Stars are born out of dark moments.
Image Source: Pixabay – Felix Mittermeier
Author: fracalde (Page 2 of 14)
Telling your boss that they are wrong is never easy. Most employees will not consider it, fearing professional suicide. However, not being able to face issues, speak truth, and learn has dire consequences. Wrong is a part of life and business, and (most importantly) the key to improvement.
The most successful CEO’s actively seek out staff who will stick their necks out and have hard conversations. Delivering the message is always tricky. It is important to deliver criticism in a way that will be heard, understood, and appreciated.
This article provides five tips in order to better confront your boss:
- Accentuate the positive: When delivering bad news, try always to finish with a positive spin. The positives, as well as the negatives, provide the complete picture. A balanced, constructive view does not focus on “what’s right and what’s wrong,” but instead tells us “what to do more of, what to stop doing, and what to do differently.”
- Use “I” statements: The “I” statements offer your perspective. There are different versions of the truth, and “I” statements leave room for discussion, interpretation, and alignment.
- Focus on common ground: When addressing a problem, remind your boss of the goals with a particular action or decision. Ground your discussion in shared objectives, and always make your case with good data.
- Ask questions: Before you point out problems, make sure you are likely right. Seek to understand the total situation. Opening a dialogue and asking useful questions may help bosses see that they are wrong before you even need to say it. If and when you do decide to deliver bad news, leave room for discussion; “Am I wrong on this?”
- Offer solutions: If you have an opinion, you have a responsibility. Even if the boss was solely responsible for a bad decision, everyone must help the company address the issue and move forward.
Image Source: Pixabay – Geralt
“How can I get a little more time every day so that I can get things done on a daily basis?” This is not only the case for our private lives but also in terms of the strategic goals defined at work. Most organizations make an effort of increasing productivity through effective planning. However, effective planning is a concept known for being hard to grasp, and it can be a challenge to figure out where to start.
This Article provides five useful tips for a more effective planning:
- Plan Far into the Future: By creating a plan for many months into the future, you avoid the daily hurdles of finding out what is the most appropriate project to engage in. By doing this, it is easier to see the bigger picture and which small projects will get you closer to the general goals.
- Involve Everyone in the Planning: The planning processes are comprehensive and involve scheduling activities, delegating responsibilities and continuous coordination. Are these carried out by a few people in the organization, and much is spend unnecessarily.
- Use An Intuitive Tool for Effective Planning: To ensure that employees are motivated to use a digital tool, the solution should be intuitive. Keep in mind that everyone should be able to use it, and therefore, it is important that you have access to tutorials and descriptions about the features.
- All Activities in One Structure: This tip is related to the previous one and involves an important feature of the just mentioned digital solution. At a glance, the tool should be able to give you a comprehensible view of the plans for the year, and this is a precondition for the planning to be truly effective. When it isn’t possible instantly to get a full view, it can be challenging to get the bigger picture.
- Automation: The last tip has to do with the time being saved by automating processes. This could, for instance, happen by arranging emails for customers or marketing campaigns to be sent out automatically. Another example is to use a tool that allows you to set up notifications to be sent out to colleagues prior to events.
Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
Image source : Pixabay – Darkmoon_Art
You know how resolutions often go: you set a goal and start strong … then the motivation runs out and feelings of frustration and shame creep in. The struggle is real, but what if it doesn’t have to be?
Sociologist Christine Carter in this TED Talk shares a simple step to shift your mindset and keep you on track to achieving your grandest ambitions.
Image source : Pixabay – Pexels
If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.
Now more than ever before, leaders all over the world are facing change and complexity — the coronavirus pandemic has presented us all with new challenges, new circumstances, and new uncertainties in the workplace. Jobs have been morphing, expanding, shrinking, and disappearing; co-workers, teammates, and technology are changing rapidly.
This Article provides five useful techniques for leaders for adapting to change:
- Be curious. Ask many questions. Wonder, explore, and consider before you judge and decide.
- Do not get too attached to a single plan or strategy. Have Plan B (and C) at the ready.
- Create support systems. Do not go it alone. Look to mentors, friends, coaches, trusted peers, professional colleagues, family members, and others to serve as your support system in times of change. Encourage employees to do the same.
- Understand your own reactions to change. You have to be clear about your own emotions and thoughts about changes, so you can be straightforward with others.
- Immerse yourself in new environments and situations. Do this when you are confronted by change — but get practice by joining activities, meeting new people, and trying new things on a regular basis.
Image Source: Pixabay – Geralt
It is easy, in the onrush of life, to become a reactor: to respond to everything that comes up, the moment it comes up, and give it your undivided attention until the next thing comes up. This is, of course, a recipe for madness.
Having an inbox and processing it in a systematic way can help you gain back some of that control. But once you’ve processed out your inbox and listed all the tasks you need to get cracking on, you still have to figure out what to do the very next instant. This is why setting priorities is so important.
This article explains the three basic approaches to setting priorities, each of which suits different kinds of personalities. The first is for procrastinators, people who put off unpleasant tasks. The second is for people who thrive on accomplishment, who need a stream of small victories to get through the day. And the third is for the more analytic types, who need to know that they’re working on the objectively most important thing possible at this moment.
- Eat a Frog
There’s an old saying to the effect that if you wake up in the morning and eat a live frog, you can go through the day knowing that the worst thing that can possibly happen to you that day has already passed. In other words, the day can only get better.
The idea here is that you tackle the biggest, hardest, and least appealing task first thing every day, so you can move through the rest of the day knowing that the worst has already passed.
- Move Big Rocks
Maybe you are not a procrastinator so much as a fiddler, someone who fills her or his time fussing over little tasks. You are busy busy busy all the time, but somehow, nothing important ever seems to get done.
You can fill the time you have in a day up with meaningless little busy-work tasks, leaving no room for the big stuff, or you can do the big stuff first, then the smaller stuff, and finally fill in the spare moments with the useless stuff. To put it into practice, sit down tonight before you go to bed and write down the three most important tasks you have to get done tomorrow.
In the morning, take out your list and attack the first “Big Rock”. Work on it until it’s done or you can’t make any further progress. Then move on to the second, and then the third. Once you’ve finished them all, you can start in with the little stuff, knowing you’ve made good progress on all the big stuff.
- Covey Quadrants
If you just cannot relax unless you absolutely know you are working on the most important thing you could be working on at every instant, Stephen Covey’s quadrant system might be for you.
Covey suggests you divide a piece of paper into four sections, drawing a line across and a line from top to bottom. Into each of those quadrants, you put your tasks according to whether they are:
I.Important and Urgent
II.Important and Not Urgent
III.Not Important but Urgent
IV.Not Important and Not Urgent
The quadrant III and IV stuff is where we get bogged down in the trivial. Although some of this stuff might have some social value, if it interferes with your ability to do the things that are important to you, they need to go.
Quadrant I and II are the tasks that are important to us. If you are really on top of your time management, you can minimize Q1 tasks, but you can never eliminate them: these things all demand immediate action and are rarely planned for.
You would like to spend as much time as possible in Quadrant II, plugging away at tasks that are important with plenty of time to really get into them and do the best possible job. This is the stuff that the QIII and QIV stuff takes time away from, so after you’ve plotted out your tasks on the Covey quadrant grid, according to your own sense of what’s important and what isn’t, work as much as possible on items in Quadrant II (and Quadrant I tasks when they arise).
It’s only after you’ve stepped outside your comfort zone that you begin to change, grow, and transform.
Image Source: Pixabay – mohamed_hassan
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