Coach John G. Agno is your own cultural attache; keeping you abreast of what's effective in leadership. People learn better and are positively motivated when supported by regular coaching.
PERSONAL COACHING Leadership onboarding coaching helps the executive adapt to the employer's culture, create rapport with their team and develop productive ways to achieve necessary goals.
SELF ASSESSMENT CENTER Leadership skills and style testing. Know how you motivate and coach people to gain success at work and in life.
WHAT IS LEADERSHIP? Leadership is an interactive conversation that pulls people toward becoming comfortable with the language of personal responsibility and commitment.
LEADERSHIP TIPS “The crux of leadership development that works is self-directed learning: intentionally developing or strengthening an aspect of who you are or who you want to be, or both.” Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis & Annie McKee (Harvard Business School Press)
Our natural talents are gifts at birth. We had nothing to do with them. However, we have a great deal to do with becoming aware of them. It is up to us to discover our natural signature talents and transform them through focus, practice and learning into strengths.
Our first awareness of what comes easy happens in late childhood or adolescence. We then build on these competencies in our first job or when some other transitional situation occurs that demands we use one or more of our innate talents more purposefully. Focusing on what matters helps us reach clarity.
As the years go by, we practice those things that come easily to us as we build our natural talents into strengths. Concurrently, we experience what doesn’t come easy to us, while trying not to overplay our talents, as we work around and underplay our weaknesses. The result is we undermine our destiny by attempting to live within our limitations.
This new book reminds us that we have spent our time and energy pursuing things that are not aligned with who we really are and what we are capable of achieving. When we understand the misalignments between what we do naturally and what is required for success, we can close the design gap of where we want to be instead of attempting to change who we are.
When we reach out to others, who help us get to where we want to be, we increase our ability to be resourceful, to persist and be generative using our designed plan for happiness and success. We build resilience and adaptability through receiving and acting upon the feedback received from those who help us as we move along the path of constant change which is the new normal.
@F-L-O-Wis the guide we need to ride the waves of change while enjoying the happiness and well being we seek.
As the business world and the Internet become increasingly intertwined, it’s becoming apparent just how relevant that platitude is to the success of your business. Particularly when it comes to search marketing, as it is necessary to accumulate inbound links from other sites to your own
The average business typically doesn’t have a significant amount of time or resources to dedicate to gathering links or citations, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t. What it does mean is that they should take a basic approach to link building that will greatly improve their SEO efforts without requiring major investments in their most valuable resources (time and money). Fortunately, there is a simple approach to link building that breaks the practice into two primary categories: content creation and networking. Here’s how you can get started without losing sleep or breaking the bank.
As with all search-related practices, content is the backbone of link building efforts. Content drives interest in your site, establishes you as an authority and, ultimately, gets you links. Thus, you must establish a content plan for your website. To do this, identify and learn about your target audience.
Before anyone will want to look at your content, they have to find it, which is why you should also identify widely searched keywords related to your niche that signify user intent, and then include them in your site’s content. Using these terms helps interested and relevant parties discover you, a crucial step in the link building process.
Once you know what you want to write about and who you want to write to, it’s time to start publishing content. Arguably, the best way to do this is by starting a blog and updating it regularly. You can blog as often as multiple times daily or as infrequently as weekly, but keep a consistent, regular schedule to make your audience feel familiar and comfortable. Don’t forget to make your content easily linkable or shareable (usually with social share buttons), so that visitors who enjoy it don’t have to work too hard to share it with others.
One great method to increase traffic and save yourself some time is to only submit part of an article (or one installment in a series) and include a link to the rest of it on your site.
See where your own visitors are coming from, such as other websites or directories, and then visit those pages to see where else they’re sending users. Some of these could provide good link leads from more established sites. Finding the best sites to target shouldn’t be difficult, because as a responsible publisher, you’ve already studied your audience and know what kind of content they like.
Source: Michael Garrity, associate editor, Website Magazine, November 2012
A decade into the 21st. century, one thing has become clear: constant change is the new normal.
The question is no longer if, but rather "how." Companies that have learned to ride these waves of change are the ones that will successfully compete in today's economy and beyond.
In Change-Friendly Leadership, Duncan shares four simple strategies to navigate change, which he names the Four Ts:
Think-Friendly behaviors include exercising curiosity, asking smart questions, and challenging your own conclusions. Sound thinking is at the center of every effective change effort. It doesn't necessarily have to be brilliant thinking, although that never hurts. But it needs to be sound thinking--thinking that raises the right questions and elicits a range of reasonable answers. Thinking that expands possibilities.
Being Talk-Friendly involves dialogue skills, listening to learn and understand rather than to rebut or overpower. Simply put, true dialogue cannot occur in an atmosphere where anyone is inclined to exert power over another. Command-and-control is the antithesis of an open and honest sharing of meaning. An atmosphere of mutual trust is impossible to establish if any of the participants are perceived to be holding their power ready for an ambush.
A leader is Trust-Friendly by consistently earning trust and extending trust. The language of trust is both verbal and non-verbal. It's both words and behaviors. It is not subtle. When used appropriately, the language of trust is deliberate and explicit, and it makes all the difference in every kind of relationship.
A Watson Wyatt study showed that high-trust organizations outperformed low-trust organizations by 286%--that's nearly three times--in total return to shareholders. Disengaged employees are enormously expensive. Engagement flows out of trust, and trust flows out of engagement. They are mutually reinforcing.
Being Team-Friendly means working with people in ways that foster genuine collaboration. When we're strategic about putting both the team and the work into teamwork, beautiful things can happen. "Team" is used to describe a carefully selected group of individuals who work interdependently, who are mutually supportive, and who bring out the best in each other as they strive to accomplish a set of specific goals. With a real team, in other words, the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts.
Managing change does not mean a narrow, lock-step approach that controls all the variables. It means setting boundaries around the chaos, challenging the status quo, and providing a deliberate and proactive process for getting from point A to point B and beyond.
“Ask” is the keyword both for the leader as coach and for the person being coached.
When someone knows that the leader is ready, willing and able to take the time necessary to talk about a subject important to that person, effective coaching can happen on the dance floor of conversation.
As my holiday gift to you and your friends on Dec. 10 & 11 at Amazon.com, I am giving away the new ebook “Ask the Coach” to download on your smartphone, eReader, tablet or computer. Please note that “Ask the Coach” is a reference book; like a dictionary or any other similar resource book that is not meant to be read cover to cover. Readers would normally look up a question of interest in the Table of Contents and then proceed to read that self-coaching answer in the book.
The insights in this book are meant to help you develop the leadership skills necessary to become the master of yourself so you will be ready, willing and able to lead others. Self leadership happens through self-learning and self-coaching.
If you could do just one thing to help your customers and your business, what would that be?
Our answer is to consider giving more of what you have away. One of the most potent laws of influence is the law of reciprocity (http://www.lawofreciprocity.com/).
The law is that people want to repay, in kind, what another person has given to them. Reciprocity flows from the law of love (http://www.lawoflove.com/) that is “the gift of giving” without the “hope of reward or pay,” or serving others. Remind yourself that reciprocity is not about what you need but what the other person needs and how you can give that to them.
Finding ways to make your gift stand out takes some thought about what would make the recipient happy.
For your best customers, consider abandoning the usual baskets of fruit and cheese or imprinted coffee mugs at special times of the year. Also, avoid those silly end-of-the-year gifts of refrigerator magnet calendars given in mass by real estate and insurance agents. Many recipients would rather see the money you spend on calendars or fruit baskets go to a worthwhile cause.... like a charity or to help someone get to where they want to be.
All businesses are ultimately people serving people and our life’s work should come from the heart. Long after your thoughtful gift has been delivered, the feelings and knowledge shared during the business relationship remain.
Gary Chapman in his book, The Five Love Languages, tells us that there are five ways people speak and understand emotional love. One of those is in receiving gifts: A gift is something you can hold in your hand and say "Look, he was thinking of me," or "She remembered me." The gift is a symbol of thought and the thought remains not only in the mind but is expressed in actually securing the gift and giving it as an expression of love.
World economic losses to disasters totaled an estimated $380 billion in 2011, and nearly every major company now sets up detailed continuity and mitigation plans for everything from terrorist incidents and nuclear attacks to pandemics like bird flu.
A cottage industry of in-house sky-is-falling professionals and glass-half-empty consulting firms has sprung up to deal with this need. And as companies become more reliant on digital data and geographically diverse locations, their strategies must evolve, too. “For instance, people don’t warehouse parts anymore,” says Ken Burris, chief executive officer of Witt Associates, a crisis management consultancy. “They rely on just-in-time delivery. But when there’s that hiccup in the supply chain, they’d better have multiple contingencies in place, or work stops.” And Burris points out that the implications are often dire: “Statistics show that, of small businesses impacted by disaster, about a third don’t recover.”
When millions in the Northeast lost power, cell service, Internet access, and running water due to Superstorm Sandy in October 2012, companies scrambled to find the answer.
The biggest difference between recent disruptions and those only a decade ago shows up in businesses’ increasing faith in cloud computing, which was sorely tested by Sandy. As Lower Manhattan was swamped, major media companies such as Huffington Post, MarketWatch, and Gawker saw their sites go offline as water flooded the basement floors of the Datagram server building.
Peer1 Hosting, a Net outfit based in Lower Manhattan, thought it was in the clear—it had generators on the 17th floor ready to keep the data servers humming. But when the fuel pump in the basement was flooded, Peer1 was unable to get the necessary diesel fuel upstairs.
And obviously the cloud can’t help if you don’t have electricity, cell service, or Net access. In the 10 states hit by Sandy, 25 percent of cell towers and land lines were affected by the storm, according to the Federal Communications Commission. Downtown New York lost power for nearly a week.
Yet, a smartphone and a land line are all you really need for a good day's work.
A hardwired phone is an enormous help, but not without a phone book. If you don't have a number in your contact list, you could look it up only in fits and starts, as the signal on your smartphone comes and goes.
There is also more contact redundancy in your life than you realize. If you don't have someone's cellphone number, you probably have their email address. If neither works, there's Facebook messaging. If that won't load, maybe a Twitter direct message will.
Also, you have to have a backup way to charge the smartphone. A portable battery pack, good for about six phone chargings, would work.
The toughest part is simple typing and editing what you've typed on the smartphone.
"Taxes are what we pay for civilized society," Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., said, nearly a century ago.
Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more taxes because they have benefited more. Taxes, well laid and well spent, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare.
Taxes protect property and the environment; taxes make business possible. Taxes pay for roads and schools and bridges and police and teachers. Taxes pay for doctors and nursing homes and medicine.
During an emergency, like an earthquake or a hurricane, taxes pay for rescue workers, shelters, and services. For people whose lives are devastated by other kinds of disaster, like the disaster of poverty, taxes pay, even for food.
Taxes are a pact. That pact needs renewing through constructive leadership.
Nearly six million factory jobs, almost a third of the entire manufacturing industry, have disappeared since 2000. And while many of these jobs were lost to competition with low-wage countries, even more vanished because of computer-driven machinery that can do the work of 10, or in some cases, 100 workers. Those jobs are not coming back, but many believe that the industry’s future (and, to some extent, the future of the American economy) lies in training a new generation for highly skilled manufacturing jobs — the ones that require people who know how to run the computer that runs the machine.
This is partly because advanced manufacturing is really complicated. Running these machines requires a basic understanding of metallurgy, physics, chemistry, pneumatics, electrical wiring and computer code. It also requires a worker with the ability to figure out what’s going on when the machine isn’t working properly. And aspiring workers often need to spend a considerable amount of time and money taking classes to even be considered.
And yet, even as classes are filled to capacity all over America, hundreds of thousands of U.S. factories are starving for skilled workers. Throughout this year's presidential campaign, President Obama lamented the so-called skills gap and referenced a study claiming that nearly 80 percent of manufacturers have jobs they can’t fill. Mitt Romney made similar claims. The National Association of Manufacturers estimates that there are roughly 600,000 jobs available for whoever has the right set of advanced skills.
The secret behind this skills gap is that it’s not a skills gap at all.
Several factory managers confessed that they had a hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs. “It’s hard not to break out laughing,” says Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center, referring to manufacturers complaining about the shortage of skilled workers. “If there’s a skill shortage, there has to be rises in wages,” he says. “It’s basic economics.” After all, according to supply and demand, a shortage of workers with valuable skills should push wages up. Yet, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of skilled jobs has fallen and so have their wages.
In a recent study, the Boston Consulting Group noted that, outside a few small cities that rely on the oil industry, there weren’t many places where manufacturing wages were going up and employers still couldn’t find enough workers. “Trying to hire high-skilled workers at rock-bottom rates,” the Boston Group study asserted, “is not a skills gap.” The study’s conclusion, however, was scarier. Many skilled workers have simply chosen to apply their skills elsewhere rather than work for less, and few young people choose to invest in training for jobs that pay fast-food wages. As a result, the United States may soon have a hard time competing in the global economy. The average age of a highly skilled factory worker in the U.S. is now 56. “That’s average,” says Hal Sirkin, the lead author of the study. “That means there’s a lot who are in their 60s. They’re going to retire soon.” And there are not enough trainees in the pipeline, he said, to replace them.
Manufacturers, who face increasing competition from low-wage countries, feel they can’t afford to pay higher wages. Potential workers choose more promising career paths. “It’s individually rational,” says Howard Wial, an economist at the Brookings Institution who specializes in manufacturing employment. “But it’s not socially optimal.”
In retrospect, the post-World War II industrial model did a remarkably good job of supporting a system in which an 18-year-old had access to on-the-job training that was nearly certain to pay off over a long career. That system had its flaws — especially a shared complacency that left manufacturers and laborers unprepared for global trade and technological change.
Don't expect a big thank-you at work this week. While people may express gratitude when they gather at Thanksgiving, showing appreciation is far from traditional at the office.
A common attitude from the corner office is "We thank people around here: It's called a paycheck," says Bob Nelson, an employee-motivation consultant in San Diego.
The workplace ranks dead last among the places people express gratitude, from homes and neighborhoods to places of worship. Only 10% of adults say thanks to a colleague every day, and just 7% express gratitude daily to a boss, according to a survey this year of 2,007 people for the John Templeton Foundation of West Conshohocken, Pa., a nonprofit organization that sponsors research on creativity, gratitude, freedom and other topics.
Spouses, partners, children, parents, friends and mere acquaintances are up to four times more likely to get a thank-you, participants said.
More than half of human-resources managers say showing appreciation for workers cuts turnover, and 49% believe it increases profit, according to a study of 815 managers by the Society for Human Resource Management.
Even the crustiest managers acknowledge that acknowledgment matters. Jack Welch, the former General Electric chief executive who is famed for his business philosophy of ceaseless, rigorous review and improvement, says he thanked employees on every plant tour and facility visit. "If you don't do it, you don't have a culture. You are just a bunch of bricks and mortar," he says.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, November 21, 2012
In the 1960s a new concept in leadership, known as "servant leadership," began with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead.
Creating the next wave of vision, inspiration, workability and success in leadership that will turn many current ideas and philosophies of leadership upside down is "grateful leadership." By definition, grateful leaders are those who see, recognize and express appreciation and gratitude for their employees' and other stakeholders' contributions and for their passionate engagement, on an ongoing basis.
Acknowledgment is the heartfelt and authentic communication that lets people know their value to their organization or to their team and the importance of the contribution they make.
You can start being a grateful leader by practicing acknowledgment skills on those in your workplace whom you don't know well or even at all--relative strangers who surpass your expectations. As you practice these skills, you will begin making the workplace a happier, more productive environment. Look carefully and you will find those unsung people who deserve acknowledgement.
Why focus on relative strangers or people we see from time-to-time at work but don't know well? Because doing a good job of delivering a whole-heart-ed ackknowledgment of someone can be harder than it sounds. It makes sense to try it out on people who aren't as close to you as the people you work side-by-side with. Relative strangers will be pleasantly surprised, and they are not likely to waste time worrying about your motives. And when you make someone's day, you make your own, and everyone benefits.
When we are willing to speak committedly and generously and gratefully from our hearts, we can all help others experience the true meaning of their service. It is your privilege and challenge as a grateful leader to make sure that your people know how valuable their contribution is.
With a simple, caring act of appreciation and acknowledgment, we simply have no idea of the contribution we make to someone who talks to thousands of people.
Assessment is a sensitive field. Behavioral assessing is expensive, time-consuming and not easy to manage because it deals with personality variables. Perhaps, most telling is that it is becoming part of the emerging application of predictive analytics for business.
Testing employees' competencies and their abilities to carry out operational assignments, like recalling information and using it to successfully complete tasks, is fundamental for organizational success.
Behavioral assessments typically focus on competencies related to managing priorities, managing others, managing priorities, managing for results and managing change. These are important aspects of life at work, to be sure, but more difficult to measure.
Cognitive skills are less affected by changes in the work environment than are behavioral traits. It is easier to teach people how to operate or repair something than it is to help them understand the complexity and consequences of interpersonal behavior.
As people become more self-aware, they are usually amazed at the abilities of the conscious mind to choose, handle situations with deliberation, and behave appropriately for different occasions. On the flip side, the unconscious mind is a powerful force driving our behavior. Within our unconscious lie veiled assumptions and beliefs that formulate what is called default behavior. The dictionary defines default as the “failure to perform a task or fulfill an obligation,” which means that default behaviors are reactive responses that occur when we fail to consider the appropriate response.
Becoming aware of our personal reactive tendencies is crucial if we want to make sense of our toxic behaviors, understand why we have permitted these gremlins to continue, and develop a plan for taming them.
Our attitudes are choices, some of the most important choices we will ever make. Attitudes are reflections of what goes on inside our heads. They affect everything we do—positively or negatively. A negative attitude acts like the accelerator of a car. When we put our pedal to the metal, we learn very quickly that driving can indeed be dangerous to our health and to our career aspirations. Default behaviors occur when we decide not to act, but to react. And default behaviors may not represent our best side or our ideal self.
Talking in the language of behaviors and outcomes, which managers understand, is the key to addressing the relevance of the data or people intelligence found in an assessment. It is how the results of self-assessments should be reported and incorporated in an organization's analytics around its people capabilities.
