It's time to invest in something useful

I have long since been irritated by the continuing proliferation of wind turbines that keep appearing across the country, many in some of the most naturally beautiful areas of the countryside.

My irritation is compounded by the fact that they rarely seem to be turning.  Sometimes this is due to a lack of wind, at others it is due to the wind being too strong, and at other times it is because the grid is at full capacity and the turbine owners are paid to switch them off.  Industry figures reveal that in 2014 £53.1 million was paid to green energy companies for shutting down turbines.

The reality is that wind-generated electricity is ludicrously inefficient.  It has received billions of pounds in subsidies from UK taxpayers as a result of ill-conceived and misguided Government policy, yet it still only manages to contribute a pitifully small amount of electricity to the national grid. 

Between 5 pm and 5:50 pm on Monday 19^th January 2015 UK electricity demand hit its highest level this winter – 52.54 gigawatts, yet despite the fact that the UK now has more than 30,000 onshore turbines, wind contributed less than 1% of the total (Gas 42%, coal 29%, nuclear 16%, hydro 5% with the remainder being imported). 

If you are interested, you can view a summary of recent consumption by clicking here.

I am not averse to either energy levies or taxation money being used to develop and subsidies green energy technologies, but I do object when Government spends our money in idiotic ways.  The UK once led the world in power generation; be it coal, hydro, gas or nuclear, but now we lag behind other nations in all forms of power generation including solar and, most importantly of all, nuclear fusion.

We should therefore stop the stupidity of subsidising ineffectual and unwanted wind projects and divert resources into the types of projects that have the potential to provide for our energy needs well into the next century. 

Getting emotional with customers

Science has shown that humans remember information better when their emotions are involved.

As early as 1890, psychologist William James observed that emotions “leave a scar upon the cerebral tissue.”  Since then, the number of studies on the connection between emotion and memory has skyrocketed.

Only a small fraction of the business world, however, applies this widely accepted psychological concept to customer service programs. When a customer has an emotionally pleasing experience, it almost always goes to his or her long-term memory. Of course, the opposite is also true: an emotionally traumatic customer service experience won’t soon be forgotten - service failures stick like glue in customers’ memories.

The link between emotion and memory is critical when we come to Customer Engagement and brand loyalty. Trust plays a huge role in building loyalty, however, trust is one emotion that can be built or lost in a flash. Just one five-minute interaction might be enough to entrust a customer to your company for years to come - or to demolish any trust they had in you, and even drive them to complain about you to friends and family.

So what should companies do to take advantage of the fact that customers never forget? Committing to and delivering on their service promise is critical. This includes having an effective and responsible complaints handling process.

Collecting feedback that seeks to measure customers’ emotional response is useful including how customers are responding to the brand on a real time basis. Net Promoter is a customer loyalty metric developed by (and a registered trademark of) Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix. It was introduced by Reichheld in his 2003 Harvard Business Review article "The One Number You Need to Grow".

Companies obtain their Net Promoter Score (NPS) by asking customers a single question on a 0 to 10 rating scale: "How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?" Based on their responses, customers can be categorized into one of three groups: Promoters (9-10 rating), Passives (7-8 rating), and Detractors (0-6 rating). The percentage of Detractors is then subtracted from the percentage of Promoters to obtain a Net Promoter score.

Proponents of the Net Promoter approach claim the score can be used to motivate an organisation to become more focused on improving products and services for customers. This is something that we use at BIE and it has produced some interesting results.

Being Happy is Hard Work

Some time ago the Government proposed supplementing GDP with a measure of GWB (General Well-being) to measure the nation’s happiness. The Archbishop of Canterbury also suggested that people seek real happiness, above and beyond economic and material wealth. And most organisations would freely admit to pushing happiness and well-being higher up their people agenda, perhaps as an antidote to the depressing financial times.

But one important and often over-looked finding in the psychological research is that being happy takes effort. This may sound odd, but there’s a lot of truth in this.

In 2005, psychologists analysed the mainstream well-being research and identified that about 50% of happiness is inherited – i.e. genetic – while about 10% is down to our economic and cultural circumstances. The remaining 40% is believed to be down to effort. This means investing time in deliberate and intentional activities that will make us happier.

In other words, it is necessary to put effort into maintaining happiness, through activities such as being deliberately optimistic when problems crop up, or being consciously appreciative of our circumstances.
What is really interesting, though, is that psychologists Sheldon and Lyubomirsky (2006) monitored people over a period of several months to identify what impact these activities actually have on our happiness. They found that a change in circumstances, such as gaining more money or moving to a new area, made people happy for a limited time only. Clearly the novelty of the change wears off.

On the flip side, they found that those who invested time and effort in a range of ‘happiness’ based activities led to longer-term increases in psychological well-being. In their conclusion, the researchers stated that ‘both effort and hard work offer the most promising route to happiness’.

So, when the Government and the Church tell us to be happy, they – and organisations – need to know that this doesn’t just happen. It takes hard work that has to be sustained, supported and measured. In other words, if you really knuckle down and apply yourself, you’ll be a lot happier as a result…

Life Lessons to My Older Self

Reading an article entitled “Life Lessons for My Younger Self” got me thinking about how you can apply time travelling wisdom to your own life in a useful and practical way.  So here is my radical alternative:  “Life Lessons to My Older Self”!

My thinking goes along these lines.  You can shape and influence your Older Self, helping him/her to be happier, more true to himself/herself and more successful. Understanding now what matters deeply to you, allows you to either express yourself fully now or shape your steps to do so in the future.  If you look at what you regret spending time on in the past, it can help you look at how you are using your time today. It helps you understand what more you want for yourself and others going forward.

Nelson Mandela had a very clear picture of what he felt was most relevant to him, saying he wanted his epitaph to read just “Here lies a man who has done his duty upon earth” and no more. Duty for him came before all else.  For others the heart searching questions about how you have lived your life will be different but no less important.

 Those questions may change over time too. In my twenties I acted like the all-important question was “Have you been successful?”  Unsurprisingly, the Rosie Miller that I was then was very earnest and hard working. Today I wonder whether the all-important question might be “Did you enjoy your life?” or “Did you make the best of your talents?”.  With this mindset I am looking at ways of having more fun and laughter in my life and ways to fully express my set of talents. I still want to be successful at work but I am challenging my Older Self to live a different balance in life – one which meets a clearer definition of success on my terms.  

So how can you rebalance your life and focus to enable your Older Self? One way is to run a self-audit every five years or so.  Many of us have 8-9 key life areas to consider (in no particular order): parent, family member, romantic partner, work or career, friends, health/fitness, interests, community involvement and possibly spiritual/faith.  You can adapt these to your own list of roles and priorities. Look at how you are performing across the different areas in your life versus what you would like to be true. It helps you take a helicopter view so that you can identify imbalances and think about what drives them. What would you like to do to help your Older Self have a better audit score? What will it feel like to achieve that?

I found doing a self-audit especially useful a few years ago when I was heavily engaged in a demanding job. The results showed that I was still responding to the same drivers as in my twenties. My work-orientation meant I was only expressing myself and contributing well across half the areas in my life. The much needed change has taken a few years but has paid off enormously in terms of happiness and satisfaction.

What then is my key life lesson to my Older Self? Keep asking yourself these questions:

Are you living a life that helps you fully be what you truly are?  

If not, when will you permit yourself to do so? 

Self-knowledge is the starting point

Work-life balance is a uniquely human concern. It’s not something that animals, living in tune with themselves and their environment, face.  Obvious statements of course – but it’s worth considering that the reason work-life balance can be of concern is that as humans we have the ability to override our natural instincts and feelings, rather than just respond to them as their arise.  It’s our choice, and choice is, after all, what makes us human.

So we can continue working when tired, we can force ourselves to do what we’ve decided it is necessary to do.  We can work hard, sacrificing family and personal time, for the promise of later reward, rather than needing instant gratification of our desires and wishes. All this has been to the good – if humanity had not pushed itself to the limits, our world today would be without the greatest works of art and scientific discovery.

But there is a hidden danger – people can become so good at overriding their instinct, feelings and messages their body is trying to give them that they don’t even hear the message anymore. Many people who are suffering stress for example, don’t even realise they are. Yet you can’t suppress feelings forever. Trying to do so will eventually result in burn-out.

My point in writing this is that the first thing anyone needs to do is to learn to listen to themselves and observe. Taking action is secondary to understanding your situation. It can be obvious things - how much time are you spending forcing yourself on when you’d really rather be somewhere else for example. How much caffeine, sugar and other stimulants do you need to get through a day? Do you suffer irritation or mood swings without always being able to put the finger on why? It can be in simple behaviours too – I once realised I was stressed when I found my hands were saw from continually gripping the steering wheel too tightly!

Listening to yourself does have to be learnt. My recommendation for anyone who thinks they may have work-life balance or stress issues is to keep a diary for a month and simply note your feelings and observations about what you do, and always ask the question “why do I feel what I feel”.  Work-life balance ultimately is about being satisfied and fulfilled in your life – and that begins with self-knowledge.

Working to your natural rhythm

According to a recent survey, over one third of workers are consumed by thoughts of work from the minute they wake, and one in four only stop thinking about it before they sleep. This difficulty or inability to relax and switch off is widely known, and there is abundant advice available on how to relax and unwind after the working day.

What much of this advice misses, however, is that the reason we find it difficult to switch off is that our patterns of work effectively train our bodies and minds to stay switched on and override our natural cycles.  So it’s no wonder then that when we want to unwind we find it difficult.

Let me explain. We all know about the 24 hour circadian rhythms of  sleep and awake, and that if you travel or for any reason change your cycle you suffer the experience of your body clock having to readjust. What is less known is that as well as circadian rhythms there are ultradian rhythms that are shorter than 24 hours.

These were 1st discovered by the sleep researcher Nathaniel Kleitman in the fifties who introduced the concept of REM (rapid eye movements) to the world. He discovered the basic rest-activity cycle demonstrating that when we’re asleep we progress in 90 minute cycles  through the five stages of sleep.

He also considered that this  90minute ultradian rhythm continued during the day giving a cycle of energy every 90 to 120 minutes.   We all experience this – we are able to concentrate well for a period of up to 2 hours, before our mind starts to wander, or we lose focus. That’s a natural rhythm occurring. The trouble is, many of us override it.  Working without beaks, boosting our energy with caffeine and sugar and so on.  What’s more, to comply with our request to work on, the body releases adrenalin and stress hormones.

Yet, the natural cycle of peak performance is well known by many athletes and concert classical musicians, who organise their training and practice into 90minute sessions with a rest break in between.

The solution then to not being able to relax at end of the day is to learn to follow your own ultradian rhythms. If you can learn to take short breaks regularly and actually go with the cycle, there are lots of benefits – it can actually boost your productivity as well as reducing your stress levels.

Brainstorming properly

We've all experienced brainstorming sessions: a group of people, often chosen largely for political reasons, begin by listening passively as a moderator (often an outsider who knows little about the business) urges you to 'Get creative!' and 'Think outside the box!' and cheerfully reminds you that 'There are no bad ideas!'

The result? Some attendees remain stone-faced throughout the day, others contribute sporadically, and a few loudly dominate the session with their pet ideas. Ideas pop up randomly - some intriguing, many preposterous - but because the session has no structure, little momentum builds around any of them. At session's end, the group trundles off with a hazy idea of what, if anything, will happen next. 'Now we can get back to real work', some whisper.

It doesn't have to be like this.  By undertaking better preparation and providing structure throughout a brainstorming technique, organisations can greatly enhance their chances of generating better ideas that will be implemented.

1. Know your boundaries:  One reason good ideas hatched in corporate brainstorming sessions often go nowhere is that they are beyond the scope of what the organization would ever be willing to consider or to implement. 'Think outside the box!' is an unhelpful exhortation if external circumstances or company policies create boxes that the organization truly must live within.
    
2. Ask the right questions:  Build the workshop around a series of 'right questions' that the team explores in small groups during a series of idea generation sessions. The trick is to identify questions with two characteristics. First, they should force your participants to take a new and unfamiliar perspective. Why? Because whenever you look for new ways to approach an old problem you naturally gravitate toward thinking patterns and ideas that worked in the past. Research shows that, over time, you'll come up with fewer good ideas, despite increased effort. Changing your participants' perspective will shake up their thinking. The second characteristic of a right question is that it limits the conceptual space your team will explore, without being so restrictive that it forces particular answers or outcomes.
    
3. Choose the right people:  The rule here is simple: pick people who can answer the questions you’re asking. As obvious as this sounds, it’s not what happens in many traditional brainstorming sessions, where participants are often chosen with less regard for their specific knowledge than for their prominence on the org chart.
    
4. Use subgroups:  To ensure fruitful discussions, don't have participants hold one continuous, rambling discussion among the entire group for several hours. Instead, have them conduct multiple, discrete, highly focused idea generation sessions among subgroups of three to five people - no fewer, no more. Each subgroup should focus on a single question for a full 30 minutes. Why three to five people? The usual behaviour in groups of this size is to speak up, whereas the norm in a larger group is to stay quiet.
    
5. Brief them first:  After your participants arrive, but before the division into subgroups, orient them so that your expectations about what they will - and won’t - accomplish are clear. Each subgroup will thoughtfully consider and discuss a single question for a half hour. No other idea from any source - no matter how good - should be mentioned during a subgroup’s individual session. Tell participants that if anyone thinks of a 'silver bullet' solution that's outside the scope of discussion, they should write it down and share it later.
   
   Also, whenever possible, share 'signpost examples' before the start of each session - real questions previous groups used, along with success stories, to motivate participants and show them how a question-based approach can help.
    
6. Follow up quickly:  Decisions and other follow-up activities should be quick and thorough. Of course, we’re not suggesting that uninformed or insufficiently researched conclusions should be reached about ideas dreamed up only hours earlier. But the odds that concrete action will result from an idea generation exercise tend to decline quickly as time passes and momentum fades.

Go on – take the first step

The mornings may be getting lighter, but at 6.30am in January, it is still more appealing to ignore the alarm and keep snuggled under the duvet. But today, instead I ignored the lure of a final half an hour of coziness and donned my running shoes for a blast of exercise. Yes, it is a resolution for 2014 – and we all know what often happens with good intentions – but the difference this year, is an attitude of “just do it” (thank you Nike). And of course to “just do it”, I had to stop talking about wanting to run and literally take the first step.

A coach’s job is to help unispring ideas and motivation within their clients – coming from the belief that we all have the resourcefulness within us. So we often know what changes we have to make, whether it is exercise, taking a decision to move jobs or to deal with a non performing team member. The trick is to get started! Sure, discuss your issue at length, build a plan of action, evaluate best routes, think things through, but there will be no change unless you actually do something. Here are some ideas

1. Break your pattern, do something spontaneous, whether it is going for a 10 minute walk or sitting at a different desk. There is nothing like a change of scenery to change your perspective
2. Perfectionists beware! Break down your goal into bite sized chunks and then bite off the first one. Overwhelm is the enemy of action. When I realised I could start my running campaign with just 10 minutes – and in that I could walk as well – all of a sudden it wasn’t so hard to start
3. Identify what is stopping you. Is it laziness, a move out of your comfort zone, fear of the unknown or failure? Face it. No excuses - bite sized chunks of action make your excuses smaller. And remember, if you don’t start, nothing will happen anyway
4. Get support. If you are truly stuck ask a friend for help – to provide the motivational rally cry, the encouragement from the side of the sports field. Peer pressure works
5. Shout about it. Hit the social networks and drum up your cheerleaders 
6. Become accountable. Diarise when you are going to do it. Put it in your diary now
7. Be mindful. Take some time away from the world of screens and stimulation. Remove your distractions. Use that time to visualise success and recall feelings of success you have had in the past
8. Change your evening pattern. Ensuring restful periods of time before sleep helps us have a balanced approach to life and helps us to knock through barriers and excuses
9. Honestly assess the consequences of not getting started. Procrastination can make events spiral into even more complex challenged
10. Think through your rewards. What benefits and impact will making this change bring to your life?

I love this quote from Martin Luther King which can be applied in any context - “Faith is taking the first step even when you can't see the whole staircase.”

Power and Politics

I am sick to death of hearing politicians from all parties bleating on about the evil energy companies.  Let’s not forget that it was the Conservatives that privatised the electricity and gas industries, thereby moving their primary purpose away from the maintenance of supply to the provision of shareholder returns.

Successive governments of all persuasions have then stood idly by while those same companies have been snapped up by foreign firms (EDF - French, e-on and Npower - German, Scottish Power - Spanish), some of which have very good reasons for branching out from their own domestic markets.  Take the French firm EDF for example; in France price increases have been strictly limited by their domestic regulator, so EDF are selling electricity more expensively in the UK than they are in France.  According to the official EU Energy Portal the average price of a kWh of electricity during May 2013 in France was €0.14466 whereas in the UK it was €0.17078, more than 18% higher.

Although I support the objective of greenhouse gas reductions, when the Labour Government signed the Kyoto Protocol they did so without any means of delivering on their commitments.  They therefore skewed the energy markets by forcing companies to buy a proportion of their power from ‘green’ sources, by subsidising everything from solar panels to wind turbines and by forcing energy companies to insulate people’s houses either for free or at below-cost prices.  And to pay for these ludicrously inefficient technologies, they imposed ‘green levies’ on all of our energy bills that now account for around 10% of the average household bill. 

Our countryside and coast is now covered in windmills that spend most of their time doing nothing and every second house is covered with solar panels generating minute quantities of electricity.

At the same time, successive governments have allowed our power generation industry to decline to such an extent that, whereas the UK once led the World in nuclear power technology, we are now having to go cap in hand to the French to build new power stations.

Yet these same politicians have the audacity to point the finger of blame at companies that are simply doing their job in delivering profits to their shareholders.  And who are the shareholders?  You guessed it – through our pension and investment funds many of us will be shareholders in the major energy companies.

What we need is a sensible strategy and a long-term view – but unfortunately that is as unlikely as it is that a politician would admit to the possibility that today’s problems may have been as a result of their party’s decisions.

Balancing your short- and long-term goals

One of the perennial challenges of virtually every aspect of life is balancing the achievement of our long-term goals and aspirations with the short-term imperatives.  In theory balance should be easier to achieve at work where we are free of tasks such as cooking a meal, cutting the lawn or reading a bed-time story.  In practice, it often seems harder at work where it is not uncommon for people to say that it is not until 5:30 that they finally got the time to start working on the bigger objectives they set out to achieve that day.

While all the literature and training courses on the subject of time management will advise you to set aside time to work on your bigger goals, this is easier said than done when the short-term objectives are typically more urgent. 

Personally I think it is better advice to encourage people to take time to reflect and set out a plan – and the Christmas break provides the ideal opportunity. My suggestion is that you draw three circles on a page (as shown below) and label them short-term imperatives, long-term objectives and personal goals. In each circle write a list of the things you want/need to achieve.

I am sure you can see where this is going, but I would caution that it would be naïve to believe that there are simple things you could write in the overlap area between all three circles. What you could do however is appraise each list and see what elements in that list could contribute to the achievement of your other circle goals.  For example, suppose one of your personal goals was to retire early, but to achieve that you would need to earn more.  It might be that you could increase your chances of promotion at work if you were more closely associated with the attainment of one of the long-term objectives and if you prioritised the short-term tasks set by certain people or departments over others.

The objective is therefore not simply to write things in the overlap area (if they were that obvious you would most probably already be working on them) but rather to define and create your overlap area by steering everything you do towards your bigger goals.

I hope you have an excellent Christmas.

Increasing Engagement to Deliver Big Goals

How many of your goals – especially your corporate goals - are exciting for you and the people who must deliver them? Have you even asked yourself the question?

For most of us the emotions that a goal engenders, such as excitement, are simply not considered or discussed. But research shows that it’s the emotional reaction to a goal that ultimately dictates motivation and engagement in the people tasked to deliver it.

Shane Lopez, a leading psychologist on hope, resilience and motivation says in his latest book “Making Hope Happen”:  “The truth is our rational strategic thinking about goals is spurred on by our emotions. As a result we invest the most resources and make the most gains on goals we are excited about”.  This may seem blindingly obvious, but in my experience it is not often considered!

Let’s take a real life example from someone I was coaching recently. Her team was handed down a very challenging corporate goal. They were tasked with generating double digit growth in a mature and declining market in which they already held high market share. This was in support of a plan for uninterrupted dividend pay-outs throughout the company’s entire existence of over 100 years. She said it was like being asked to climb Mount Everest without oxygen - impossible to achieve. Put yourself in her shoes and imagine how you would have felt in the same situation. A typical response could be fear and de-motivation, leading to risk aversion, closing the mind to innovation and a tendency towards a blame culture.

Could the leaders that set that corporate goal have done it differently? I would say yes. They could have followed this 5 step approach to create engagement and a positive emotional response:

1. Acknowledge the size of the challenge – acknowledge that a fear of failure, anxiety and of feeling overwhelmed would not be a surprising response.
2. Remind people of other seemingly huge goals they have achieved in the past and draw out the strengths they used to do that.
3. Let people talk about it – explore and critique, offer different perspectives and test the assumptions. This starts engagement.
4. Turn around the “story” to make it more meaningful and exciting for the delivery teams e.g. acknowledge it is a huge task but “think about how special it would be to be part of the team that achieves it”
5. Start asking what might be possible, what could happen, and what might be needed to create possibilities, pathways and buy-in, even if they do not fully deliver all of the goal now.

Using this process should increase the positive emotion associated with the goal, getting more engagement and commitment from the teams tasked with its delivery.

A key learning from recent research is that leaders need to anticipate, create and manage the right emotional response in themselves and others in order to deliver big goals.  In most corporate cultures leaders try to rationalise and almost “de-emotionalise” business goals. Whilst it’s true that this generates rational, concrete goals that appear logical, what emotions are they creating – fear or excitement?

Positive emotions like excitement create the will to engage fully, to innovate, problem-solve imaginatively and to go the extra mile. So when goal setting add an important question to your process “What’s the exciting challenge here?”

Jump off the Hamster wheel

These days, time seems to be the most precious of our resources. It is used as a universal excuse “If only I had more time, I would write a book”, “I would get better grades if I had more time”, “I have no time for exercise”. We have all heard these, and most likely use these time-based excuses ourselves, without even noticing it!

In coaching, I am increasingly finding my clients so focussed on being productive – and being seen to be productive – that work has become almost an obsession. People become trapped in a “too-busy” cycle, combining activities such as a lunch break with catching up on emails or going to the restroom as an opportunity to mentally draft a report, or a traffic jam being the ideal place to chair a conference call.  Super-efficient to some, for most this lifestyle isn’t sustainable and can result in overwork, overwhelm, stress and ultimately illness. It is like the hamster continually turning the wheel in its cage round and round.

Breaking out can be hard, not least as we continually seek to affirm our actions so having no spare time is likely to be part of our “current normal” - part of our day to day routine. There are many things that we can do, but all require conscious awareness and choice to disrupt the current routine and create a different space for yourself. Here are my top tips to reclaim your time:

• Find your show-stoppers – make a list of 3 or 4 things that are most important to you and commit to checking in on them every day.
   
• Find your timewasters – even if you think you enjoy these activities, take a typical work and weekend day and chunk it down to how you live those precious 24 hours. Did Facebook, Coronation Street or Twitter make the show-stopper list? If not, drop them for two weeks and see what time you created – and assess how painful the “detox” from these timewasters was.
   
• Diarise – it sounds so obvious, but unless you have a formal “appointment” for an important activity, the power of being sucked back into your “current normal” is such that you won’t get started on it.
   
• Consolidate – why do something 4 times a week when you could consolidate it into once? It is like batch processing in a factory – do your email in one chunk a day, not continuously: go to the supermarket once a week, not every other day.
   
• Keep your daily task list to the three most important things you must achieve in the day. It doesn’t mean you won’t get more done, rather it will help you to achieve the most important things as well as not feel overloaded.
   
• Do your “Big Rocks” first – The author Steven Covey uses this powerful metaphor to explain that our lives are full of grains of sand, gravel, trickles of water, and rocks. If we liken our day to a bucket, if we don’t fit in the big rocks first, then by the time we have finished with the sand, gravel and water, there will be no more room in the bucket.
   
• Learn to say no – remember that every time you say yes to something, in a full day, it logically means you must be saying no to something else. Work out what you can say no to immediately, say goodbye and scrap those activities from your life.
   
• Change your routine – how often do we examine our “current normal” and appraise it for its effectiveness? Now is your chance. Ask yourself, is there a better way of doing things? Make a new routine that is more balanced, more optimal, more filled with activities you love.

We all have the same amount of time, and it’s finite and in great demand. But some of us have made the time for doing the things we love doing, and others have allowed the constant demands and pressures and responsibilities of life to dictate their days. So reclaim your time and create the life you want. When you run out of time to think, you then start operating on automatic pilot – and what is the joy in that? Jump off that hamster wheel right now!

Balancing the real, virtual and home office

Since 2001 in the USA there has been a 100% increase in the amount of people working from home. There are significant advantages for both the employer and employees. Companies are spending less on real estate and, according to recent research from Stanford university, working from home can deliver a 13% increase in productivity. For the workers there is the advantage of flexible working, less commute time and potentially a better work/life balance.

Alongside this, there are some important downsides and disadvantages. Remote working can breed social isolation. Not being in an office diminishes social interaction and relationship building between colleagues and in teams. People can also end up identifying less with the organisation they work for and, significantly, they can earn less respect. A recent MIT survey indicates you are 9% more likely to be considered dependable and responsible if you put in “face time” and show up at the office. 

Technology and management advice is continually developing in an attempt to address these disadvantages. Cloud computing, video conferencing, remote meeting software and so on are already in wide use. There are newer technologies too. Sococo provides an office layout on screen, where workers with little face icons can walk about the virtual office and pop into different people’s offices and meeting rooms. People can even meet by a virtual coffee machine for a chat. The company Anybot is going further. They can provide you with what is called a telepresence avatar – it’s a mini robot with wheels, a face and a screen that you can see through, hear through, speak through and drive about a real office remotely from your PC at home. You can park your robot in a real meeting for example. The only problem is they haven’t yet overcome the “Dalek syndrome” – the robot can’t go up or down stairs!

On the management advice side there are numerous recommendations ranging from increasing personal contact with remote workers, promoting networking amongst remote workers, ensuring managers are accessible, developing trust and ensuring people feel respected and so on. There’s also plenty of advice for the qualities needed for a good tele-worker – self discipline and independence being paramount.

Remote workers themselves, together with new virtual office businesses, are also taking initiatives to reduce social isolation. Many cities now have boutique style co-working clubs, where home workers can work independently or together. The style is different to a typical business centre – its more coffee bar style combined with work spaces.

But can all these initiatives overcome the disadvantages of remote working? Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, seems to not think so. She recently and famously issued a memo requiring all home workers to now work from offices. She is of the clear belief that innovation, decision making, turning a company around   all require real people working in real time in real offices.

She may have a point. Despite all the technologies there has been an increase in home workers across the board at least putting in some real office time.

Whatever the future holds companies and individuals need to find an effective balance. Companies need to balance the cost benefit of home working with the need to create a real and collaborative company spirit and culture. Individuals need to balance the advantages of home working with the need for social interaction and real life engagement with management and colleagues that can help them feel an integral and valued part of the organisation they work for.

Emotional Intelligence

There are dozens of management theories about what makes a great leader great.

If we can learn something from each of these, then surely that helps our own development towards becoming a better leader.

The concept of “social intelligence” has been around since the 1920s, but it wasn’t until 1995, when Daniel Goleman wrote “Emotional Intelligence”, that this theory was applied to leadership and organisational performance.

Emotional intelligence grabbed the headlines as the scientific evidence quoted by Goleman suggested that only 20% of a leader’s success is down to IQ with the rest down to EQ (as emotional intelligence is often called).

People high on emotional intelligence demonstrate a number of characteristics….

1. They’re articulate and engaging…
2. They’re good team players…
3. They create positive work climates… It has been reported that Fred Goodwin, the ex CEO of RBS, was authoritarian and cultivated a climate of fear in the corridors of his Edinburgh HQ. Authoritarianism is the antithesis of emotional intelligence….
4. They know themselves well…
5. They’re good at coping…
6. They’re responsive and empathic…
7. They are very self controlled…

Some of these characteristics are deep seated and hard to develop – such as an ability to deal with stress – but the starting point in developing emotional intelligence is through increasing self awareness.

Research by the Centre for Creative Leadership has found that the primary causes of derailment in leaders are those low in emotional intelligence, particularly in handling change, not being able to work well in a team and poor interpersonal relations.

What examples have you of working with emotional intelligent leaders? Do you agree that EQ beats IQ hands down every time? Which of the EQ characteristics do you think is most important?

Delegation

As a coach I have a lot of dialogue with clients who are struggling to fit in all the things they “have to do”. Usually the subject of delegation comes up. When I ask “what’s stopping you delegating?” a fairly predictable batch of reasons to not delegate comes up:

• “It’s quicker to do it myself“
• “I can trust myself to do it properly”
• “It’s important I stay on top of this”
• “I don’t have anyone with the right skills to delegate to”
• “Everyone else is too busy – I can’t ask them to do any more”

Some of these may be familiar to you – I know I count some of them as old friends myself.

Each of the reasons may be true at one level. We understand the perceived short-term cost in energy and time to hire someone or teach someone else to do the task, or to manage them until they can do it to the standards we want.

Typically we do not consider costs of not delegating. What could you do, achieve or enjoy with the time if you did delegate some tasks:

• Things that are more important or productive in your life?
• Things you like doing better?
• Time with people you love?
• Time to focus on things where you have special talents?
• Time to think how to grow your business or career?
• Time to expand your focus and not simply tick boxes?

Our time is a finite resource. As we choose how to spend it we are, in practice, voting for certain things to be in our lives. Each vote can only be made once.
If we continue to do what we have always done and not delegate things over time, we are voting to hold ourselves, and possibly others, in a relatively static place. Ultimately we are voting for “less” in our lives.  If we do decide to start delegating more, despite the initial costs, we are voting for growth and development of ourselves and others. In other words we are voting for “more” in life. 

How to start

I’d like to invite you to think how you could delegate just one thing in the next week or month. Pick something that is relatively boring and un-demanding of your talents and ask yourself why you continue to do this and not find an alternative solution? Is there someone else who is better placed to do this task – either because they have more talent at it or because they have more time than you or because it would help them grow and learn. Then get a clear picture of what you intend to do with the time that’s freed up? How much more could you have?  Persevere and you’ll find that over time your time is increasingly spent on more satisfying things – and things still get done.

 

It's all in the mind

The degree of enjoyment you draw from your work has a direct bearing on your perception of whether you have a satisfactory work-life balance or not. The less you enjoy your work, the more likely you are to consider it an interruption to your life and its priorities. Of course a degree of flexibility and sense of control of your time is important for work-life balance, but beyond these, basics enjoyment and fulfilment counts for far more.

For those whose work is their passion, some artists and athletes for example, the issues of work-life balance rarely arise - it’s just something that has to be managed. But most people aren’t fortunate enough to be in that position, and being passionate about their work, although it’s a fashionable idea in modern management parlance, may be a false ideal to strive for. Nonetheless we can all benefit from working to increase our level of enjoyment and satisfaction in what we do.

There are three primary sources of enjoyment – self, others and purpose.

In the first case there’s the enjoyment you can derive from the work itself. Rather than just doing your job, why not set goals for yourself above and beyond those expected by the organisation? And then take satisfaction in achieving them or at least getting close.

Sources of enjoyment involving others are plentiful. Enjoy having a laugh and a joke with your colleagues, take an interest in their hobbies, their family and their personal life and make it a priority to get to know them better. Beyond that there’s the fulfilment that can come from actively helping others, in a coaching or mentoring role, or simply in being supportive.

Contributing to a purpose is the third source. By this I mean the contribution your job makes to making the world a better place to live in. It doesn’t matter what you do, someone somewhere will inevitably benefit from your endeavours. Consider the famous story of the cleaner interviewed at NASA in the sixties. When asked what they were doing they replied “Helping to put a man on the moon!”  

You need to take ownership of the emotional engagement you have with your work – whether you are satisfied and fulfilled, or whether you are bored and dissatisfied, it’s down to you  and it all starts in the mind.

Generation F

The experience of growing up online will profoundly shape the workplace expectations of “Generation F” - the Facebook Generation. At a minimum, they’ll expect work to reflect the social context of the Web - open, collaborative and informal.

Although it’s a buyer’s market for talent right now it won’t always be the case - and in the future, any company that lacks a vital core of Gen F employees will soon find itself stuck in the mud. If we hope  to attract the most creative and energetic members of Gen F, we will need to understand these Web-derived expectations, and then reinvent our management practices accordingly.

With that in mind, I came across a list of 12 work-relevant characteristics of online life generated by management thinker, Gary Hamel. In his words, these are the yardsticks tomorrow’s employees will use to determine whether your company is “with it” or “past it.”

1. All ideas compete on an equal footing. On the Web, every idea can gain a following - or not, and no one has the power to stop a subversive idea or squelch an embarrassing debate. Ideas gain traction based on their perceived merits, rather than on the political power of their sponsors.
    
2. Contribution counts far more than credentials. When you post a video to YouTube, no one asks you if you went to film school. When you write a blog, no one cares whether you have a journalism degree. Position, title, and academic degrees—none of the usual status differentiators carry much weight online. On the Web, what counts is not your CV, but what you can contribute.
    
3. Hierarchies are natural, not prescribed. In any Web forum there are some individuals who command more respect and attention than others - and have more influence as a consequence. Critically, though, these individuals haven’t been appointed by some superior authority. Instead, their clout reflects the freely given approbation of their peers. On the Web, authority trickles up, not down.
    
4. Leaders serve rather than preside. On the Web, every leader is a servant leader; no one has the power to command or sanction. Credible arguments, demonstrated expertise and selfless behaviour are the only levers for getting things done through other people. Forget this online, and your followers will soon abandon you.
    
5. Tasks are chosen, not assigned. The Web is an opt-in economy. Whether contributing to a blog, working on an open source project, or sharing advice in a forum, people choose to work on the things that interest them. Everyone is an independent contractor, and everyone scratches their own itch.
    
6. Groups are self-defining and self-organising. On the Web, you get to choose your colleagues. In any online community, you have the freedom to link up with some individuals and ignore the rest, to share deeply with some folks and not at all with others. Just as no one can assign you a boring task, no can force you to work with dim-witted colleagues.
    
7. Resources get attracted, not allocated. In large organisations, resources get allocated top-down, in a politicized budget wrangle. On the Web, human effort flows towards ideas and projects that are attractive (and fun), and away from those that aren’t. In this sense, the Web is a market economy where millions of individuals get to decide, moment by moment, how to allocate their precious currency of time and attention.
    
8. Power comes from sharing information, not hoarding it. The Web is also a gift economy. To gain influence and status, you have to give away your expertise and content. And you must do it quickly; if you don’t, someone else will beat you to the punch - and garner the credit that might have been yours. Online, there are a lot of incentives to share, and few incentives to hoard.
    
9. Opinions compound and decisions are peer-reviewed. On the Internet, truly smart ideas rapidly gain a following no matter how disruptive they may be. The Web is a near-perfect medium for aggregating the wisdom of the crowd - whether in formally organized opinion markets or in casual discussion groups. And once aggregated, the voice of the masses can be used as a battering ram to challenge the entrenched interests of institutions in the offline world.
    
10. Users can veto most policy decisions. As many Internet moguls have learned to their sorrow, online users are opinionated and vociferous - and will quickly challenge any decision or policy change that seems contrary to the community’s interests. The only way to keep users loyal is to give them a substantial say in key decisions. You may have built the community, but the users really own it.
     
11. Intrinsic rewards matter most. The web is a testament to the power of intrinsic rewards. Think of all the articles contributed to Wikipedia, all the open source software created, all the advice freely given - add up the hours of volunteer time and it’s obvious that human beings will give generously of themselves when they’re given the chance to contribute to something they actually care about. Money’s great, but so is recognition and the satisfaction of accomplishment.
     
12. Hackers are heroes. Large organisations tend to make life uncomfortable for activists and rabble-rousers - however constructive they may be. In contrast, online communities frequently embrace those with strong anti-authoritarian views. On the Web, muckraking malcontents are frequently celebrated as champions of the Internet’s democratic values - particularly if they’ve managed to hack a piece of code that has been interfering with what others regard as their inalienable digital rights.

These features of Web-based life are written into the DNA of Generation F - and mostly missing from the managerial DNA of the average FTSE company. There are a lot of kids looking for jobs right now, but given the expansive freedom of their online lives, few of them will ever feel at home in cubicleland.  If your company wants to engage the best talent in the future, it needs to start thinking about how it will engage the Facebook Generation.

Can You Forward This?

An interesting article once appeared in the Harvard Business Review about an exchange of emails.  I thought the article useful, practical and sensible, so here is a short summary:

A busy executive crafted an excellent email response to an important query posed by her subordinate. Thoughtful, useful, and personal, her answer cut to the heart of the issue while presenting an effective approach for managing it.

The only problem was the executive's note was too personal and, as written, couldn't be shared with anyone beyond the original recipient.  Yet it offered a thoughtful response to a business issue that would impact the behaviour of literally hundreds of employees.  After another email exchange, the executive and her direct report recognised that, as useful as the message was, it could not be shared with other employees.  They spent a quick half-hour editing the original note into a more formal directive.  This revised communication had the desired organisational impact.

A happy result?  Not exactly.  Senior people should (almost) always write emails as if they would be — and should be — forwarded to key players in their organisation.  Rewriting and revising individual emails into more scalable missives is time-consuming and inefficient.

If you're editing even only three emails a week into a forwardable focus — particularly in collaboration with a colleague — then you're arguably wasting 10 hours a month on communications rework.  Why not write it as forwardable in the first place?  Every single significant response to a serious query should be written as if it can and should be forwarded.

This is the happier and healthier corollary to the "Never write anything you wouldn't be comfortable seeing on the front page of the New York Times — or WikiLeaks”.

The downside of this approach is that when you write only in a style to be forwarded, you inherently throttle back some of the personal touches in your communication.  Indeed, this approach insists that communicators be a little less intimate and individual.  That is a loss.

On the other hand, many executives personalize their communications in ways that get in the way of information sharing and, in reality, blur the professional focus of the message.  While efficiency shouldn't always be prized above personalisation, personal flourishes that undermine efficiency waste time and attention.  Those are resources that effective executives are reluctant to squander.

Our True Values

On leadership training programmes we often spend time discussing authenticity and self-awareness. Part of this involves exercises to explore personal values so we can better understand what is important to us and what we stand for.  For many of us, articulating our values and having a language for them is hard: it is often only when our values are challenged in some way that we recognise them as being imperative to the way we choose to live our lives.

Values exist, whether we recognise them or not.  They are core beliefs that guide us on how to live our lives in a meaningful way.   They emerge from a mix of our background and experiences, our emerging personality and sense of self.  Some may remain constant throughout our lives and others will develop and change. When our actions and behaviours are consistent with our values, we are usually happy and centred.  But when they don’t, we can become unhinged and feel compromised.  This is why making a conscious effort to identify our values is so important.

A great start is to think about times in your life when you were most happy, fulfilled and proud.  Think about who you were with, what you did and what choices you made. Then think about times when you were less satisfied and fulfilled.  Gradually exploring the insights from these thoughts will help to start the process of articulating what matters most to you in life.  Choosing then to consciously live these values, to consistently demonstrate and show them will help you to become centred around what you stand for and help others to understand who you really are.

So, how about making June the month you identify what you stand for and investing some time in identifying your values?  It will be time well spent and will, at a minimum, provide you with some food for thought in how you choose to live your life.

I will end with 2 powerful quotes, both from Malcolm X, the Civil Rights Activist, who absolutely knew his values and what he stood for (the second has been attributed to other sources too).

“I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I am for justice, no matter who it is for or against”

“If you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything”

Don’t rush what should be taken slowly

Having just returned from a boating holiday where the maximum cruising speed is 6mph, I’ve been starkly reminded of just how fast the pace of modern life is. After the leisurely flow of English rivers, stepping into my car and navigating traffic and motorways at speed was a sharp awakening indeed.

Speed, and with it the expectation that everything can be done quickly, is inherent to the mindset of modern business life, affecting everything from communications, production, market responsiveness and logistics. There are benefits of course, but the danger is it can give the illusion that everything can and even should be done at speed – and that change can be affected instantly.

Navigating a boat has factors inherently different from driving a car. Steering and manoeuvring has to be done with anticipation – a rudder is not as instantaneous as a car steering wheel. Even more significantly, a boat does not have brakes – you need to slow down ahead of time or use reverse gear to stop. To navigate a boat effectively, particularly in a crowded marina, you need anticipation as you don’t always have the luxury of changing your mind at the last minute.

So whilst speed of communications is great, it’s vital in business not to carry the expectation that all can happen instantaneously. There are some things where slow is definitely best, including strategic decision-making, affecting major changes and altering the direction of a business.  These all require levels of anticipation, precise actions, intelligence gathering and monitoring - all more akin to navigating a boat than driving a car.

Slow is also best when it comes to leading people. We can’t just expect to turn the steering wheel and assume everyone is with us – leadership needs to anticipate the time it will take and the continual reinforcement of new direction.

The anticipation and thoroughness needed to navigate a boat is also needed when taking important decisions in our own life. When it comes to moving, changing jobs or taking on new responsibilities it is best to takes things slow and steady. Most car drivers today apparently use way too much acceleration and braking – if you used the same approach to drive your life you’d wear yourself out in no time!