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)
All three participants should engage in this conversation, trying to speak with fresh thoughts and staying in a quiet mind. Don't describe a moment of insight that you have thought about dozens of times before. Do mention any thought that feels new and fresh.
There are two roles (one speaker and two listeners). The speaker describes his issue in sixty seconds or less while the other two people listen quietly. They should remain completely silent and refrain from asking any questions.
Once the sixty seconds is up or the speaker has finished (whichever comes first), the listeners should face each other (preferably with the speaker out of their line of sight). The listeners should be looking for a good feeling, not barking out the first thought that comes to mind. The period allotted for sharing fresh thoughts begins in a silence that lasts until a light bulb flashes for one of the participants.
Each time either listener has a truly fresh thought on the subject, she shares it with the other listener while being "overheard" by the speaker. Remember that the purpose is neither to solve the problem nor to give advice. It is rather to generate fresh thought around the subject and help facilitate an insight in the speaker.
The speaker should now take two minutes or less to report any new insights that may have occurred during the exercise and comment on what it was like listening to the others discuss the topic using only fresh thinking.
According to Census Bureau data from 2013, about 4.8 million Americans moved across state lines in the previous year. That is down from 5.76 million in 2006 and 7.5 million in 1999. All in all, the percentage of Americans moving across state lines has fallen by about half since the 1990s.
The slowdown represents a tectonic shift in our economy and labor market--across all industries and all incomes and ages. Clearly, the recession has something to do with declining mobility. You can't move for a job if no jobs exist. You can't buy a house if nobody gives you a mortgage. And you can't sell a house and take off if nobody is buying.
This is not a short-term supply-and-demand issue or a side effect of a slow-growth economy or shift in demographics. The change is deeper. Earnings have been become similar across the country, meaning there is less incentive to move from one place to another in search of a raise.
The rise of the Internet can explain much of the rest of the decline in mobility, by reducing the chance that a worker will move and move and move again in search of a good neighborhood or a good job. By information being more accessible, the Internet has improved the quality of any given move. As a result, Americans' moves are stickier these days.
Source: INERTIA NATION, New York Times Magazine, December 15, 2013.
As any business owner knows, negative online reviews can have a huge impact on future business. But what should you do when you get the inevitable less-than-positive review? Ignore it? Respond?
Based on an analysis of thousands of local businesses featured on the Locality.com platform, Locality CEO Jay Shek developed a list of four crucial mistakes that small business owners frequently make when responding to negative online reviews:
MISTAKE 1: POSTING FAKE POSITIVE REVIEWS Local neighborhood guides often have red flags in place to find out when a business owner posts fake reviews. Don't run the risk of being publicly shamed. It's not worth it.
MISTAKE 2: OVERREACTING Negative responses, finger-pointing, and customer-blaming is a quick way to turn a bad online conversation into really bad buzz that hurts your bottom line. Instead, be constructive and find a solution.
MISTAKE 3: BEING TOO PASSIVE Ask your loyal followers to review you online. Target red flags in customer service and nip them in the bud before they find their way to a review.
MISTAKE 4: KEEPING THE CONVERSATION ONLINE Don't get stuck online -- move the conversation offline. Contact the customer behind the negative review, hear them out, and offer a positive solution.
ABOUT LOCALITY: Founded in 2011, Locality (http://www.locality.com/) is a service that businesses can use to create an online profile and publish their information for free. To sign up, visit www.locality.com/merchants.
Janet Yellen is lined up to run the Federal Reserve. General Motors named Mary Barra to be the next chief executive officer (CEO). Angela Merkel won another term as chancellor of Germany. Park Geun Hye took office as South Korea's president. Kathleen Taylor was named the next chairman of the Royal Bank of Canada. In Chile's presidential race, both candidates in the runoff were women.
Catalyst, recognized that women didn't get more seats in the boardrooms and C-suites. Still, in the year that Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg published "Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead," women everywhere made impressive economic and political gains.
“It’s hard to believe that at the end of 2013 we still see more than a few all-male corporate boards and leadership teams.” said Ilene H. Lang, President & CEO, Catalyst. “Diverse business leadership and governance are correlated with stronger business performance, employee engagement, and innovation. Shareholders beware: a company with no women at the top is missing one of the biggest opportunities in the marketplace today.”
Leaders in new positions often failfor a few common reasons: due to unclear or outsized expectations, a failure to build partnerships with key stakeholders, a failure to learn the company, industry or the job itself fast enough, a failure to determine the process for gaining commitments from direct reports and a failure to recognize and manage the impact of change on people. However, onboarding coaching of the newly recruited or promoted executive can turnaround this high rate of failure.
As a new leader, you go on to explain, to those who report to you, what you want to focus on, and how you want to work. When you get up to go to the first team, one of the associates asks you, "What is it you need most of us?"
You smile a bit about the words she chose ('needs'...), and answer, "What I need is results. The results to improve the situation." With that, you leave the room. You don't hear them saying to you: "We agree, but we lack trust..."
You are gone. Just at the moment when they needed you, and you could have had a big impact on the situation. You do not realize that had you noticed this need, and acted on it, the message would have gone to all involved faster than the speed of light. Trust and confidence would have begun to grow. Results would soon have followed. All this just because you have related to what was the obvious first need of those involved.
Instead, you are now telling the first team what must be done, and how you work. You don't ask them anything. They listen to you, some of them take notes, but you don't see them interacting. You repeat once more what needs to be done, and that you expect a thorough approach.
What you don't grasp yet, is that for control to work for these people, there has to be trust first. We don't begin by controlling the process, but by laying down the foundation based on cooperation.
Fostering the formation of positive relationships in organizations is a topic that has been well examined. One of the most important findings associated with this research, however, is the explanation for why positive relationships produce desirable outcomes. What has actually been found is that what people give to a relationship, rather than what they receive from a relationship, accounts for the positive effects.
It is commonly understood that positive relationships are satisfying and preferred by people, but the benefits extend well beyond just providing a pleasant experience. Positive social relationships— the uplifting connections associated with individuals’ interpersonal interactions— have beneficial effects on a variety of aspects of human behavior and health.
Increases in oxytocin cause people to seek social contact with others (Taylor, 2002), so that a virtuous cycle of positive social interactions is created. People who experience positive relationships (as opposed to ambivalent or negative relationships) experience lower blood pressure, systolic heart rate, and diastolic heart rate (Holt-Lunstad, et al., 2003). When encountering stressful events, people’s cardiovascular systems worked less hard (as evidenced by lower heart rates and blood pressure) when they were in positive relationships or felt social support at work.
In addition to the physiological effects of positive relationships, a variety of psychological, emotional, and organizational benefits have also been uncovered in research.
Positive Energy Networks
Research has discovered that individuals can be identified as “positive energizers” or “negative energizers,” and that the difference has important implications. Positive energizers create and support vitality in others. They uplift and boost people. Interacting with positive energizers leaves others feeling elevated and motivated. Positive energizers have been found to be optimistic, heedful, trustworthy, and unselfish. Interacting with them builds energy in people and is an inspiring experience.
In contrast, negative energizers deplete the good feelings and enthusiasm of others. They sap strength from and weaken people. They leave others feeling exhausted and diminished. Negative energizers have been found to be critical, inflexible, selfish, and undependable.
Most importantly, positive energizing is a learned behavior. It is not a personality attribute, inherent charisma or physical attractiveness. Positive energy is not a matter of merely being gregarious or outgoing. People learn how to become positive energizers. It is not an inherent attribute.
Positive energizers benefit their organizations not only by performing better themselves but also by enabling others to perform better. For example, in studies of network maps in organizations comparing people’s position in information networks (i.e., who obtains information from whom), influence networks (i.e., who influences whom), and positive-energy networks (i.e., who energizes whom) revealed that a person’s position in the energy network is far more predictive of success than her or his position in information or influence networks (Baker, 2004). Being a positive energizer made individuals four times more likely to succeed than being at the center of an information or influence network.
The "Vision" describes the organization three to five years from now, answering the question "where are we going" in a way that makes us want to get there.
Vision, along with the other intangibles, is a part of the creation of a mission statement. A good vision inspires and motivates employees, provides the basis (along with other intangibles like assumptions/beliefs, values and guiding principles) for setting goals along with the strategy to achieve them. Most important, it sets the expectations of all stakeholders and aligns employee efforts. All customers, employees, suppliers and the community are anxious to know what the organization will become....since they all have a stake in its success.
When everyone engaged in the business can agree thattheir personal beliefs fit well with the company's intangibles (of assumptions/beliefs, vision, values and guiding principles), they understand and will contribute to a meaningful corporate mission statement.
Here are intangible elements defined:
•Assumptions/beliefs: A reality map formed through your collective reinforced experience. This would be a manifesto of the mental models you use and believe in to create your work and personal lives.
•Values/Aspirations: An attitude or world-view depicted by one word or one single concept observed through one's behavior. Values often influence people's choices about where to invest their energies. Please recognize that values change over time. Being "fair" means something different for a person at 44 than at 4 years old.
•Vision: A word picture of the future leading from now through near to far reality. You energize people to support your purpose or life signature with an overarching description of what you see.
•Guiding Principles: A universal operating standard that guides decision-making both personally and organizationally. Use guiding principles to align, create trust and walk the talk by putting everybody on the same playing field. Energy isn’t wasted in the politics of the team, organization or community because there aren't different rules for everybody.
Without joint agreement on these intangibles, a vision statement runs the risk of each listener defining it their own way, buying into their own different perspectives, wasting the opportunity for alignment and setting the stage for future disputes that undermine the focus critical for success.
The technique in developing a vision is to do it as a team. Since buy-in is crucial to a successful vision, a solo approach is not likely to be the right answer. The team who must buy-in must also have a role in developing the vision. The leader can then "create the vision" by leading the discussion and declaring his or her synthesis of the team's thinking.
A good vision inspires when it is rooted both in reality and in the assumptions/belief, values/aspirations and guiding principles of the employees.
When John G. Agno speaks, it’s good to listen and even take a few notes. Not only is he a seasoned corporate executive, but he is an author and management consultant who coaches senior executives and business owners. The wonderful thing for us is he has written an amazing resource for executives called Develop Leadership Skills: A Reference Guide.
This well-organized and concise guide is filled with easily accessible and relevant topics for busy executives who want timely answers. From the beginning section on insights, which covers leadership styles and blind spots to an intriguing topic on the advantages of disadvantages, Agno fluidly moves to strategies in developing visions and goals and innovations for shifting perspectives.
The personal development section has ways of becoming a better leader, developing interactional skills, and managing office politics. It leads into the business development section on introducing a new labor model, achieving sustainable growth, and branding. The section on teams and collaboration rounds out the book with tips on managing productivity and morale, building trust, and coaching. Agno’s extensive knowledge of the business environment makes this a reference book worth studying over and over again.
Psychologists and economists have studied happiness for decades. They begin simply enough — by asking people how happy they are.
The richest data available to social scientists is the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, a survey of Americans conducted since 1972. This widely used resource is considered the scholarly gold standard for understanding social phenomena. The numbers on happiness from the survey are surprisingly consistent.
But don’t bet your well-being on big one-off events. The big brass ring is not the secret to lasting happiness.
About half of happiness is genetically determined.
Up to an additional 40 percent comes from the things that have occurred in our recent past — but that won’t last very long.
That leaves just about 12 percent. That might not sound like much, but the good news is that we can bring that 12 percent under our control. It turns out that choosing to pursue four basic values of faith, family, community and work is the surest path to happiness, given that a certain percentage is genetic and not under our control in any way.
The first three are fairly uncontroversial. Empirical evidence that faith, family and friendships increase happiness and meaning is hardly shocking. Few dying patients regret overinvesting in rich family lives, community ties and spiritual journeys.
Work, though, seems less intuitive.
What if we ask something simple: “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your job?” This simpler approach is more revealing because respondents apply their own standards. This is what the General Social Survey asks, and the results may surprise. More than 50 percent of Americans say they are “completely satisfied” or “very satisfied” with their work. This rises to over 80 percent when we include “fairly satisfied.” This finding generally holds across income and education levels.
According to the General Social Survey, nearly three-quarters of Americans wouldn’t quit their jobs even if a financial windfall enabled them to live in luxury for the rest of their lives. Those with the least education, the lowest incomes and the least prestigious jobs were actually most likely to say they would keep working, while elites were more likely to say they would take the money and run. We would do well to remember this before scoffing at “dead-end jobs.”
Assemble these clues and your brain will conclude what your heart already knew: Work can bring happiness by marrying our passions to our skills, empowering us to create value in our lives and in the lives of others. Franklin D. Roosevelt had it right: “Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.”
This is not conjecture; it is driven by the data. Americans who feel they are successful at work are twice as likely to say they are very happy overall as people who don’t feel that way. And these differences persist after controlling for income and other demographics.
Based on Soleil's Eight Principles of Business, the book provides a framework to create a high-performing business that gets results by creating a culture that's fueled with human energy to achieve greater levels of growth and innovation.
To actually enjoy waking up and going to work again, you want to live life the way you want to live it...not the way everyone else in this world is telling you to live. The search for your purpose---your life signature---matters.
You can't separate your business life from your personal life.
You can try, but it's not possible. Our energy is our energy. It doesn't matter if you're at home, at work, in the car, with your kids, or with your dog, our energy and who you are remain exactly the same. When people are on a constant search for their purpose, they become absolutely exhausted, easily frustrated with life, and the energy they put into the world is that of frustration, exhaustion and irritation. Home or work, it makes no difference where you are; if you're on the search for your purpose, everything you do is impacted by the exhaustion you carry with you.
In highly developed countries, there is a growing percentage of people thinking about their meaning of life. This genuine spiritual concern is broader than traditional views of religion practiced in numerous countries of the world. Yet, it is unclear to most how they want to live their life in a meaningful way. Purpose is a verb. Your purpose shows up in how you show up to live your life. It's not a thing that's waiting to be found.
"No man is born into the world whose work is not born with him." James Russell Lowell
The message is:Life is not a dress rehearsal. You can solve your problems using the mind you know you have. You can stop seeking answers outside yourself. You can look within.
When your business helps people live their purpose, people want to help your business live its purpose. The purpose of every individual person in your business needs to come first. There is no exception. The energy that comes from the people who authentically live their truth is the same energy you need to help move your business to its destination.
Everyone in your business wants a life full of purpose and meaning. When they do, there's nothing they can't accomplish. If your business isn't set up to help people spread their wings and fly, they will leave your business and go work somewhere they can honor their own life purpose.
We live in an economy where we don't have to tolerate jobs we hate. For the most part, we get to choose. But that choice isn't about a job search so much as an identity quest. So, don't be cursed because of your tremendous ability and infinite choice of jobs. Decide what you can devote your life to and then live your dream.
Bottom line: If you want to fuel your business, energize people, and drive profits by increasing the healthy energy flow in your business, you have to create opportunities for people to want to be part of the business---on their own terms, and in their own way. You have to create experiences that make people want to stay because being part of the business makes them feel good. People need to have a genuine belief that the business has their best interests in mind.
When everyone engaged in the business can agree that their personal beliefs fit well with the company's intangibles (of assumptions/beliefs, vision, values and guiding principles), they will understand and contribute to a meaningful corporate mission statement.
Here are intangible elements defined:
•Assumptions/beliefs: A reality map formed through your collective reinforced experience. This would be a manifesto of the mental models you use and believe in to create your work and personal lives.
•Values/Aspirations: An attitude or world-view depicted by one word or one single concept observed through one's behavior. Values often influence people's choices about where to invest their energies. Please recognize that values change over time. Being "fair" means something different for a person at 44 than at 4 years old.
•Vision: A word picture of the future leading from now through near to far reality. You energize people to support your purpose or life signature with an overarching description of what you see.
•Guiding Principles: A universal operating standard that guides decision-making both personally and organizationally. Use guiding principles to align, create trust and walk the talk by putting everybody on the same playing field. Energy isn’t wasted in the politics of the team, organization or community because there aren't different rules for everybody.
That corporate mission statement then becomes the foundation for every business plan that will be developed, understood and supported by all employees. However, if there is no joint agreement of those "intangibles," every future business plan will slowly and painfully fail.
The workforce is rapidly changing. As it grows more multicultural, youngerand more female, businesses are feeling the effects of "the power gap" --- the growing distance between frontline managers and workers from different backgrounds. The result? Misunderstanding, miscommunication, missed opportunity and loss of market share.
As Jane Hyun and Audrey S. Lee show in "FLEX: The New Playbook for Managing Across Differences," the key to managing today's diverse workforce lies in "flexing" -- the art of switching between leadership styles to more effectively communicate with and lead people who are different from you.
Portrait of a Fluent Leader
Fluent leaders consistently demonstrate a core set of beliefs and mind-sets that guide their actions in the workplace and in their communities. These collected traits, along with an intentional focus on improving their management skills form the basis of the tremendous influence, admiration and respect given them by their teams and, for some, by their clients and suppliers.
Fluent leader flexing is about having the ability to switch behaviors and styles in order to communicate more effectively with those who are different from you. It may help to think about flexing as "stretching" your interpersonal style or "reaching out" to meet someone else partway.
Self-aware leaders know it is easier to spot points of commonality in others if you refrain from positioning your way as the only way to get things done. This is a critical component of flexing across the power gap.
You can retain your value system and still stretch your style to meet someone different from you partway. In fact, one common theme about fluent leaders is their astute sense of self and strong personal moral core. Their behaviors are rooted in a value system that they stand by, regardless of whether it is aligned to their company culture.
There are critical traits for a fluent leader that encompasses the attitudes and behaviors needed to flex up, down and across. Fluent leaders have a good grasp of their own power gap preference. In practice, this typically means that they are self-awareenough to realize that they are more comfortable with less hierarchical structures, or that they prefer a certain communication style.
Adaptability is a key component of fluent leadership, indicating an ability to adapt to stretch your styles and preferences and sometimes exercise other styles in order to better interact with others. Fluent leaders are not rigid, constrained or trapped in a single-mode way of thinking. This is a fairly conventional definition of an innovative mind-set.
Fluent leaders are comfortable owning a leadership identity and effective at managing up, down and across the organization, as well as with customers and vendors. They can turn failures into teachable moments and maintain an ability to see the promise of their teams.
