It's Down to You

The actions and behaviours of managers have a direct impact on the stress levels and quality of the work-life balance experienced by those who work for them.  Crucially, it is not so much the volume of work that causes stress, but the degree to which people feel they are able to control their workload and priorities. 

Beyond more obvious work-life balance measures such as flexible working, there are several things a manager can do to improve the situation of those in their teams:

1)    Create the opportunities and processes to enable individuals and teams to plan their own work, in terms of both schedules and priorities.

2)    Provide as much forward planning information as possible. Randomly announced jobs with urgent deadlines or ever changing goals and priorities simply serve to reduce the control people have over their work.

3)    Give feedback regularly and certainly not just when things go wrong. Feeling useful and valued is essential for an optimum work-life balance.

4)    Be open to feedback on your own management style and how it affects those around you. Working for a boss you can’t really talk to is a major source of workplace concern.

5)    Involve people in the decisions that will impact their work.

6)    Don’t delegate pressure.  Just because you are under pressure does not mean that your team should be.  Remember that the ‘buck stops with you’.  By all means enlist the help and support of your team, but simply passing on the pressure is generally an unproductive approach.

Lastly remember that the job of a manager is to get the best out of their team, and people generally do their best work when they are happy, motivated and having fun.

Leadership in Crises - Lessons from Japan

Japan is experiencing a horrific cocktail of natural catastrophes.  These are made significantly worse by the threat of a nuclear disaster, a threat the Japanese authorities thought they had planned and protected against. Prime Minister Naoto Kan and his leadership team are dealing with a new reality. The situation demands decisive leadership that the Japanese people can trust and follow.

The Japanese are noted for their expertise in earthquake and tsunami preparation, yet were overwhelmed by the events of 11th March 2011. The sheer scale of the natural disaster that befell them was greater and more damaging to their nuclear plant than they had planned and anticipated in their risk management strategies.

Yet the Japanese people are responding with coping strategies rather than panic. The press are full of admiration for their dignity and stoicism.  So whilst their training and mental rehearsal had not prepared them for exactly this disaster they had developed skills which improved their chance of survival and they are expected, as a nation, to come back from this fairly quickly.

Times of crisis force change.  Leaders must let go of existing plans and expectations very fast and create a different sense of purpose and hope that acknowledges the new reality. The speed at which a leader can establish new direction and a sense of control dictates their success in dealing with adversity.

So what are the lessons for us?

We admire people who rise to the challenge of a crisis and lead their followers with vision and purpose through a new landscape. Speed and agility at dropping old plans and setting new ones defines this style of leadership.

We will have to wait to see what the future holds for Japan, but they are a good example of how better outcomes result from improving the pace at which they can get their heads around a new reality. This skill is helping them now as they battle with the aftermath of the disaster.

Should you build your abilities to lead successfully in a crisis? I have done this effectively with several clients using scenario building and strategy testing techniques. It has made them faster at getting through the shock of change, faster at letting go of old expectations, more decisive and better at communicating with people.  Having these skills does not stop a crisis happening but does allow you to take your people with you, enabling them in turn to respond quickly.

Core to that is the ability to give people a renewed sense of purpose, strength and hope; a hallmark of strong leadership and a skill which can be learnt.

Rosie Miller is an international executive coach and author

The Benefit of Being Early

How you begin anything has a determining affect. Image the picture: Over sleeping the first alarm you get up with little time for breakfast before rushing out of the house. You arrive at work breathless and you already have three urgent messages, yet you’re already late and unprepared for your first meeting appointment.  Before you know it you’re the opposite of cool, calm and collected – you’re hot, harassed and dispersed and it’s only 9.30am! The day is leading you, rather you leading the day, and you never catch up with yourself.

The opposite of being collected is being “dispersed.” It means having fragmented thoughts, having six things in your mind competing for attention, rather than being focused on the one thing you’re meant to be doing. It saps energy, leads to irritation and stress, and will definitely over time impair work life balance!

We may all have days like this, but if it becomes a habit, or it becomes part of the culture of your work environment – a definite symptom of which is where you get the symptom of everyone being late for everything – it’s a problem.

Yet there is an appropriately simple solution. Being early. Giving yourself an extra 20 minutes when you get up in the morning – so you can at least register how you are and collect your thoughts for the day ahead; arriving early for appointments and meetings – so you can be prepared and focused on the important objectives; doing something before the deadline so you have a chance to review it for final improvements. Being early will always give you the sense of being ahead and it can give you space to handle the unexpected - such as urgent messages.

If you were the pilot of an aircraft you’d definitely check everything over before taking flight. If you want to pilot your life effectively you’d do the same thing.  Why not try being early for everything just for a day to see how it feels?

Nick Woodeson is a renowned trainer and coach

Choosing Between Right and Right

There is an interesting conversation around risk which is being conducted on a global stage. Bankers, politicians and regulatory bodies are in a heated debate about what sort of risk management we should adopt in our banks. 

Do we want our banking systems to be “Fail Safe” or “Never Fail”? Both could work (and not work), making the choice all the more hard to make.

At the moment some commentators and regulators favour “Fail Safe” and are arguing to split up the banks so that none are “too big to fail”. However this option has its own widespread consequences for the international banking system. While it may reduce the risk of system wide failure it does not necessarily avoid risk at the individual firm level.

Other commentators and regulators favour “Never Fail” strategies but, as opponents point out, that comes at a price in terms of high capital reserves, less flexible rules, and potentially higher cost of doing business. So a “Never Fail “culture can be reassuringly predictable yet low on customer responsiveness and innovation.

Many organisations struggle with exactly this dilemma in their own internal culture.  Should your culture encourage people to experiment and take manageable risks with no loss of credibility, or do you want your managers and leaders to make sure they have no failures? The decision drives not only how the organisation bears risk but also its ability to innovate and to attract and retain different types of talent.

It will be interesting to see how the debate unfolds in the financial industry. To what extent will the decision making be affected by being in the full glare of a critical public eye, amidst the high emotions and painful aftermath of the 2008 crash?

As David Dotlich, Peter Cairo and Stephen Rhinesmith say in their book “Head, Hearts and Guts: How the Worlds’ Best Companies Develop Complete Leaders”:

 “It is easy to choose between right and wrong. The difficult bit is choosing between right and right.”  

Rosie Miller is an international executive coach and author

Overcoming distractions at work

I have had a lovely weekend meeting up with old school contacts, many of whom I haven’t seen for 30 years! As we left with promises of keeping in touch, new language came to the fore “I will facebook you” “Follow me on twitter”. Whilst I applaud the benefits of much of the current social media, it is now part of the plethora of available channels we can use not just to connect with others, but also to distract ourselves. Technology has had a great effect on attention spans and I know how frustrated I get when my Google search doesn’t come up immediately with exactly what I require!

I am, like many others, very distractable. I use the excuse that I can multi-task well and I thrive with variety, but then I bemoan that I have run out of time,

When we indulge in a distraction, we focus our time and energy on something that is inherently more pleasurable than what we are currently doing. Doing my VAT return is boring, so I’ll just surf on you-tube for my favourite band instead. Making that call to the customer will be challenging, so let me read the news first. The bottom line is that distractions are compellingly magnetic because they either give us pleasure or take some pain away. Here are some of my strategies for getting focussed

·         Prioritise your work. The 10 minutes it will take to do this will reap dividends for your productivity each day

·         Focus on the most important tasks first. Make a list and be realistic as to what you can achieve. The reason we get distracted in the first place is because some of the tasks we set ourselves are just not fun to do or we feel really overwhelmed so…

·         Schedule your tasks – and give specific time frames for each activity you love to do and the time you need to do it, so it doesn’t get in the way of tasks you need to accomplish

·         Spread out your work into smaller chunks – it helps give you a sense of accomplishment and keeps you fresh.

·         Switch between high and low attention tasks to give your brain a rest after heavy concentration. But don’t just jump from task to task, without finishing anything at all. This gives you the illusion of being busy, but you will end up frustrated

·         Give yourself breaks – real breaks, not snatched breaks. This will allow you to enjoy what you are doing more and encourage you to finish on time when you are happy and not feeling like work is a burden

·         Make sure your work environment is comfortable. Research shows that natural images, landscapes or wildlife images on the wall can help you focus – they relax you into a comfortable, resourceful state for work

·         Shut out distractions as much as possible. Don’t sit in the same room to work as a distraction trigger, such as your Xbox or a TV. Listening to music, particularly instrumental music can help, producing a steady background noise. This can drown out other noise, helping your focus. Some people even use noise machines to give a steady “white noise” such as ocean waves or falling rain.

Finding the “Zone”

There are some implicit assumptions within the concept of work-life balance that are worth challenging. The first is that work is somehow separate to life – something we have to do before life can resume.  The second is that too much effort and time spent in work impairs the “balance” and the quality of life.  The only case where these assumptions hold absolutely true, is where work has no enjoyment, satisfaction or fulfilment other than financial reward.

For people who consider their work has such meaning that it is their life, or for people that love what they do for a living and are driven by it, these assumptions make no sense. In a recent documentary about Dave Brubeck the jazz composer/pianist a fellow musician made the comment “If you find yourself engaging in something at 8.00 in the morning and the next occasion you think of the time its 8.00 at night, you’ve found what you should be doing for the rest of your life.”  What he was describing has similarities to what athletes call entering the zone: a state of concentration and absorption where everything flows and seems to go right.  Apparently in this state, the brain produces alpha waves similar to those found in Buddhists meditating. Such states have been measured not just in athletes, but in people fully engaged in very different activities including computer gaming, as an example.

Whilst these states are only temporary, they do suggest that the optimum work activity is where a person can be 100% engaged, without distraction, completely absorbed and in effect lost in what they are doing. In such conditions people actually draw energy from their work rather than become depleted by it.  This can only be found in activities you love and want to do.

So with work-life balance it’s not the amount of work you do that is the real issue – it’s what kind of work and your attitude about it. If too many of your days consist of responding to the demands of others, or doing things simply because you have to, your energy will become depleted and dissatisfaction will ensue.

People say it’s only the lucky few who are paid for what they love to do. Whilst in a general way it may be true, it’s well worth asking yourself what are the aspects of your job that you really enjoy and love to do. 

The secret to a better work-life balance might well be not in managing your time and reducing your overall time in work, but increasing the time you spend in the aspects of your job that you find most absorbing and fulfilling. Remember – if the time just passes without you taking account of it, you’re doing the right thing! 

Trophy vs Tournament

So we didn’t get the World Cup and, instead of the England bid, which FIFA admitted was technically, financially and security-wise the best, the 2018 World Cup was awarded to Russia, where it is difficult to grow grass and where corruption is rife!

But this is not sour grapes; I simply wanted to point out that there is always a problem when one culture meets another.  It reminded me of many years ago when a large IT company was selling computers to slightly dodgy countries.  At one point, so it was rumoured, it accepted payment for a mainframe computer with a container ship loaded with grain.  Eventually it stopped selling to those countries as the things it needed to do to secure the business did not sit well with its “whiter than white” corporate image.  So the result was that other companies sold to those countries instead.  But at least the company could hold its head high – or at least it could until it got done for passing bribes to US officials!

The reality is that corruption exists everywhere.  In our own country we have just had the MPs expenses scandal and before that the cash for honours debacle.  We may have a “free press” but that does not prevent it from being biased, opinionated and harmful in other ways.

So instead of moaning about how unfair and corrupt it all is, let’s get over the fact that we haven’t won the tournament and instead concentrate on winning the trophy.

Check Your Filters

Ever struggled to get the results you want?   Isn’t it frustrating?  I have been thinking recently that it must be a common complaint for members of the UK’s coalition government.

Good leadership of people requires an acceptance that they will respond to how they perceive your behaviours and not necessarily to your original intention. This is particularly true with communication. If the perceived message does not match the intended outgoing message then the point gets lost or is misinterpreted.

We all carry in our head pre-suppositions about how things should be, what certain behaviours mean, how people should behave and what's the right way to do things.

These pre-suppositions are like filters - and everyone’s filters are different. Being able to consciously recognise your own and others’ for what they are is a pre-requisite to good communication.  It helps to stop you assuming too quickly that you understand someone else’s intention – or they yours!

Accepting that different people carry different filters allows you to appreciate that if you want to “treat someone well” then your actions must be consistent with their filters about what “being treated well” looks like. For example, assume you want to thank and acknowledge someone for making a special effort. Your own preference might be to get a public thank you in front of an audience. But another person’s might be a private thank you and a small personal token, like a meal out with their partner. To make the right connection you need to understand others’ filters and preferences.

When I meet effective leaders I am often struck by their ability to read other people and then adjust their own behaviour to get the results they want. In doing this, they all display two vital ingredients: a desire to connect and curiosity.

Connecting people make the effort to determine the other person's perspective and respond to it. They think through the other person’s likely issues, concerns and hot buttons. They ask questions, listen carefully and probe for insights. This makes for increased understanding, better communications and better outcomes. 

Coalition politics are often fraught with problems because one person sees and hears things through a different filter to the person who originates an action.  Layer on top of that different objectives to start with and it just gets harder and harder!

Reading and responding to people more effectively is one way to get better results. I have seen many successful leaders reap the rewards of investing time in doing this better.

How well do you check your filters and seek fresh perspectives?

The Ghost of Work-Life Balance

I’ve always loved “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens. It’s a salutary tale with a timeless relevance.

The Victorians never had the term work-life balance of course, but it’s clear from the story that Ebenezer Scrooge didn’t have much of a life – so consumed had he become by his business and the hoarding of wealth, that he had little time or inclination for anything else.

You may not consider yourself to be a “scrooge”, but in a prevalent culture of overwork, overstress and over-demand, it’s all too easy to be so consumed by what you have to do, that other importances, including family, relationships and community can unwittingly take second place.  Excess pressure and demand, can often have the effect of rendering important things unimportant, and unimportant things important. People virtually always say that family and relationships are more important than work, but in terms of where people devote their best energy and time, the reverse is often the case. 

Ebenezer was fortunate to be visited by the ghost of his former business partner, and by the three Christmas ghosts.  The Ghost of Christmas past reminded him of the vitality, innocence and goodwill of his youth. The Ghost of Christmas present prised his focus away from his self-obsessed concerns to the wider needs of the community. The piece de resistance was the Ghost of Christmas yet to come, where he was forced to confront the consequences of what he had become.  It was enough to cause an instant transformation and he went on to become the embodiment of generosity, compassion and kindness.

None of us will likely have the benefit or uncomfortability of such ghostly visitations, but it well worth taking the time to reflect.  Scrooge never set out in life to be a miser, it was circumstance that led him there.  We are all shaped by what we do, and the question is - are there unintended consequences?  Does the pressure of work cause you neglect things that are more important? Has the cut and thrust of how you have to be in business, affected your humanity and human values?  

Optimism

Are you half empty or half full? This metaphor of a glass half way filled is often used to describe a person’s mindset and their attitude towards life. A person can look upon their life’s events as being “half done” as half the drink has gone, or as space to pour in half more – as there is room for more drink! In other words, people tend to adopt a pessimistic or optimistic outlook on life.

I am, like my father, the eternal optimist. To such an extent that my friends call me Polly Anna, always looking for goodness, seeing a different picture on sometimes dire circumstances and generally waving the flag of positive thinking. We are beautifully balanced by other family members who, living more in the half empty world, bring us back down to earth with a bump!

Of course there are benefits of allowing yourself to be pessimistic. My sister describes it as living her life in more of a realistic way, not allowing herself to be disappointed when things go wrong. And us optimists of course can learn from a healthy dose of realism. My friends do tell me that I drive them round the bend always looking for the positive, particularly in people.

But I do wonder if optimists have a better life, by constantly showering ourselves in positive thoughts? In thinking about this, here are some things that optimists, most likely subconsciously, do:

• They reframe – this process is often used by coaches to help clients develop a new perspective around their issues. The thinking is that optimists live events as if they were enclosed and played out in a picture frame. Optimists are more able to expand the borders of the frame and change the content to play a different movie and outcome.
  
• They are open to new landscapes – optimists often generate new possibilities and don’t limit themselves to the familiar. They are more prepared to sneak a peek at something new.
  
• They learn – when, inevitably, things don’t go the way they want, they generally view the experience as something to put as a credit in their learning bank and approach differently next time.
  
• They find another way to tell themselves they are lucky – even in the most difficult circumstances, optimists give themselves positive affirmations. Following bereavement for instance, as well as the obvious loss, there is a feeling of luck to have had that person in their life.
  
• They visualise – optimists find a language or a way to look at a future full of possibilities. They are able to create a picture something to aim for that is different to now.

As with everything, there is a downside to each of the above. More pessimistic people would describe that better than me and of course people who describe themselves as more pessimistic also do the above. But I believe that optimists do them more naturally and automatically. And while I can learn from, be balanced by and injected with realism by my less optimistic friends, I am still happy where I am. After all, in the famous song from the famous Monty Python movie, even Brian was able to “Always look on the bright side of life”!

I would be very interested in your views via the blog.

Executive Stretch

Many executives and senior managers find themselves overstretched, often working excessively long hours with a consequence to their work-life balance. It’s a situation exacerbated by the recession, where the solution to economic difficulty is regularly touted as “achieving more with less”.

The concept is meant to translate into finding more efficient and effective ways of working, but all too often it results in doing the same things, the same way, but with less people and therefore simply an increase in everyone’s workload.

Yet for an executive, it’s not simply the volume of work that’s an issue, but the type of activities they spend their time in.

There’s a simple model that can help in understanding this. Consider that there are three levels of work.
•    Level 1: Future – strategy, direction, business development, change
•    Level 2: Overall management of current business operations
•    Level 3: Involvement in specific operational tasks, issues, problems, crisis

In a recent course, I asked a group of senior managers to consider how their time, by percentage, is typically split between these three levels. The results were interesting. Those that, by their own definition, were overstretched, were spreading their time between all three levels, often with level 1 activities suffering as a consequence of  their situation forcing them to spend more than 50% of their time in level 3 activities. In other words they were getting lost in the detail.

The model suggests that to be effective, executive time should be split between the top two levels, with most time being spent in level 1 – and only a small percentage of time, less than 10%, in level 3 activities.  Those that considered that they worked hard, but were not overstretched, had more of a tendency to this balance.

So it’s not the amount that people do, but the stretch between too many competing challenges at different levels that seems to cause a problem. The urgent things, as is so often the case, were taking precedence over the important things, and the short-term taking precedence over the long-term.

To address this the cycle has to be broken. This means making the time for activities that will lead to long-term results in readdressing the balance.  For example, taking the time to coach others in how to do things.  In the short-term this takes more time than simply doing whatever it is yourself, but in the long-term, it will enable you to delegate more.

Ultimately it’s a simple message. To become less over-stretched, to achieve better results for the business and to improve your work-life balance the most important question is not “how do I squeeze more into a day?” – but “what should I be doing, and what should I not be doing?”

Using pressure the right way

People achieve their best when under a certain degree of pressure; but too much pressure or the wrong kind of pressure can result in stress and a reduction in a person’s effectiveness.  For example, the nerves most people experience before giving a presentation can help you stay sharp – too few nerves and you might come across as being too relaxed or even blazé; while too many nerves can be so debilitating that you fail to perform. 

Wise leaders know that it is good to give people roles, responsibilities and tasks that are just beyond their current capability. This stretches people and helps them develop.  Achieving stretch goals can also help build a person’s confidence, making them capable and willing to stretch themselves a little further next time.  But give people a task that is too far beyond what they can already do and it has the opposite effect – leading to a lack of confidence, anxiety and stress.

The key to understanding where the tipping point is between too little pressure and too much pressure is confidence. 

In training, athletes will frequently set themselves new targets, continuously pushing themselves to achieve higher and higher standards. But why don’t they simply set a winning target and work towards it?  The reason is that as human beings we perform best when our confidence is continually boosted by a succession of achievements; and with each success comes the impetus, momentum and confidence to aim for something even higher.

The secret to using pressure effectively is therefore to set lots of little targets that are stretching but achievable; and to then congratulate yourself and celebrate your success with each and every achievement.

But what I meant was ……

Mis-communication, mis-understanding and confusion can happen to all of us. Despite our best intentions, other people can pick up entirely the wrong message. Sometimes it’s merely annoying or even funny. Other times it can lead to disastrous consequences. It is interesting to speculate just how many good intentions but poor communications have led to the problems surrounding the Commonwealth Games and its late delivery.

It pays to step back and remember that the communication process is not simply one person saying/doing something and one person receiving and understanding. Instead we have a double filter system operating.

I start with an intention to communicate A to you. Using my filters, I decide to do behaviour B to express my intention. Unfortunately, through your filters, my behaviour means something quite different to my original intention. So you respond to what you think is my clear, but unfortunately completely erroneous, message. I see your behaviours and translate them back and so on.

For better communication and relationships, we need to keep remembering that everyone’s filters are different. They reflect our preferences, our experiences to date, cultural norms and assumptions. Some we may be aware of, others are deeply ingrained but opaque.

When mis-understanding happens it is worth examining:
(a)    did my behaviours competently indicate my intention in the first place?
(b)    what are the possible filters the recipient might have?
(c)    did I check understanding at the intention level or simply check “receipt”?

It is also worth remembering that being human is an imperfect activity!

Virtual Team Building

Social interaction is a fundamental human need. Human relationships and teams bring warmth, humour, energy, a sense of belonging, morale and motivation to the workplace, and it is well understood that team spirit increases productivity. It is no co-incidence that the name given to an incorporated business is a 'company'- and have you ever noticed how often people say when asked what’s great about their company that “it’s the people”?

In the pre-technological age teams were generally co-located. People worked together on tasks or in the same space as others performing similar tasks. The basic ingredient for tem building was present – people were actually together in one place.

In today’s world it’s a different picture. The last 10 years has seen an unprecedented rise in the existence of 'virtual' and 'remote' teams. People can spend the day working at home communicating through technology, or indeed – they can visit an office, occupy a hot desk, spend the day communicating with people in other locations while barely exchanging a word with the people sitting next to them.

The side effect can be an increase in social isolation. There may still be communication in a virtual team – but most of it is structured and work-related. As a consequence, relationship building, a necessary part of team building and team spirit, suffers.

Personal relationships and real teams benefit from unplanned communications – a conversation at the coffee machine, being able to let off steam with colleagues, spontaneous humour and ideas, sharing successes, personal stories and concerns.  Yet unplanned communication or communication ‘without agenda’ is often missing completely from modern technology-enabled teams.

If you lead a remote or virtual team you need to think about how to compensate for the lack of natural human interaction and how to provide new opportunities. Here are some ideas to get you going:

• The obvious one. Arrange regular formal and informal meetings - there is simply no substitute.
• Invite  virtual team members exchange photographs and biographies of themselves with each other.
• Speak with and meet individual team members regularly – especially those who work at home.
• Set up mentoring and coaching relationships within the team to encourage more one-to-one relationship building.
• Agree shared tasks and actions – particular in relation to generating new ideas and proposals for the team and the business.
• Invite team members who don’t know each other well to make a joint presentation for the next conference call.
• Develop ways of bringing social exchange into the beginning of conference calls.  Swapping stories of weekends or holidays, talking about films, sport or news. Remember that this is important and if you’re the leader you’ll need to take the lead on this.
• Ask the team to come up with ideas for enhancing team communications.

Inspired Words

I have just been bullied into joining the modern world by my kids and opening up a facebook account. My reluctance didn’t stem from my perpetual technophobia, but rather a suspicion (now confirmed) that I would find this social media utterly addictive. Being an innately curious person, I find it fascinating to delve into what makes people tick and I am particularly interested in the different quotes that people cite as being inspiring. I have dug into all my new found friends’ profiles to find a completely different range of quotes; from Chekhov’s “Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out”, to Einstein’s “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions” to “Life’s an ocean, sail it” (anon).

Any search engine will come up with a multitude of sites for inspirational quotes some of which are subscription based, so it appears that there is certainly a market for keeping us human beings inspired with words. But what is it about language that we find inspiring?

The poet is perhaps the master of inspiring language and as many poets will tell us, language is the ultimate power, influencing our perceptions and amending opinions, which is something politicians and the media also understand very well! Language for them is a palette, a keyboard, a block of marble, a medium from which they can create. Words are not therefore neutral, but have intentions, associations, connections. Rhythm, meter, use of metaphor etc are a powerful means to expression and to creating meaning for the reader. Our ordinary day to day language could be viewed as a stunted, stripped down and abbreviated shadow of what poetry could achieve. So when we read short quotes using extra-ordinary language, it is the difference to our everyday speech that is compelling and engaging for us and the association in our memories which makes it meaningful.

And because we all have different histories and memories we will find different quotes thought provoking, motivational and personal to us – for all sorts of different reasons. I do however struggle with some of the “inspirational” quotes my facebook friends had selected as their favourites such as Homer Simpson’s “You tried, you failed, so the lesson is, stop trying”. But I did particularly like another take on failure from the basketball player Michael Jordan “I've failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed”.

What's your favorite quote?

A Call to Action – For Men and Women

Is now the time when women will take a much greater leadership role? This was a core question being asked at the Deutsche Bank Women in European Business Conference last week. The answer was a resounding “yes” from speakers such as Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, CEO of 20-first and business commentator René Carayol. “It should be” was more the tone of the speakers leading major industries such as Vittorio Colao, CEO of Vodafone Group and Colin Grassie, CEO of Deutsche Bank UK.

The business case for becoming “gender bi-lingual” is very strong for many businesses. Firstly, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox states, the biggest single, growing, poorly-tapped market for many large companies is not China, India or Brazil – it’s women in their existing home markets. Her message is that companies are still working to gender assumptions that men wield the economic power. Their products and their communications are designed to “speak” to men. Those companies that become gender bi-lingual create real competitive advantage.

Secondly, in our inter-connected business world, the skills of collaborative working, networking, and understanding people are more and more vital. Women have been shown time and again to be stronger at these skills.

So what’s at the heart of gender bi-lingual communication? For Heidi Mottram, newly appointed CEO of Northumbrian Water, it is about creating values based organisations – values that transcend male/female stereo-types. But if the top team of the company is all male, and the layer below is all, or nearly all, male, how do you create a real understanding of what those values should be - and how they should be expressed?

As someone who has listened to this debate for decades now, the answers from the conference made sense to me:
•    get more women into leadership roles
•    stop “fixing” the women and start fixing the culture!
•    trust those women to succeed by thinking and acting as women leaders, with different skills, rather than behaving like a man

If those are the answers for you too - what’s your role in making it happen?

More balances to consider

Balancing your time between work and life is an important consideration in managing stress.  But leading a fulfilled, enjoyable, purposeful life, involves the consideration of many balances. Here are a range of other balances important to life, where the question for anyone is “have I got the balance right”.  There isn’t a magic formula, but there is a balance that’s right for you

1.    Being at pressure vs. simply relaxing
2.    Being planned with a schedule vs. being unplanned and spontaneous
3.    Projecting into the future vs. living in the moment
4.    Doing what you need to do vs. what you want to do
5.    Satisfaction with what you have in your life now vs. striving to achieve more
6.    Managing and directing others vs. coaching and empowering others
7.    Taking risks vs. avoiding risks
8.    Responding to your own needs vs. addressing the needs of others
9.    Reaching for new ideas vs. fulfilling current plans.
10.  Seriousness vs. humour
11.  Rational thought vs. creativity
12.  Asserting your own interests vs. listening to others
13.  Doing what you always do vs. trying something different
14.  Saying yes to others vs. saying no

Summer holidays are a great time to reassess the balances in your life and recharge the batteries ready for the rest of the year.  More importantly, the better the job you do of maintaining your balances, the less you’ll need a holiday and the more you’ll be able to enjoy it.

Happy Mondays

I met a lady the other day at a networking event, whose title was CEO – not the usual interpretation, but Chief Euphoria Officer! Her job was all about ensuring their work environment was a happy one – as well of course as a successful one. That got me thinking – what can we do for ourselves to ensure we have that spring in our step on a Monday morning as we head into another working week?

Clearly the more we enjoy what we do at work, the more likely we are to look forward to it and thrive when doing it. Research into employee engagement (Gallup) talks about when people focus strengths they are six times more likely to be engaged at work and more than three times as likely to report an excellent quality of life in general. But how many of us really know what our strengths are?

Think over your working life so far, including your years of study, and recall those times when you were really in your flow, where work came easily to you even when you were tired, where you felt challenged yet motivated, fulfilled and satisfied. Then think of the opposite scenario – when you felt bogged down in the day to day churn of doing something, where the mere thought of that something made you feel lethargic and miserable. Chances are that you will be using more of your natural style in the former situation. Even if your job isn’t a complete match, find ways in your day to use your natural style – if you like working with numbers, find a way to work on the analysis for your department; if you particularly like people interaction, make sure you plan conversations into the day.

Here are some other tips and hints to help make sure you have great days at work:

     Don’t say yes to everything
     Take time to mix with other people
     Watch your posture and breathe
     Get some fresh air
     Arrange your workspace your way
     Have great evenings and weekends!

The reality is that we don’t need a Chief Euphoria Officer to feel happy at work, we just need to keep conscious of playing to our strengths and focusing on the things we enjoy. As with everything, life is a choice, and if your Mondays aren’t happy, it may be time to move on.

Living With Uncertainty

My travel plans have been disrupted twice recently by volcanic ash, and it served as a potent reminder that no matter how much we try,  we simply cannot be in control of all circumstances that may impact our lives and schedules.

Whilst a decade ago advice about time management and work life balance focused on taking control, the times we are in now call for a different approach.  We live in increasingly uncertain and unpredictable times, and all the trends suggest we’d better get used to it. 

We may have survived the first wave of the recent recession and bank crisis, but now we have sovereign debt crisis,  deep spending cuts,  uncertainty about inflation and deflation and for many  a continuing period of job insecurity to deal with.  All this is to say nothing of the impact of climate change and its as yet unknown impact on the economy, food, water the lives and livelihood of many in the world.  It’s not so hard to reach the conclusion that the future is going to be different – it’s certainly not going to be “business as usual”.

So if the watchwords used to be “take control”, what are they now? Certainly accepting uncertainty is one key.  I was very frustrated when the ash cloud first disrupted my work schedule, but the second time it happened I’d already become more philosophical about it. 

A second key is agility and adaptability – being prepared to adapt ones plans, strategies and goals according to changing circumstances.  Even being prepared to adapt one’s lifestyle is going to be important. I know several people whose career consists of a series of international assignments. Every few years they up sticks and move with their families to a new country and a new culture. They’ve trained themselves to be able to adapt quickly to new circumstances that impact all aspects of their lives. 

Adaptability goes hand in hand with flexibility, which has an apt dictionary definition – “the ability to bend without breaking”!  In practical terms this means being able to adjust our time usage, work, schedules and priorities as they arise – and just doing it rather than getting stressed about it.

A third key is “readiness” and by this I mean being ready for anything, rather than just specifically prepared for certain situations. One international trouble-shooter I know keeps a bag permanently packed so he’s ready to travel at a moment’s notice.

But more than this readiness is an attitude. It’s to do with expecting the future to be different, anticipating and preparing where you can, and being ready to change, adapt and respond to the opportunity rather than the difficulties that the future will bring.

They Called Their Website WHAT?!

In a new book entitled "Slurls: They Called Their Website WHAT?!" the author Anndy Geldman lists 150 domain names that pay homage to the wonderful mistakes people can make when converting the name of their company or product into a single word domain name.  

Examples include a site listing MP3 music hits entitled www.mp3shits.com or the site belonging to the American broadcaster, author and columnist Benjamin Dover - yes, you guessed it www.bendover.com.  If only he'd been as sensible as Michael Hunt and Richard Head who were savvy enough to use their full names.


Please add your own example of marketing or naming faux pas as comments below.