace feliz a los habitantes que viven en los países ricos. Sin embargo, aquellos con menos prosperidad son más felices.

El tema de la relación entre dinero y felicidad a estado en la mente de muchos desde centurias. Desde Aristóteles hasta Bentham, Mill y Adam Smith el tema de la felicidad y el dinero han estado en el trabajo de economistas y filósofos.

Incluso hay un área de la economía, llamada economía de la felicidad, donde economistas y sicólogos combinan sus neuronas para definir, estudiar y medir la felicidad de los individuos y sociedades.

Los debates floran. Están aquellos que se concentran en que la felicidad nacional no necesariamente incrementa con el ingreso todo el tiempo; que la felicidad está en otras áreas como el amor, la familia, la cultura; o que una vez cumpliste con tus necesidades básicas, el dinero pasa a un plano secundario o irrelevante en relación a la felicidad.

¿Son los miembros de los países más prósperos menos felices? No. Contrario a la creencia de los "submarinos amarillos" la realidad es que: 1) los países más prósperos ofrecen más oportunidades de lograr el mayor potencial de felicidad, y 2) la felicidad no se condiciona sólo al sistema sino también al individuo.

Hay una relación positiva entre aumento de ingresos y satisfacción personal. La encuesta realizada por Gallup a miles de personas procedente de 155 países entre 2005 y el 2009 muestra claramente que estar satisfecho con la vida es mucho más alto en países con mayor ingreso per capita. O sea, los lugares en áreas como Norte America, Europa del Oeste, Japón, Australia y Arabia Saudita son países ricos con una alta satisfacción entre 7.5-8.5. Mientras que en el sur de África, Haití y Cambodia indican una baja satisfacción de entre 3.1 y 4.5.

Cierto que hay países con menos ingreso per capita e indican una alta satisfacción - por ejemplo Costa Rica es uno-. Pero, la tendencia indica que un alto nivel de ingreso per capita se correlaciona con un alto nivel de satisfacción por la vida.

Aunque estamos hablando a nivel agregado - el total de la gente-, el sentido común y nuestra experiencia nos pueden ayudar a comprender que puede haber casos de personas de países más pobres felices y personas infelices en lugares con ingreso más alto.

¿Por qué? Porque la felicidad no es sola y exclusivamente del país. También entra en la ecuación el individuo. Hay un escrito muy interesante* donde tres sicólogos hablan que la felicidad contiene tres determinantes:

La parte neurobiológica de las personas (50%). Temperamento, personalidad y otras características de nuestra personalidad que están en nuestro "DNA".

Las circunstancias (10%) que incluye factores geográficos como la región, culturales, demográficos -edad, género y raza o etnia-; factores circunstanciales como historia personal, eventos que marcan como traumas, accidentes o ganarse un premio. También están los factores circunstanciales como son el estado marital, ocupación, seguridad, ingresos, salud y afiliación religiosa.

La actividad intencional (40%) que son las cosas que pensamos y acciones que tomamos en nuestra vida diaria. Le llaman intencional porque nosotros escogemos los pensamientos y las acciones. Y muchas veces esos pensamientos y acciones lo hacemos un hábito aunque pareciera parte de nuestro DNA.

Por eso, podemos encontrar individuos que tienen todas las comodidades que un togoles dejaría hasta la camiseta con el fin de tener una cuarta parte de ellas. Sin embargo, la persona es infeliz. ¿Acaso no vemos los dramas de tantos artistas, deportistas o personas públicas que son infelices a pesar de tener tanto? ¿La razón? El problema puede ser de genética, puede ser circunstancias que se están viviendo y/o simplemente eligen conscientemente vivir infelices. lo mismo le puede pasar a una persona viviendo en un país con menos privilegios y viceversa. El punto es que no podemos alejar la prosperidad de la felicidad. La felicidad está condicionada al nivel de prosperidad económica como también al individuo.

Cierto que el dinero no es el único pasaje para la felicidad. Pero, cierto que puede comprar mucha satisfacción de vida. Solo piensa esto: ¿Quién crees que estará más satisfecho con la vida: aquel individualmente feliz viviendo en un país con muy bajo nivel de ingreso per capita o aquel individualmente feliz viviendo en un país con un alto nivel de ingreso per capita?

Al final, tú decides.

*"Pursuing Happiness: The Architecture of Sustainable Change"

Incompetencia

Horacio Marchand

"Yo quiero hacer dinero; y no creo en la suerte".

Esto me decía un joven empresario jalisciense hace unos días. Le preguntaba si le gustaba hacer algo en particular, alguna industria o actividad específica y nuevamente me contesta con firmeza: "yo lo que quiero es hacer dinero; el cómo es lo de menos".

Mejor cambié el tema y me puse a hablar del Mundial en Sudáfrica.

Vivimos en pleno paradigma mecanicista (las partes hacen al todo), cartesiano (separación de mente/espíritu y materia) y capitalista (la acumulación del capital), el cual nos lleva a pensar de manera automática y subconsciente, como en el caso del joven que describo, en que todo depende de nuestro esfuerzo, que tenemos pleno control de nuestras ganancias económicas y que el éxito es cuestión de voluntad. Pero infelizmente no siempre es así.

Hay gente que trabaja muy poco y gana mucho dinero y otros que bajo la premisa de que el esfuerzo paga, de que allá al final del camino existe justicia divina, se la pasan trabajando 50 horas a la semana haciendo lo mismo por décadas y logrando poco.

La realidad es que hay empresas, rumbos, empleos, productos y relaciones que es más sensato abandonar y dejar por la paz. Es cierto que las probabilidades de que nos vaya bien tienden a incrementarse con el esfuerzo pero, metafóricamente, por más que se esfuerce una mosca en cruzar un ventana de vidrio jamás podrá hacerlo.

Los recursos: tiempo, dinero, energía, talento, son limitados y de ahí que tengan que liberarse hacia lo relevante y sin perder el tiempo. En estos tiempos, acusar de incompetente a algún directivo o empresario tiene que ser el insulto más grande.

Por ejemplo, hace unos días Facebook anunció que había llegado a los 500 millones de usuarios. ¿Pero qué pasó con My Space, si era el pionero, el grande, el líder indiscutible? Sean Parker, ex presidente de Facebook, ofrece una explicación: "La única razón por la que le ganamos a MySpace fue debido a la enorme incompetencia". Ouch.

Otros más que van a la baja: el Explorer de Microsoft sigue perdiendo participación de mercado y ya tiene menos del 60 por ciento, y ni para qué hablar de la industria automotriz norteamericana que durante 30 años consecutivos perdió participación de mercado.

Incompetencia o no (además de que no me toca juzgar la de nadie en particular), el caso es que las empresas grandes caen, los emporios quiebran y las directores-estrella acaban estrellados.

Más que gente competente o incompetente, creo que más bien se trata de diferentes competencias que se requieren para diferentes momentos en la empresa y diferentes etapas de la industria.

Los líderes tienen vigencia, prescriben, se obsoletizan. Es que los líderes con el tiempo son víctimas de sus propensiones, se autorrepiten y se hacen inflexibles.

Adicionalmente, hay por lo menos dos tipos de competencias: la operativa y la estratégica.

La competencia operativa es hacer las cosas bien y ser eficiente. La manera en que este tipo de líder hace crecer el negocio es a base de multiplicar el mismo modelo, replicar y expandirse.

La competencia estratégica es hacer las cosas correctas, aceptar cierto grado de ineficiencia en aras de la exploración y la búsqueda de oportunidades a explotar.

Lo que queda entonces es tener la humildad para reconocer que las oportunidades son fugaces, el olfato fino para detectar nuevas oportunidades, la flexibilidad para movilizarse a través de diferentes portafolios de negocios y segmentos de mercado, y la disciplina de gestión para optimizar la explotación de las oportunidades detectadas

How to Become a Master Problem Solver

By Scott Halford for Entrepreneur

Your ability to make money is directly proportionate to how well you solve problems for your customers. Problem solving is one of the most highly valued characteristics you can have as an entrepreneur. Hone this skill and you reap the benefits of saving time, making money and finding the next big idea for your business.

There are three myths about problem solving that should be shot before we talk about how to become good at it.

Myth No. 1: Problem solving and critical thinking are the same.

Fact: Problem solving is a sub-set of its larger cousin, critical thinking. Problem solving deals with the immediate issue, and critical thinking is required for long-term strategic issues.

Myth No. 2: Good problem solvers intuitively shoot from the hip.

Fact: Intuition is an important part of the process, but research shows that the more systematic problem solver has a better return with accurate and successful solutions.

Myth No. 3: If you come up with a good solution, you’re a good problem solver.

Fact: There are five steps to good problem solving, and you need to follow through on each to be deemed a pro at it.

Following these five steps will help you become a master problem solver.

1.Identify. Identifying the correct problem to work on is often where people trip up. It’s not as simple as you might think — breeze over this step at your own peril. Think about a business that has revenue issues. There could be a few hundred reasons for that issue. Asking the right questions and being a smart detective help you zero in on the problem with precision. The good problem solver asks a lot of questions about what the problem really is, instead of guessing and making snap decisions about it.

2.Ideate. Now that you have a short list of what the problem might be, brainstorm all the possible solutions. The best brainstorming happens when you have the opportunity to bounce ideas off others. Get the right people in the room and think of as many solutions as you can. This is not the time to evaluate. The physiological brain process of generating ideas is not the same as evaluating them, and they cannot be switched on at the same time. They are both critical processes, but don’t turn off the ideation by turning on the evaluation.

3.Evaluate. This is when you evaluate the ideas you came up with during the ideation phase. Evaluate ideas first based on their impact on a goal, and secondly, on the complexity of the idea. Complexity is not about difficulty. Instead, it is determined by only two things: time and money. Can the idea bring about successful results in the time constraints you have, and does it fit any known budget constraints you have? Ask yourself how large an impact the idea has. If you’re trying to cut $10,000 out of a budget and you come up with an idea that saves $100, the impact is relatively low. One with $1,000 becomes a higher-impact solution. You are looking for high–impact, low-complexity ideas.

4.Execute. This is another step average problem solvers often skip. It does no good to come up with a great idea and then bungle execution on it. We’ve all been in those meetings where ideas are brainstormed and funneled into a few doable deeds, only to walk out of the meeting and never know when or how the ideas will be executed. Fruitless. Come up with a plan to get your idea done. You don’t have to be the executor of the full idea, but as a problem solver, you have some responsibility for implementing the solution.

5.Re-examine. The final step is to check in with the solution’s progress and determine if it is still the right one. There will be times when the problem still exists because the solution wasn’t right. Don’t throw in the towel. Go back to step two and get going on the next solution to try.

Problem solving is a skill that pays handsomely. Practice the steps so that you become efficient at them. Require it of others you work with. Then execute. Get them in the habit of always bringing at least one solution idea for every problem you identify. No problem

EL MUNDO DE LAS QUEJAS

Antes o después, quiérase o no, a las puertas de la empresa se presentarán clientes disgustados por algo que ha hecho o dejado de hacer la empresa. La forma como se gestione el contacto y los resultados finales que se obtengan constituyen, sin dudas, la “prueba de fuego” de la atención al cliente de cualquier empresa. Todo dependerá de la forma como el personal de contacto con los clientes o “primera línea” reciban y gestionen las quejas y reclamaciones de los clientes.

Nótese que en los casos de atención habitual a los clientes, éstos llegan a la empresa, en el peor de los casos, en una actitud neutra. En el caso de una queja, el esfuerzo a realizar es doble que el normal, ya que, primero, es necesario inducir al cliente a abandonar una actitud negativa (bajo cero en el nivel de satisfacción).y, luego, hacer todo lo que sea necesario para conducir al cliente a una posición positiva (la más alta posible en la escala de la satisfacción). Y en ocasiones, no es fácil, pero hay que hacerlo.

Pero, la eficaz gestión de una queja o reclamación reviste mayor importancia de la que usualmente se le asigna, ya que una queja recibida en la empresa es el reflejo de una realidad mucho mayor, tal y como lo han comprobado en Technical Assistance Research Programs (TARP), una entidad de los EE. UU. que disfruta de prestigio a nivel internacional por la precisión de sus investigaciones, la amplitud de las mismas y las bases formales y teóricas que validan su adecuación a las exigencias técnicas más estrictas. En la Figura 1 mostramos algunos de los resultados (verdaderos hallazgos) arrojados por las investigaciones realizadas por TARP.

Figura 1. Hallazgos de las investigaciones de TARP

1 Sólo la mitad de los servicios prestados satisfacen plenamente a los clientes.

2 El 30% de los servicios presentan algún tipo de problema para los clientes, pero éstos no lo expresan mediante una reclamación concreta.

3 El 15% de los servicios suministrados motivan reclamaciones escritas o verbales a otras áreas de la empresa que no llegan al departamento o persona responsable.

4 Sólo el 3% de los servicios prestados motivan una queja por escrito (en la práctica, cada queja es un síntoma de la existencia de una insatisfacción mucho mayor).

5 El 92% de los clientes que se quejan y su queja ha sido resuelta satisfactoriamente a la primera vez, vuelven a hacer negocios con la empresa.

6 Cuando la queja ha sido resuelta de forma no satisfactoria, la tasa de los que vuelven a hacer sus negocios con la empresa baja a un 42%.

7 La tasa de fidelidad de los clientes que se han quejado y cuyas quejas habían sido resueltas satisfactoriamente es más alta que la de los clientes que nunca se han quejado.

8 Los principales motivos de quejas y reclamaciones de los clientes se relacionan con el servicio personal recibido por parte de algún miembro del personal de la empresa proveedora (no con la calidad de los productos o servicios).

9 Las razones de cambio de un proveedor a otro a otro son: 68 por ciento por motivos relacionados con la calidad del servicio y la atención al cliente; 19 por ciento por haber encontrado productos mejores o precios más ventajosos; y 13 por ciento por otros motivos que escapan al control de las empresas.

10 Por cada queja recibida de un cliente, existe una media de 26 personas con problemas y seis de ellos suelen ser graves.

11 La persona promedio que tiene una queja se lo cuenta a otras 9-10 personas (amigos, familiares, compañeros de trabajo, etcétera). El 13 por ciento se lo cuenta a otras 20 personas.

12 Las personas cuyas quejas han sido atendidas y resueltas se lo cuentan a 5-6 personas.

EL FACTOR CLAVE: LA ACTITUD DEL PERSONAL

Para lograr una eficaz gestión de las quejas y reclamaciones todo debe comenzar por la formación y concienciación del personal que las recibe. Para el personal de atención al público, una queja no debe ser motivo de irritación, frustración, “resabios”, ofensas y actitudes similares. La realidad es que, cada queja es un regalo que le hacen los clientes a la empresa. Un regalo que, entre muchas otras cosas, le permite a la empresa:

• Identificar los puntos débiles de la organización y/o su personal y tomar las medidas las correctoras correspondientes.

• Resolver los problemas con los productos, servicios, contactos, métodos y sistemas que generan insatisfacción entre los clientes.

• Iniciar acciones que le permitan recuperar los clientes disgustados, en vez de sencillamente perderlos sin siquiera enterarse de que abandonan la empresa y por qué lo hacen.

• Fomentar la lealtad de los clientes hacia la empresa, sus productos y servicios.

Es fundamental que se comprenda esta realidad con el fin de adoptar en todo momento una actitud proactiva ante las quejas, en vez de recurrir a las usuales posiciones defensivas e, incluso, agresivas. Como vimos en los resultados de las investigaciones de la organización TARP, cuando la atención de la queja no es la adecuada, las posibilidades de que el cliente vuelva a hacer negocios con la empresa, ¡descienden en un 50 por ciento! La situación es aún peor, cuando el cliente ni siquiera se queja y se va a la búsqueda de otro proveedor sin decir nada a la empresa, que ni siquiera se entera de lo que está haciendo mal… ¡y lo sigue haciendo!, creando más y más clientes insatisfechos.

Sí, definitivamente, una queja es un regalo. Y como tal debe ser recibida: con agrado, amabilidad, placer e, incluso, ¡alegría! Pero, existe otra razón aún más importante para recibir con agrado una queja. Cuando un cliente se queja, lo que, en verdad, le está diciendo a la empresa es algo como lo siguiente:

“Miren, he tenido un problema con vosotros, pero no deseo dejar de hacer negocios con vuestra empresa. Por favor, resuelvan ese problema y no me obliguen a irme a otro proveedor, algo que, en el fondo, no quiero hacer.”

Por el contrario, los clientes que no se quejan sencillamente se van directamente a otro proveedor, sin decir nada.

Por demás, los clientes, se sienten positivamente impresionados cuando una queja se resuelve satisfactoriamente porque les transmite la sensación de que tienen suficiente poder y sienten que son personalmente eficaces, capaces de resolver sus problemas. En realidad:

Una queja no atendida o mal resuelta constituye, en el fondo, un atentado contra la integridad y auto-estima de los clientes, que se sienten no sólo afectados por el mal servicio recibido, sino también ofendidos y atacados en los niveles más íntimos de su personalidad.

El pensamiento que queda latente en la mente de los clientes es: “Para esta empresa, ¡yo no soy nadie!” ¿Podría esperarse que un cliente con esa percepción se convierta, luego, en un cliente debidamente fidelizado? Debemos convenir en que este es un resultado muy difícil de lograr.

Figura 2. Los 16 pasos de la metodología para la gestión de una queja

1 Recibir la queja con agrado.

2 Antes de reaccionar, preguntarse…

3 Mostrarse de acuerdo con el cliente.

4 “Enfriar” al cliente.

5 Hacerle saber al cliente que comprende cómo se siente.

6 “Empatizar” con el cliente.

7 Escuchar, escuchar, escuchar.

8 Dejar hablar al cliente.

9 Convertirse en embajador de la empresa.

10 Si el problema se debe a un error de la empresa, admitirlo abierta y francamente y excusarse.

11 Reaccionar de inmediato.

12 Elaborar, junto con el cliente, una solución justa para él y para la empresa.

13 Asegurarse de que la segunda vez todo funciona a la perfección.

14 Re-establecer la relación. .

15 Seguimiento.

16 Análisis.

Ahora bien, además de entrenar y formar al personal de contacto para que adopte una actitud positiva ente las quejas y reclamaciones, es necesario dotarle de un instrumento eficaz para gestionar el contacto conflictivo. Nos referimos a una:

10 Things That Good Bosses Do

By Steve Tobak

As we discovered in 7 Signs You May Be a Bad Manager, bosses aren’t usually aware that they are bad bosses. The fact is that nobody wants to believe they’re the problem. Nevertheless, there’s a bell curve for all things involving people, which means there are few really bad bosses, few really good bosses, and most of you fall somewhere in the middle.

To me that says, for the vast majority of you, there’s lots of room for improvement.

So, if you’re not exhibiting any of the 7 Signs, that’s great, pat yourself on the back. Still, if you really want to up your management game, maybe even vault into the executive or ownership ranks someday, you’d better start doing at least a few of these 10 Things That Good Bosses Do.

Incidentally, this isn’t from some academic study. These are real attributes of real bosses, culled from decades of observation, which motivate and inspire employees to perform at their best.

1.Pay people what they’re worth, not what you can get away with. What you lose in expense you gain back several-fold in performance.

2.Take the time to share your experiences and insights. Labels like mentor and coach are overused. Let’s be specific here. Employees learn from those generous enough to share their experiences and insights. They don’t need a best friend or a shoulder to cry on.

3.Tell it to employees straight, even when it’s bad news. To me, the single most important thing any boss can do is to man up and tell it to people straight. No BS, no sugarcoating, especially when it’s bad news or corrective feedback.

4.Manage up … effectively. Good bosses keep management off employee’s backs. Most people don’t get this, but the most important aspect of that is giving management what they need to do their jobs. That’s what keeps management away.

5.Take the heat and share the praise. It takes courage to take the heat and humility to share the praise. That comes naturally to great bosses; the rest of us have to pick it up as we go.

6.Delegate responsibility, not tasks. Every boss delegates, but the crappy ones think that means dumping tasks they hate on workers. Good bosses delegate responsibility and hold people accountable. That’s fulfilling and fosters professional growth.

7.Encourage employees to hone their natural abilities and challenge them to overcome their issues. That’s called getting people to perform at their best.

8.Build team spirit. As we learned before, great groups outperform great individuals. And great leaders build great teams.

9.Treat employees the way they deserve to be treated. You always hear people say they deserve respect and to be treated as equals. Well, some may not want to hear this, but a) respect must be earned, and b) most workers are not their boss’s equals.

10.Inspire your people. All the above motivate people, but few bosses have the ability to truly inspire their employees. How? By sharing their passion for the business. By knowing just what to say and do at just the right time to take the edge off or turn a tough situation around. Genuine anecdotes help a lot. So does a good sense of humor.

All this adds up to an environment where people feel appreciated, recognized, challenged, and appropriately compensated.

8 Tips for Cutting Edge Leaders by George Kohlrieser

Being appointed a leader does not necessarily make you one. The good news is that high performance leadership and leading at the edge are talents everyone can learn. George Kohlrieser, an organizational and clinical psychologist and Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at IMD reveals the eight paths to achieving cutting edge leadership:

1. Develop your leadership talent

Companies that have a leadership development culture excel because they become talent magnets by consistently providing people with opportunities to learn, grow and build leadership competencies. As with all talents, leadership must be developed through years of focused learning, training and practice.

2. Lead from the mind’s eye

Learning how to master the mind’s eye enables one to make choices about how one thinks, feels and acts in any given moment. The brain can be trained to look for opportunities and to go beyond obstacles, just as great athletes, musicians and actors do. Leaders who learn how to program their bodies and emotions to follow their mind will always outperform others, and personal leadership competence is a result of being aware of and regulating one’s mental states and emotions.

3. Build success through your secure base relationships

A secure base is someone who provides a sense of protection, is a source of positive inspiration and provides comfort in times of stress, frustration or failure. Very talented people often fail because they either lack secure bases or choose the wrong ones. Having the support of secure bases makes the attainment of seemingly unreachable goals possible simply because they believe in you more than you believe in yourself.

4. Lead through effective communications

A hallmark of high performance leaders is the ability to influence others through all levels and types of communication, from simple interactions to difficult conversations and more complex conflicts, in order to achieve greater team and organizational alignment.

5. Leading through conflict management

Changing negative conflicts into positive engagement is crucial for organizations to perform well. High performing leaders are able to deal with disputes, disagreements and diverse points of view. Organizations that encourage people to raise difficult issues find that doing so leads to innovation, new goals and the changes needed to achieve them.

6. Leading in a fragmented world

Among the many challenges that leaders confront in the 21st century, fragmentation in executive teams and their organizations is often cited as a major barrier to execution and implementation. Leaders can learn to develop and build integrated groups and teams across global organizations, creating an organization with “enough” shared purpose and direction to make change happen.

7. Leading through strategy

Leaders face many conflicting goal, and need to explore what it means to have a strategy in the current business environment. This includes understanding both the strategic role of the leadership team within the organization and the challenges of the overall strategy process on individual leaders. By visualizing alternative futures, leaders are able to clarify potential directions and options as a basis for enabling leadership choice.

8. Leading at the edge is a journey

High performing leaders know that learning to lead at the edge is a lifetime process of discovery. By playing to win, rather than playing not to lose, leaders make work a more exciting, enjoyable and engaging place for themselves and all those around them. With this foundation, running the business, and

Joseph Grenny on influencing yourself and others to achieve results

Over the past 20 years Joseph Grenny has taught and advised more than 100,000 leaders from all over the world on how to get the best out of themselves and others. His experience – combined with the latest research in behavioral economics and the social sciences – has led Grenny to develop what he calls “six sources of influence.” He contends that these sources of influence – if carefully and consistently nurtured – will provide you with a systematic strategy for executing on influence and give you the power to change anything. Read on to learn more.

Interview by Chris Stanley

Why is influence so important to business leaders?

If you think of problems like an iceberg, business leaders face problems both above and below the water line. Those above the water line are the visible problems of setting strategy and policy, developing new products, creating processes. These are the visible, tangible, tactile challenges that they need to generate solutions to. The problems below the water line tend to deal with behavior in the organization - things that are not always visible and apparent, but that profoundly affect the ability to execute on the elements that are above the water line. Of the two, the below the water line problems tend to be the more profound, persistent, and the most resistant to change. And leaders tend to have the fewest tools for solving them.

So what would you say are the typical characteristics of a great influencer?

There are two big things that people need to do to be effective at influencing change.

Firstly they need to have a robust and proper way of understanding today’s behavior. For example, if they need to improve service quality, the first thing that leaders do is they start rolling out a change strategy without deeply understanding the behavior that they are confronting. If employees are lethargic, disinterested or resistant, leaders tend not to have a very robust way of thinking about the root causes of that resistance.

Secondly they need to have a robust way of creating an influence strategy. We’ve spent 25 years studying the best that social science has to offer and also looking at the best practitioners on the planet to see how they create effective, rapid, profound and sustainable behavior change across an organization. We found that the measure of the potential effectiveness of an influence strategy is the degree to which it reflects six sources of influence.

What are these six sources of influence?

There are two big reasons people do what they do - because they want to do something and because they can do something. What leaders tend to do is develop motivation strategies that do very little on the ability side. They also tend not to understand that there are three types of motivation and ability: personal, social and structural.

Personal motivation and ability looks at ‘Do I want to" and "Can I?" When leaders are creating change strategies, they tend to focus on just personal motivation. They are trying to convince people that they ought to something. What they don’t understand is there are social and structural factors that profoundly affect whether people want to do something and whether they are capable of doing it.

Social motivation looks at whether my leaders, peers, direct reports and others are encouraging me and praising me or discouraging me and getting in my way. On the social ability side, the same is true - are people throwing up barriers or providing me with the help and resources that I need?

Finally there"s structural motivation - rewards and incentives; and structural ability - the design of the organization and the resources that are systematically made available.

All six of these affect any behavior. They enter into your choices about what you are going to eat today or whether you stick with the diet or not. They enter into whether you show up to work on time or not and whether you stay engaged all day long. If leaders don’t know how to think about all six of these systematically and most importantly draw upon all six of them, they fail more often than not in affecting the problems below the water line. We have found that leaders who use all six of these sources of influence were ten times more likely to see change succeed.

So let’s talk about some of these sources in a little bit more detail. The first one you mentioned is personal motivation. So how would you go about motivating someone to do something they don’t want to do?

Generally positive behaviors are less common than negative behaviors. So how do you get people to engage in positive behavior? The answer is that leaders have to help people make an experiential linkage between the behavior that is being asked of them and their own core values. When we say experiential we mean that it does not require a lecture or some sort of verbal persuasion. Leaders need to use engaging stories or recreate powerful personal experiences to help people to anchor the new behavior, and they tend not to be very comfortable with that.

Can you give me an example of this working in practice?

Yes, absolutely. We looked at supervisors in a fast food chain who were just trying to get employees to pick up a broom and brush up the dining area during slow periods. You would think that this is a particularly insignificant behavior and that it would be difficult to create a sense of vigor and passion about it. We found that those who were successful in counseling employees and changing behavior did so by describing customer experiences that were particularly dissatisfying in a way that was quite animated to the employee. So for example a manager spoke to an employee who was not very engaged in brushing up the dining area and described how twenty minutes earlier he had seen a mother come in with her two year old daughter. The mother had gone to order food while the two year old daughter sat at the table sweeping her arm across all of the debris and smears of ketchup that the previous guest had left, putting her hand to her mouth and licking it off. This created such a sense of disgust in the 17 year old employee that he didn’t need to be told to go out and clean the dining area; he felt a moral compulsion to go out and do it. So even with mundane behaviors like that, using stories can create a sense of moral motivation that profoundly affects people’s choices.

What are some of the challenges that leaders face in harnessing social pressure in a positive way, that doesn’t create resentment within teams?

The first mistake leaders make is that they don’t target their influence towards the opinion leaders. They tend to try to just diffuse their attention across the entire employee population. But the leader’s job is to persuade ten per cent of the organization, and the opinion leaders will bring everybody else along. Leaders ought to focus their attention on this unique population.

The second mistake is that when leaders do try to engage opinion leaders, they usually work with suck ups rather than real opinion leaders. For example if you are rolling out a big new quality program or a customer service program, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is go out and ask for volunteers. The people who volunteer tend to be the ones who are least socially credible in the organization, and that is the death of your effort.

Have you any evidence of the effectiveness of employing these six sources of influence?

Yes, we have studied over a thousand organizations and their attempts to bring about change. This very broad systematic strategy showed differences of an order of magnitude of 1000% when organizations started to employ all six sources of influence. These aren"t marginal differences that made some incremental change. The six sources of influence describe the physics of change. If you are not using all of these elements you shouldn’t expect to see real significant behavior change occur.

We’ve talked a lot about influence within businesses and organizations and change management in organizations. How does influence work on a more personal level? If I want to convince my boss that I want a pay rise for example, how might that work, how might I go about doing that successfully?

The first is that you need to realize that your boss will decide to give you a raise not just when he or she is motivated to do it but also when he or she is able. So you will have to be able to deal with both the motivational and the ability side. Often when we try to influence our boss we are just thinking about making him realize they should give us the pay rise but not realizing that they can’t. The people who are the most persuasive are the ones that make arguments that deal with the ability side as well. So if my boss says he’s only got budget for a 2 percent pay increase across the entire team, I have to deal with the ability side of that as well. I either have to add additional value or demonstrate where additional money is. Thinking in this way opens up other avenues that help me to be more persuasive and effective with others as well.

How do you view the internet and technology in general as a tool for influencing people’s behavior?

In general technology over the past 20 years has done more to feed impulses than values. In spite of the fact that it has been a wonderful enabler of information access, the kind of personal behavior that it has promoted has largely been negative. It has caused people to be more isolated at times. We are using social networking rather than social get-togethers. In many cases we respond to the impulses of text messages or cell phones and email as opposed to organized thought. Yet I think that the potential is there for technology to be profoundly helpful in helping people to create self-directed change. This is one of the next big projects that we are involved with the support of Dr. Albert Bandura at Stanford who stands as quite a pioneer in this field. Our next big project is to try to harness all six sources of influence through the use of technology to help people to create more self-directed change.

Tal Ben-Shahar’s keys to happiness

Tal Ben-Shahar is a professor at Harvard Business School whose course on happiness and positive psychology is the most popular ever run at the university. Here are his 6 tips on achieving the state of mind that will let you perform to your potential.


1. Give yourself permission to be human. When we accept emotions — such as fear, sadness, or anxiety — as natural, we are more likely to overcome them. Rejecting our emotions, positive or negative, leads to frustration and unhappiness.

2. Happiness lies at the intersection between pleasure and meaning. Whether at work or at home, the goal is to engage in activities that are both personally significant and enjoyable. When this is not feasible, make sure you have happiness boosters, moments throughout the week that provide you with both pleasure and meaning.

3. Keep in mind that happiness is mostly dependent on our state of mind, not on our status or the size of our bank account. Barring extreme circumstances, our level of well being is determined by what we choose to focus on, and by our interpretation of external events. For example, do we see the glass as half full or half empty? Do we view failure as catastrophic, or do we see it as a learning opportunity?

4. Simplify! Generally, we are much too busy, trying to squeeze in more and more activities into less and less time. Quantity influences quality, and we compromise on our happiness by trying to do too much.

5. Remember the mind-body connection. What we do — or don"t do — with our bodies influences our mind. Regular exercise, adequate sleep, and healthy eating habits lead to both physical and mental health.

6. Express gratitude, whenever possible. All too often we take our lives for granted. Learn to appreciate and savor the wonderful things in life, from people to food, from nature to a smile.

The End of Management

By ALAN MURRAY

Business guru Peter Drucker called management "the most important innovation of the 20th century." It was well-justified praise. Techniques for running large corporations, pioneered by men like Alfred Sloan of General Motors and refined at a bevy of elite business schools, helped fuel a century of unprecedented global prosperity.

But can this great 20th century innovation survive and thrive in the 21st? Evidence suggests: Probably not. "Modern" management is nearing its existential moment.

Corporations, whose leaders portray themselves as champions of the free market, were in fact created to circumvent that market. They were an answer to the challenge of organizing thousands of people in different places and with different skills to perform large and complex tasks, like building automobiles or providing nationwide telephone service.

In the relatively simple world of 1776, when Adam Smith wrote his classic "Wealth of Nations," the enlightened self-interest of individuals contracting separately with each other was sufficient to ensure economic progress. But 100 years later, the industrial revolution made Mr. Smith's vision seem quaint. A new means of organizing people and allocating resources for more complicated tasks was needed. Hence, the managed corporation—an answer to the central problem of the industrial age.

WSJ Deputy Managing Editor Alan Murray discusses some of the lessons new managers can learn from his new book, "The Wall Street Journal Essential Guide to Management."

For the next 100 years, the corporation served its purpose well. From Henry Ford to Harold Geneen, the great corporate managers of the 20th century fed the rise of a vast global middle class, providing both the financial means and the goods and services to bring luxury to the masses.

In recent years, however, most of the greatest management stories have been not triumphs of the corporation, but triumphs over the corporation. General Electric's Jack Welch may have been the last of the great corporate builders. But even Mr. Welch was famous for waging war on bureaucracy. Other management icons of recent decades earned their reputations by attacking entrenched corporate cultures, bypassing corporate hierarchies, undermining corporate structures, and otherwise using the tactics of revolution in a desperate effort to make the elephants dance. The best corporate managers have become, in a sense, enemies of the corporation.

The reasons for this are clear enough. Corporations are bureaucracies and managers are bureaucrats. Their fundamental tendency is toward self-perpetuation. They are, almost by definition, resistant to change. They were designed and tasked, not with reinforcing market forces, but with supplanting and even resisting the market.

Yet in today's world, gale-like market forces—rapid globalization, accelerating innovation, relentless competition—have intensified what economist Joseph Schumpeter called the forces of "creative destruction." Decades-old institutions like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns now can disappear overnight, while new ones like Google and Twitter can spring up from nowhere. A popular video circulating the Internet captures the geometric nature of these trends, noting that it took radio 38 years and television 13 years to reach audiences of 50 million people, while it took the Internet only four years, the iPod three years and Facebook two years to do the same. It's no surprise that fewer than 100 of the companies in the S&P 500 stock index were around when that index started in 1957.

Even the best-managed companies aren't protected from this destructive clash between whirlwind change and corporate inertia. When I asked members of The Wall Street Journal's CEO Council, a group of chief executives who meet each year to deliberate on issues of public interest, to name the most influential business book they had read, many cited Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma." That book documents how market-leading companies have missed game-changing transformations in industry after industry—computers (mainframes to PCs), telephony (landline to mobile), photography (film to digital), stock markets (floor to online)—not because of "bad" management, but because they followed the dictates of "good" management. They listened closely to their customers. They carefully studied market trends. They allocated capital to the innovations that promised the largest returns. And in the process, they missed disruptive innovations that opened up new customers and markets for lower-margin, blockbuster products.

The weakness of managed corporations in dealing with accelerating change is only half the double-flanked attack on traditional notions of corporate management. The other half comes from the erosion of the fundamental justification for corporations in the first place.

British economist Ronald Coase laid out the basic logic of the managed corporation in his 1937 work, "The Nature of the Firm." He argued corporations were necessary because of what he called "transaction costs." It was simply too complicated and too costly to search for and find the right worker at the right moment for any given task, or to search for supplies, or to renegotiate prices, police performance and protect trade secrets in an open marketplace. The corporation might not be as good at allocating labor and capital as the marketplace; it made up for those weaknesses by reducing transaction costs.

Mr. Coase received his Nobel Prize in 1991—the very dawn of the Internet age. Since then, the ability of human beings on different continents and with vastly different skills and interests to work together and coordinate complex tasks has taken quantum leaps. Complicated enterprises, like maintaining Wikipedia or building a Linux operating system, now can be accomplished with little or no corporate management structure at all.

That's led some utopians, like Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, authors of the book "Wikinomics," to predict the rise of "mass collaboration" as the new form of economic organization. They believe corporate hierarchies will disappear, as individuals are empowered to work together in creating "a new era, perhaps even a golden one, on par with the Italian renaissance or the rise of Athenian democracy."

That's heady stuff, and almost certainly exaggerated. Even the most starry-eyed techno-enthusiasts have a hard time imagining, say, a Boeing 787 built by "mass collaboration." Still, the trends here are big and undeniable. Change is rapidly accelerating. Transaction costs are rapidly diminishing. And as a result, everything we learned in the last century about managing large corporations is in need of a serious rethink. We have both a need and an opportunity to devise a new form of economic organization, and a new science of management, that can deal with the breakneck realities of 21st century change.

The strategy consultant Gary Hamel is a leading advocate for rethinking management. He's building a new, online management "laboratory" where leading management practitioners and thinkers can work together—a form of mass collaboration—on innovative ideas for handling modern management challenges.

What will the replacement for the corporation look like? Even Mr. Hamel doesn't have an answer for that one. "The thing that limits us," he admits, "is that we are extraordinarily familiar with the old model, but the new model, we haven't even seen yet."

This much, though, is clear: The new model will have to be more like the marketplace, and less like corporations of the past. It will need to be flexible, agile, able to quickly adjust to market developments, and ruthless in reallocating resources to new opportunities.

Resource allocation will be one of the biggest challenges. The beauty of markets is that, over time, they tend to ensure that both people and money end up employed in the highest-value enterprises. In corporations, decisions about allocating resources are made by people with a vested interest in the status quo. "The single biggest reason companies fail," says Mr. Hamel, "is that they overinvest in what is, as opposed to what might be."

This is the core of the innovator's dilemma. The big companies Mr. Christensen studied failed, not necessarily because they didn't see the coming innovations, but because they failed to adequately invest in those innovations. To avoid this problem, the people who control large pools of capital need to act more like venture capitalists, and less like corporate finance departments. They need to make lots of bets, not just a few big ones, and they need to be willing to cut their losses.

The resource allocation problem is one Google has tried to address with its "20%" policy. All engineers are allowed to spend 20% of their time working on Google-related projects other than those assigned to them. The company says this system has helped it develop innovative products, such as Google News. Because engineers don't have to compete for funds, the Google approach doesn't have the discipline of a true marketplace, and it hasn't yet proven itself as a way to generate incremental profits. But it does allow new ideas to get some attention.

In addition to resource allocation, there's the even bigger challenge of creating structures that motivate and inspire workers. There's plenty of evidence that most workers in today's complex organizations are simply not engaged in their work. Many are like Jim Halpert from "The Office," who in season one of the popular TV show declared: "This is just a job.…If this were my career, I'd have to throw myself in front of a train."

The new model will have to instill in workers the kind of drive and creativity and innovative spirit more commonly found among entrepreneurs. It will have to push power and decision-making down the organization as much as possible, rather than leave it concentrated at the top. Traditional bureaucratic structures will have to be replaced with something more like ad-hoc teams of peers, who come together to tackle individual projects, and then disband. SAS Institute Inc., the privately held software company in North Carolina that invests heavily in both research and development and in generous employee benefits, ranging from free on-site health care and elder care support to massages, is often cited as one company that could be paving the way. The company has nurtured a reputation as both a source of innovative products and a great place to work.

Information gathering also needs to be broader and more inclusive. Former Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley's demand that the company cull product ideas from outside the company, rather than developing them all from within, was a step in this direction. (It even has a website for submitting ideas.) The new model will have to go further. New mechanisms will have to be created for harnessing the "wisdom of crowds." Feedback loops will need to be built that allow products and services to constantly evolve in response to new information. Change, innovation, adaptability, all have to become orders of the day.

Can the 20th-century corporation evolve into this new, 21st-century organization? It won't be easy. The "innovator's dilemma" applies to management, as well as technology. But the time has come to find out. The old methods won't last much longer.

How to Get People to Change

By Bobbie Gossage
Feb 1, 2010

Forget PowerPoint. If you want to influence employee or customer behavior, charts and data typically won't cut it, say Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the 2007 bestseller Made to Stick and the new Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. In Switch, the Heath brothers explore ways to manage big changes in life and in business. "Change is hard, because we're schizophrenic," says Chip, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. (Dan is a senior fellow at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business.) "Part of us may want to change, but part of us has this emotional connection to the way that we've always done things." In researching their new book, the Heaths consulted experts on subjects as diverse as how to diet and how to change society. "Time and again, we found the same principles coming up, whether it was individual change or organizational change or societal change," says Chip. Those principles, he says, involve appealing to both our rational and emotional sides. Inc. senior editor Bobbie Gossage recently spoke with Chip Heath about the book's findings.

What mistakes do leaders make when they are trying to change their organizations?

One of the main mistakes is when leaders come up with a new vision but never translate that broad analytical vision into something people on the frontlines can actually execute. I was talking to an entrepreneur who wanted his employees to have a "mindset of customer service." But if you're an employee, when you hear that, all you hear is buzzword, buzzword, buzzword, jargon, jargon, jargon.

What if you are dealing with some really stubborn people who don't like change?

You can try to find the feeling that's going to make them empathize with customers. For instance, Microsoft had some very stubborn programmers who thought they were writing brilliant software. But six out of 10 customers Microsoft surveyed couldn't figure out how to use the new feature. When they told the programmers this, their response was, "Where did you find six dumb people?" Microsoft brought the programmers into a usability-testing lab and put them behind a two-way mirror. When the programmers watched a real customer struggle with the software they designed, the programmers immediately started thinking about ways of changing it.

Don't try to argue with a stubborn employee. That appeals to the dark side of the analytical parts of ourselves.

What do you mean by the dark side?

Our analytical capacity is wonderful, but we face too many choices. If you give customers in a grocery store an assortment of 24 jams to sample, they're actually less likely to buy any of the jams than if there are only six jams. Very often we paralyze our analytical side by offering it too much to analyze. The same thing happens if you give your employees too many things to think about -- like having a "mindset of customer service." As an employee, there are 45 things I could do that might improve customer service, and I don't have time to do all of those things, so I end up doing none of them.

What about using carrots and sticks?

If you're offering bonuses or hiring and firing a lot of people so that you can find the few special people who can execute your vision -- those are expensive, time-consuming strategies. Very often, by making small changes in the environment, we lead people in the right direction without that expense.

So you should change the environment, not the employee?

One of the most basic mistakes that psychologists have documented is that we tend to blame people and their personalities for problems and ignore situations. One of my students, a director at Nike, thought of herself as a very open manager. She had an open-door policy, but when she asked for feedback, she learned that her staff thought she was a bad communicator.

After talking with her team, she realized the problem was the way her desk was set up. When an employee came in and sat across from her, her computer was right in the middle. She got distracted when e-mails showed up. After she rearranged her office so she would have to turn her chair away from the computer when an employee came in, she immediately got positive feedback. By fixing that environment, she fixed the problem.

You mention in the book that peer pressure is also a powerful motivator.

Social influence is strong. If a third of your employees aren't filling out their expense reports on time, what they may not know is that two-thirds of your employees are. Sometimes just understanding that a crowd of people is moving in a direction makes people uncomfortable enough to change. One of my favorite studies in the book is about a group of researchers who went into hotels that have those "Please reuse your towels" signs. They changed one of the signs to say, "Most people in this hotel reuse their towels at least once during their stay." Immediately, towel reuse rates went up 25 percent, and laundry bills went down.

Does a bad economic climate affect people's ability to change?

We commonly think that fear is a good motivator, but fear works for only a short time. And this recession has gone on for a couple of years in some parts of the country. So when we try to motivate people, we need to find feelings of hope and optimism.

How do you do that?

There's a technique we talk about in the book: looking for the bright spots. When you face a change situation, you're often demoralized and depressed. Instead of focusing on what isn't working, you need to shift people over to thinking, What have we done in the past that has been successful for us?

I was talking to a small-business owner whose firm is a general contractor. He had been killing himself by doing proposals for big government contracts, which the company would often lose. I asked him, "What are the last three times that you got a contract you were excited about?" Turns out they were all projects from referrals, and they tended to be not the bigger projects but projects for small and medium-size cities where relationships mattered more.

At this firm, they were masters of taking people who might not necessarily agree on what the fire station should look like and helping them resolve those conflicts. The firm shifted to focusing on smaller projects where it was in charge of a more complete project and people's skills were better utilized.

It's easy to get demoralized when you lose and you lose and you lose. But when you think about the last time you won and how you can do those kinds of things more often, that gives people a sense of hope and optimism that will motivate their behavior

GANADOR O PERDEDOR

John C Maxwell

Estaba en la Universidad en 1968 cuando el senador de los Estados Unidos, Robert Kennedy, fue asesinado. Una famosa frase que el habia citado de George Bernard Shaw hizo una impresion muy profunda sobre mi. Salto desde las paginas del diario hasta mi corazon. Algunos hombres ven las cosas como son y dicen: Por que Yo sueno con cosas que nunca fueron y digo, Porque? no? Esa declaracion describe un liderazgo efectivo.

Los lideres en todas las areas de la vida tienen caracteristicas distintivas. Una de ellas, comunes a todos, es la vision.

Los lideres ven la vida como podria ser. Siempre ven un poco mas adelante, un poco mas que aquellos que lo rodean. El mundo dice: Tengo que ver para creer?. El lider dice: Tengo que creer para verlo?.

Las multitudes sacuden sus cabezas en desesperacion y murmuran: Es la hora mas oscura de la humanidad. El lider todavia en medio de la oscuridad dice: La hora mas oscura siempre es la anterior al amanecer.

El perdedor ve el trabajo que necesita ser hecho y se excusa cuando dice: Mi pequeno aporte no hara diferencia, la tarea es demasiado grande

El ganador mira el mismo trabajo que hay que hacer y dice: He aqui una gran oportunidad, hare mi parte para lograr el exito?.

Los seguidores ven el arduo trabajo que deben resistir para llegar a subir a la montana del exito. Los lideres ven el exito de subir la montana del arduo trabajo.

Muchas personas ven el problema en cada situacion. Por lo tanto, concentran su pensamiento sobre los problemas y la posibilidad del fracaso.

Los lideres ven el potencial en cada situacion. Por lo tanto, concentran su pensamiento sobre el potencial y la posibilidad del exito.

Es posible que dos personas miren el mismo objeto y vean cosas diferentes. Mientras que nuestra vista fisica es muy importante, nuestra vista mental lo es igualmente.

Por que sera que marcamos revisiones periodicas de nuestra vision fisica y no de nuestra vision mental La ultima vez que visite a mi oculista me reviso y dijo que tenia un poco de hipermetropia (vision a distancia); yo le respondi Alabado sea el Senor!?

Si iba a tener problemas de vision que fueran por vision a distancia y no por vision corta.

Perfección imperfecta

Por: Merlina Meiler

Cuando hacemos algo, nuestra meta es que todo salga bien, de acuerdo con lo planeado o esperado. Asimismo, muchos de nosotros aspiramos a lograr un resultado perfecto en lo que hacemos, y, en consecuencia, nos fijamos metas que van mucho más allá de nuestros límites o posibilidades. Incluso de lo humanamente asequible. En esta clase de situaciones, a veces el hacer las cosas de la mejor manera que podemos no es suficiente, y nos causa una sensación de frustración que en términos objetivos no debería ser tal.

Todos cometemos errores en algún momento del día... o en muchos. Permítete que así sea, ya que los errores son una excelente manera de aprender y de pulirnos. Hazte a la idea que los resultados que planeas obtener muchas veces se presentarán como lo deseas, y otras no. Los errores e imprevistos son excelentes oportunidades, que nos sirven de sobremanera para ampliar nuestros horizontes y la manera en la que vemos lo que nos rodea. Si todo rindiera los frutos esperados, nos estancaríamos en lo que ya sabemos y manejamos, y también nuestro crecimiento personal se vería frenado puesto que no precisaríamos desarrollar herramientas nuevas ni incorporar conocimientos y formas de pensar diferentes para obtener lo que buscamos.

En vez de estar en tensión, frustrarte, enojarte o reaccionar de mala manera cada vez que algo sale de manera distinta a la prevista, relájate y acepta que el resultado de tus acciones no depende enteramente de ti, hay factores librados al azar, a determinadas circunstancias que no puedes manejar, o a las resoluciones de otros individuos. Un gran número de las variables que se conjugan para alcanzar un resultado están más allá de nuestras decisiones, nuestros límites o nuestra voluntad.

La exigencia personal es una característica motivadora e impulsora que nos estimula a mejorar, progresar, tener objetivos y alcanzar metas. Por el contrario, la sobreexigencia drena nuestra energía, ya que cobijar la ilusión de no cometer un error bajo ninguna circunstancia es demandarnos una hazaña titánica, imposible de cumplir. Tal vez tu costumbre sea que la pretensión desmedida que te exiges o te exigen sea demasiado alta, prácticamente inalcanzable. O te veas sometido a escrutinios exhaustivos en los que nada llega a satisfacer el resultado deseado ya que los parámetros de perfección con los que mides (u otras personas miden) la realidad que te rodea no son humanamente aplicables en su totalidad. Puedes elegir que tu vida esté basada en una actitud distinta, más relajada, al mismo tiempo que aspiras a que las cosas estén bien hechas, de acuerdo con parámetros lógicos que tú mismo delinees.