Holiday Harmony

S[NO]w More Stress

The holidays bring us a great deal of magic and wonder. Though with all the good, it is also – unfortunately- a time of the year that becomes extra stressful for many of us.

It is typically not possible to let our work slowdown in the weeks just before the holidays. There are so many critical year end tasks to complete and those business activities often conflict with our personal need to prepare and attend events and celebrations with our family and friends.

This month is ripe for improved self-awareness and self-management. Nowhere more so than concerning our stress behaviors – whether the source of that stress is work, the holidays or a combination.

It is possible for you to improve your resiliency to stress.

Resiliency is the power or ability to return to the original form, position, etc., after being bent, compressed, or stretched. I think we all feel somewhat ’bent, compressed and stretched’ during the year end and holiday season.

Build stress ‘resiliency’ by using the Succeed Under Pressure report in imapMyTeam®

The Succeed Under Pressure report is descriptive and prescriptive. It helps you understand exactly what is making you feel stressed and a quick tip on how to rebound.  Successfully managing our stress behaviors is a path to Holiday Harmony and a true gift to ourselves.

The Push to Year End:

Less than one month remains in 2014.  Chances are you will be attending a number of important meetings over the next couple of weeks that are focused on one or both of these key topics:

1.     Look Back: Some debrief and analysis of what has happened in 2014,

2.     Look Forward: Setting objectives and goals for 2015

Make these end of the year meetings your best ones yet. Productive and meaningful team meetings are not about one person.  A great meeting encourages collaboration among the members; it should foster a sense of belonging and identity; and help coordinate interdependent work of the team members, even those who work virtually.

The most important guidelines in a meeting are not necessarily sound meeting principles, but internal motivational expectations.

Despite your best intentions and planning, people will largely evaluate the meeting based on how well it meets their own internal motivational needs. When the meeting is in sync with those needs participants will be engaged and think they are in a productive meeting. If the meeting is out of sync with motivational needs, it is easy to disconnect and feel as if the meeting is a waste of time.

You may remember that red and blue needs are opposite as are yellow and green needs.  That means if you are managing the meeting according to what a Red needs person expects, you are probably turning off all of the Blue needs participants.  The Reds judge it a great meeting and the blues consider it a bad meeting.  You stick to a pre meeting agenda and while the Yellow needs are happy, the Greens feel that lacks flexibility to add topics on the fly – so it is ‘too rigid’.  We can easily polarize our audience.

Use imapMyTeam to close out the year with your best ever meetings. As part of your planning, use the bottom right corner “My Meetings” section to better understand the motivational needs of those involved. Select the “Team Dynamics” report and go to the “Team Needs” tab. Note which quadrant each person in the meeting falls in and use the attached grid report to better understand what they need out of the meeting. Plan to meet not only your business goals for the meeting, but also the critical motivational needs of each person.

Using imapMyTeam.com to understand the “needs of the meeting” will save you time in planning and help you make sure your meetings are meaningful and productive for everyone.  

The Gratitude Attitude

The end of November is upon us and that moves us to gather with friends and family to celebrate Thanksgiving. An amazing feast with our families and friends is just one of the tangible benefits of the Thanksgiving holiday. However, don’t overlook some of the intangible benefits we enjoy when we celebrate with an overall mindset of gratitude.

Be grateful for what you have.

Recent studies have established when people take time to identify specific positive attributes in others or their actions, and take time to record them in some way, they tend to:

• Have a relative absence of stress and depression
• Make progress toward important personal goals
• Report higher levels of determination and energy

Using imapMyTeam® makes it easy to find and document positive attributes of your team and other co-workers.

Take a few minutes to read about what your colleagues contribute to the team by running their “Strengths Summary” report. Just login to imapmyteam.com click on their name to move them to the center pane and select that report to view it. Consider their contributions and how they add to the team’s overall success. Perhaps write down a few notes to solidify your appreciation.

We hope you enjoy some time away from the demands of work and your return from the holiday comes with a renewed attitude of gratitude!

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Change or Die?

I live in the Northeast. Last Tuesday it was 68 degrees; on Thursday it was 33 degrees. The season changed abruptly, almost overnight.

Changing with the seasons is something we’re all familiar with. We all know it can’t stay 68 degrees year-round and making the necessary changes isn’t that difficult.

 What if the change was honest to goodness life or death?

Would you change? “Yes” you say?

Would you believe the odds are 9 to 1 that you would resist even the most serious change?

At a recent medical symposium discussing healthcare challenges it was reported that 90% of people in the United States who have bypass surgery have complications or need additional surgery because they cannot or will not change their behavior for the good in the long haul.

The problem of changing behavior of patients is not exclusive to healthcare; it is also a problem for business. To stay competitive in a turbulent and uncertain environment change is necessary. And it is far more difficult than getting out a winter coat and gloves.

Fear of death apparently is not a motivator to change. Doctors have discovered better success with programs that focus on the ‘joy of living’ that they say comes from the ‘mental structures that shape the way we see the world’.

Fortunately, iMapMyTeam® measures the way you see the world through identifying your motivational needs. And to better manage the stress change creates, it is important to understand how the changes impact your motivational needs.

Change is easy when it meets your need.  It’s hard when it doesn’t. The Stress of Change report is descriptive and prescriptive. It helps you understand exactly where change is making you feel stressed and a quick tip on how to fix it.

Managing the stress of change is a necessity and an ongoing challenge for each one of us. It isn’t as serious as bypass surgery, but it will positively impact your workplace ‘health.’

Winning a ‘No-Win’ Scenario

Claiming to have ‘won’ a conflict at work is like claiming a peaceful conquest – it’s an oxymoron.

When you’re having conflict at work, resolving it is a much better outcome than winning. Disagreement happens; even on the most cohesive teams. While healthy disagreement often helps a team move forward, failure to effectively address and resolve disagreement is a real threat to the ability of the team to be successful.

What makes workplace conflict so challenging is that we all have very different reactions to conflict and disagreements. Here is a very common scenario:

When under pressure Person A loses their sense of long term implications of their actions and ‘winning’ a conflict with a colleague, or being “right”, becomes their short term goal.  Person A becomes more verbally assertive and dominates their interaction. Person B, on the other side of the disagreement, has opposite expectations. Person B wants collegiality and views fighting openly about things to be counterproductive and difficult to do. Person B ‘gives in’ to Person A because he or she is uncomfortable with the open clash. Person B did have important points to make but couldn’t do it with the open conflict so that key information failed to surface.

Who won? No one of course; and certainly nothing happened that is good for the team because when the underlying issues that created the disagreement in the first place have not been solved, they will simply reappear later. Also if you damage the relationship in the process your colleague might find it very hard to forgive you for what you have done.

imapMyTeam® helps you understand why working through disagreement can be so difficult and provides some helpful suggestions through the Resolving Disagreements report.

You will find the Resolving Disagreements report in the center pane, under reports about you section.

When you find yourself in a disagreement – large or small and don’t know what to next - this report is a valuable resource to help you consider what you can do differently to manage the tension of conflict before it becomes counter-productive to winning as a team.

What is the Key to Your Long-Term Success? Relationships.

If you are reading this ‘Tuesday Tip’ it is likely because the ‘key to success’ aspect caught your eye– or maybe you are surprised that the answer we provided was relationships.

Many people we talk with don’t necessarily connect relationships with success early on. They begin with factors such as superior product or technical knowledge, improving productivity, identifying and developing strengths, improving communication skills and the like.  Those can’t hurt, but they are secondary to being effective at building relationships.

In today’s knowledge worker based economy we must get things done with others. This is equally true whether you are a first level supervisor or a senior executive. If you cannot build and maintain relationships you are unlikely to accomplish what you are responsible for.

imapMyTeam® is about- first and foremost- great relationships.

To be good at relationships you must first start with understanding yourself then consider the critical relationships you have such as:

·         You and your manager

·         You and your peers

·         You and your direct reports (if you have them)

Ignore people’s motivational needs at your own peril. 

imapMyTeam® measures internal motivational need and helps you understand it. Most of the iMapMyTeam reports you access about others are written to their needs…and if you understand someone else’s needs and follow the advice -you’ll improve the relationship.

Being better at the relationship means a greater chance at long-term success no matter how you personally define success.

Coping Better with Workplace Change

It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.

 --Charles Darwin

Change is constant in the workplace.

Change challenges you to let go of the past, especially the old comfortable ways you’ve settled into, and to accept new challenges and opportunities for success.

When the pace of change accelerates, is unexpected and seems unending- you are likely to falter from the stress associated with absorbing and adjusting to what it all means. 

Even when positive, change usually feels somewhat uncomfortable on some level and discomfort can create tension or resistance

Unless you are the one who is creating all of the change (because face it, we like the changes WE make) you need to learn to be aware of how change may cause you stress and how best to manage what happens to you in that stress behavior.

That is why we have written the Stress of Change report in imapMyTeam®

This report increases self-awareness about the way change may personally impact you.  It also offers an actionable tip to help you self-manage that stress better.

Managing yourself to better ‘survive’ workplace change – now that is a path that Darwin would have naturally selected [pun intended].

Fear your Strengths Part 2; Improve Your Versatility

Last week we examined how having a healthy “fear” of overusing your strengths is actually beneficial to overall improved performance. This week we have an exercise to help you think through the strengths associated with each of the four quadrants and how you may use this exercise as a tool to improve your response to a situation or person.

What does taking a different approach look like for you? 

If you don’t already know where your strengths lie:

1.      Login to imapMyTeam® and look at your Team Player Report. You’ll find your usual behaviors or ‘strengths’ in the area your Diamond symbol falls.

2.      Once you have the location of your diamond use the attached pdf of the imapMyTeam® Versatility Grid to help you get started with the exercise.

Each of the four quadrants of the Versatility Grid has adjectives that describe strengths we associate to that particular quadrant. Once you align the position of your diamond from the Team Player report to the same location in the Versatility grid you should easily recognize having most if not all of those strengths.  They are the ones you are prone to overuse.

Your blind spot is the diagonally opposite quadrant. That quadrant represents strengths you may need from time to time, but are perhaps the most difficult for you to develop and adopt.  

For example, if your strengths fall in the ‘Red’ area, the behaviors found in the ‘Blue’ quadrant will feel the most awkward or uncomfortable for you to employ. However there will be business and relationship situations where those strengths will be the best resolution.

Remember, Self-Awareness is the critical key to strength management. It requires willingness, discipline and practice to choose to adopt a less familiar approach in the best interest of the relationship or the project. The versatility grid is a way to determine what strengths you may need to ‘fear’ and what strengths you need to nurture and develop.

Don’t limit your success by only operating out of one ‘box.’ 

Become more versatile by learning to use strengths from all four quadrants. Doing so will make you more effective with a wider range of people in a wider range of circumstances.

Fear Your Strengths

 This weekend I came across a business book titled Fear Your Strengths, by Robert E. Kaplan and Robert B. Kaiser.

The title immediately reminded me of the old adage that a strength overused is a weakness; however ‘fear’ is a very strong word so I had to look inside the book.  As the title suggests - the book is in part a cautionary tale. Their findings are based on assessing thousands of people in executive, leadership and managerial positions and their research clearly says that there are negative implications if you over emphasize your strengths.

I agree with their assessment, and you should too.

Virtually anyone is susceptible to taking their strengths too far.  And, the more well-defined and developed the strength, the greater the risk that you could take that strength to extremes that would be counterproductive.

Self-Awareness:  the critical key to “strength management”

You can’t really have too much self-awareness. I think self-awareness ought to be elevated to a super-power.  For you to handle the challenges that business throws your way, you must be able to read the situation and respond adeptly. This requires knowing your default strengths, the behaviors that kick in without even thinking about them.  These are the ones that may unconsciously go into overdrive.  For example, if your strengths are to be very task-oriented, decisive and assertive, then you may be predisposed to respond too forcefully, too quickly.

Self-awareness allows you to respond mindfully to the business conditions before you, rather than out of habit or instinct.   Managing yourself requires a willingness and discipline.   Learn to be more selective about what situations call for which strength and then calibrate how much is enough.

Use your imapMyTeam® Team Player report to fully understand your strengths. Evaluate recent situations and determine if you have used that strength appropriately or overused it. 

Make it a priority to work to adjust or adapt around the strength you may lean on too much. If you’re having difficulty assessing this, ask a colleague. Chances are they have a pretty good idea of where you are overdoing it.

Embrace a healthy “fear” of your strengths and look for opportunities to enhance your effectiveness by moderating your strengths so they better fit the situation.  

 Lessons from the Ryder Cup

If you follow golf closely you likely watched the Ryder Cup last weekend. If you do not watch golf, stay with me anyway- because last week’s competition was ripe with lessons on leadership. Part of what makes the Ryder Cup a magnificent event is that a great captain can galvanize and energize his team so that every player would do anything for that captain to win. You probably feel the same way about great leaders that you have or currently work for.

What happens when the opposite is true? What happens when a leader’s well intentioned approach is disconnected to the needs of their team?  

Pairings in a Ryder Cup become a hot topic because the event transforms a highly individual sport into a cooperative effort. The captains of the U.S.A. and European squads must consider playing styles and personalities for their lineups. The captains become the center of attention.

However, other than the Ryder Cup and some other selected events, professional golfers enjoy a great deal of autonomy and largely decide themselves [or with their caddy] how to plan for and play the course over a tournament. They are not looking to a captain to make those decisions on their behalf. They simply play a round or tournament in less strokes than their competitors and they win, regardless of how they got to that outcome.

As I watched some of the post-match evaluation it was interesting to hear players report that the TeamUSA Captain, Tom Watson took a more hands-off leadership approach. Rather than discussing the possible pairings with his players or asking for their views, he allowed his vice captains to assign the pairings. Professional golfers are not used to being managed in a hierarchical way. Mr. Watson’s choice to distance himself from the players in his style of leadership probably seemed like the best approach to him at the time. However, it did not produce the results he was hoping for.

TeamUSAs leaders did not use a collaborative approach and did not solicit the opinions of the individual player’s thoughts on pairings.  One can speculate that the leadership style that was employed is counter to the culture that a professional golfer typically experiences and would expect.  Perhaps they needed imapMyTeam.

The tale of the 2014 Ryder Cup plays out in business regularly. Leaders change, the new leader brings a style that may be their own and plays to their strengths, but does not work in the culture and environment for the team. If that leader is unaware, unable or unwilling to adapt to the needs of the team, that team, despite all of its talent and all of its strategies, will likely fall short of its goals.

Adaptive leadership combined with team execution puts you in a position to win every time.

imapMyTeam® is designed to enable ‘willing’ leaders to adapt their behaviors to fully inspire and engage the talents of the team against the demands of the competition.  

Merits of Servant Leadership

Many leadership experts believe that in today’s knowledge based economy the principles of servant leadership better position you and your organization for success than autocratic methods of leading.

The basic premise of the servant-leader is that they share power, put the needs of others first and help people develop and perform as highly as possible. 

The concept of servant leadership is far from new. Lao-Tzu wrote about servant leadership in the fifth-century BC: 

“The highest type of ruler is one of whose existence the people are barely aware…. The Sage is self-effacing and scanty of words. When his task is accomplished and things have been completed, all the people say, ‘We ourselves have achieved it!’”

Whether you are a proponent of servant leadership or not there are some wonderful principles that servant leader scholars generally agree are key to the development of an effective servant leader.  All of these principles are supported in and through the use of imapMyTeam®

· Awareness: A servant leader understands his or her own values and feelings, strengths and weaknesses.

· Commitment to the growth of people: Is responsible for serving the need of others. 

· Empathy: the need to understand others' feelings and perspectives.

· Building community:  Helps create a sense of community among people.

· Stewardship: Holds an organization's resources in trust for the greater good.

Use of imapMyTeam certainly builds self-awareness and, whether you are a leader now or aspire to be one in the future, the lessons of commitment to the growth of people, empathy and building community [teams] is critical to business success.

Take time this week to consider how adopting the mindset of a servant-leader might help you be more effective in achieving the results that are critical to your success as well as that of the team.

Mental Traffic Jam; 70,000 per day

The first step in the imapMyTeam success process is self-awareness. Once self-awareness is achieved you can begin to make choices that will allow you to effectively manage yourself. Those two parts of the success process are internal to you and set you up for the external steps three and four: successfully managing relationships and achieving your defined success.

I reconsidered the self-awareness/self-management connection again this weekend after I started reading [yet another] book about the human brain.

It is estimated that we generate a minimum of 50,000 thoughts per day and most likely closer to 70,000 thoughts per day. That is A LOT of processing and thinking. Assuming 16 hours per day of awake time, between 50,000-70,000 thoughts means you are generating up to 72 thoughts per minute.

It is a mental traffic jam of epic proportions.

That is also a lot of internalization because there is no way that you are communicating or in any way sharing the vast majority of what you are processing. Some of that is good of course, we think about things we shouldn’t share – but we are also missing out on many important thoughts that ought to be shared.Can all this thinking and non-sharing lead to us losing touch with ourselves and others? Maybe.

So how is this important to you as an imapMyTeam® user?

Technology is great. Having an important report in less than a minute that helps you understand yourself or someone else is incredibly powerful. The ability to read reports is a great way to understand yourself [self-awareness] and stimulates ideas of how you can more effectively manage yourself [self-management]. Technology itself however can lead to further isolation. Spending hours in front of a monitor, laptop, tablet, or smartphone can further our separation or remoteness from others.

Remember the third step in the model is managing relationships. Focus on the relationship part.

Just don’t read reports; talk about them.

Get a cup of coffee or tea or have lunch and start a dialogue and actively engage and discuss and share your reports with your colleagues. Make it an active rather than a passive exercise.

imapMyTeam® will help you harness the power of some of those 70,000 thoughts so you can be more productive.

Positive Returns on your Meeting Investment

Meetings are inevitable. They are also an investment. If you are in charge of leading a meeting, you invest time and other resources before, during and after the meeting. The same may be true for those attending as well.

Since meetings are costly, it’s critical they be highly effective. Much has been written about the keys to successful meetings; having a clearly stated purpose, starting with everyone present and on time, focusing on action items rather than recaps, balanced participation and the best meetings of course, end early.

Wouldn’t it be great if knowing and considering all of this was enough? Unfortunately, it’s not.

The realities of the work world set in and take their toll. So it’s really important that when you are charged to lead or take the initiative to lead that meeting, you are well prepared. To ensure that even when you have all the ‘best practices’ of leading meetings in place, you not only use your strengths in facilitating, but recognize when it’s necessary for you to adapt those strengths to meet participant needs.

The ‘Managing Meetings’ report found in the pull-down menu on your imapMyTeam home page, describes various strengths you have and where those strengths are helpful to getting results in meetings. The report then takes you another step. It suggests ways in which you will need to modify that strength when what you are doing isn’t getting the results you want.

Login here to see the reports


Learn to incorporate imapMyTeam as part of your ‘best practices’ for effective meeting regimen and make sure your time yields a positive return on your meeting investment. 

Back to School…Back to Business

No Reason to Sing the ‘Back to Work’ Blues

“Labor Day Weekend” has long been associated with our final fling with summer before turning our attention back to school and business. Now that we’ve put away the bathing suits and flip flops, it’s time to diagram our personal strategy for the 2014 stretch run.

Whether September brings us new challenges, or we’re looking for a strong finish to an existing project; or both- it’s time to get focused, get organized, and get busy.

Where to begin? Let’s face it, just getting refocused after summer can be challenging for many so, a great place to start is by rallying around what is easy for you.

When you are working on the things you love and enjoy most, and you are able to use the strengths that come to you naturally, you’ll be on the way to doing your best work right out of the gate. The same thing is true for your direct reports.

For you and your team to ‘get focused, get organized, and get busy,’ use imapMyTeam to help you figure it out quickly.

For yourself, check out your “Team Player” report. The descriptions provided on the interests page will help direct your focus to activities currently on your plate that you’ll easily dig into and want to get busy working on. You will find the same information for your direct reports in their “Team Player” report located in the lower left corner of the box. These will help you get back to business and on track for a great end to the year.

Login here to see the report

Juxtaposition

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view -- until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."

- Atticus Finch, in To Kill a Mockingbird

Mr. Finch would love imapMyTeam®.

It is not all that unusual to be left wondering why someone else did what they did; said what they said; thinks the way they did, etc. The reason that it is not unusual is that when we contemplate that situation, we are processing it through our own unique set of filters.

And something that you can count on is that people have very different filters that impact their perception of the situation and then how that perception drives behavior.

To simplify this complexity we look at broader dominant characteristics of behavior. Those are reflected in the team player grid or team dynamics grid found in imapMyTeam.com®. In both of these grids you want to pay attention to the other person’s need.

Despite outward behavior, people use their need to evaluate the person or the environment that surrounds them.   If one of your colleagues always reacts differently to the same person or environment than you – they have different needs.

This is important for us to know and understand because once we have a better understanding of what another person’s underlying needs or unique set of filters are, the better we understand their choices.

Spend time reviewing and understanding your teammate’s reports in imapMyTeam®.  This is the equivalent of ‘climbing into their skin and taking the walk’ that Atticus Finch suggests.  Follow his advice and see the world through new eyes, theirs!

 The ‘New’ Golden Rule

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". Treat people the way you want to be treated. The ‘old’ Golden Rule makes a lot of sense.

You want to treat people with respect so they respect you. You are not rude to people because you don’t want to be treated rudely. It is civility. We largely expect it and are surprised when it is absent.

The core of "getting along" is about the rules, understandings and societal norms that, when shared, provide the foundation for stable relationships. We learn about what polite behavior and manners mean in the workplace [and our communities]. You might say that these rules provide a sense of order and civility fosters feelings of well-being and positive relationships.

Even though we largely practice this civility we still don’t get along very well all the time. Our interactions with others, despite our best intentions sometimes lead to unintentional slights or maybe escalate to a full blown misunderstanding or at worst perceived as intentionally antagonistic.

imapMyTeam helps you go past the ’old’ golden Rule to the ‘New’ Golden Rule:

Treat people the way they NEED to be treated.

That works far better than treating people the way YOU want to be treated.

Yes, we still want you to practice civility, but we want you to consider a new level of understanding that is based on what people need and expect from you when you interact with them.

The imapMyTeam.com® reports you access on others are mostly written to that person’s motivational needs. Those motivational needs set the individual’s expectations for the situation and interaction they are in. Those needs can be very different – even opposite on occasion – than the behavior the person outwardly exhibits.

Using imapMyTeam® report suggestions when you are interacting with your colleagues– the new Golden Rule – will make sure you do get along far better with everyone than you might have ever imagined.

 Trust and Energy

Last week’s Tuesday Tip addressed the issue of employee engagement thorough the ‘Motivation Equation’. We learned that Passion + Motivational Needs = Energy. This week we look at another essential ingredient that contributes to the energy levels of individuals and teams; trust.

Consider:

1)      A July Psychology Today article, tackles the engagement issue by asserting the degree to which employees are either engaged or disengaged is directly related to their level of trust.

2)      According to the APA 2014 Work and Well-Being Survey nearly 1 in 4 workers say they don’t trust their employer and only about half believe their employer is open and upfront with them.

The lesson is simple, and although you already know it – it is worth restating. Nothing is going to work well if there is no foundation of trust in the organization.

When you consider that most experts estimate approximately 70% of US employees may be actively disengaged, understanding the trust/engagement connection becomes critical to moving the performance needle in the right direction. 

imapMyTeam® has trust covered from every angle.

There are reports to develop self-awareness of how you build trust – and if it is in sync with how others need trust to be fostered with them. There is also a report to help you spot warning signals that other’s trust is waning.

That is a total of 3 reports that, combined, are an effective tool to make sure you are not on the wrong side of the trust statistics.

Engagement through the ‘Motivation Equation’

Employee engagement continues to be a hot topic.  It’s hard to read anything related to leadership these days without getting bombarded by stories and statistics of how bad engagement is.

If we apply the old adage of ‘where there is smoke there is fire’ to this topic, there is a whole lot of smoke…so there must be a fire somewhere. If there is “smoke” on your team or in your organization – or if it’s you that can’t seem to get engaged, imapMyTeam has a solution.

There are two symbols on your Team Player grid that when combined produce a powerful motivational scenario. Those two symbols are the asterisk and the circle. Together they are the Motivation Equation.

The asterisk describes what people love to do and the circle describes what people need from their environment and others around them. Both have to do with motivation.  When these two combined characteristics are met, what you love and what you need, you are energized and when you are energized you will be engaged!

Pay attention to what the asterisk indicates and you'll get better at matching what people love to do with what the business needs. Understanding the circle and people’s needs allows you to customize your approach in support what is important for them to receive from you and others.

Save the time – pass up all the engagement articles and instead apply the insights from the asterisk and circle, the Motivation Equation, for individual and team success.