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)
Podcasts and mobile learning are revolutionizing on the job training and education in general.
Teams need continual training, but varied learning styles are difficult to navigate. What works for some members of the workforce is useless for others, and generation gaps in technology exacerbate the situation. Podcasts overcome these hurdles with ease. They engage audiences across demographic boundaries, and with the help of mobile learning, increasing learning speed, retention, and recall.
Mobile learning gives team members access to training materials from anywhere in the world, a strong benefit for companies with remote workers and employees that travel frequently on the job. Significantly cheaper than other learning options, podcasts can be produced in-house by company leadership, and even turned into an income stream for the company, as well as a training material.
The infographic below, titled Why Podcasting Is Primed For Mobile Learning, illustrates many of the reasons that today’s leaders should take advantage of this powerful educational tool.
The workforce is becoming more global, multigenerational, social, and mobile. Employers are borrowing from consumer technologies to design new systems of employee management.
Any recognition solution worth the name should be flexible enough to change with new and emerging technologies. In social recognition, thinking globally and acting locally is absolutely necessary.
People are habitually plugged into what's going on moment to moment. Even employees who value work/life balance are habituated to answering email and checking Twitter feeds and all the rest at any hour. Work activities and private life seep into each other. In a 24/7, borderless work world, recognition can potentially happen at any time and any place.
Like global organizations, mutigenerational workforces succeed when a single set of cultural values unites people in their work while accommodating people's differing needs.
Millennial workers lead other generations in their adoption of new technology and new habits. Growing up online and in the new economy, they are more psychically footloose, less automatically loyal, and more prone to 24/7 connection. They are just as responsive as others are to appreciation and reward---and adopt recognition solutions as quickly as they adopt other new technologies.
Recognition acts as a unifier in a multigenerational workplace because it crosses lines of authority, seniority, and social distance. A recognition moment confers respect and appreciation, which brings people together who might otherwise have a more remote workplace experience.
Another trend radically accelerated by technology is the recent shift toward mobile devices, chiefly smartphones and tablets.
Social recognition among colleagues can be designed for use on mobile devices to increase participation. Employees should be able to share appreciation immediately.
Two of recognition's best practices are be accessible and be universal. Mobile recognition does both, making recognition available to everyone, everywhere.
"The Power of Thanks" by Eric Mosley and Derek Irvine reveals how leading companies empower employees through social recognition, in which the practice of mutual appreciation and trust directs and rewards higher employee performance. The book details how building a fully engaged, energized workforce is a key to business success.
To Paul Spiegelman and Britt Berrett, there's a problem.
They attest that in any business, you can't take care of customers if you don't take care of employees.
Healthcare is no different.
In "PATIENTS COME SECOND: Leading Change by Changing the Way You Lead" Spiegelman and Berrett explain the connection between employee engagement and patient loyalty, sharing stories of how this has worked in a range of organizations to give readers practical tools and tips to implement immediate change in their organization.
Paul Spiegelman says, "Let's face it: Employees in most companies get treated as second-class citizens. If that's the case, how can we expect them to treat customers well? The same is true for employees in the healthcare field.
In healthcare, we need a model for the delivery of a great experience for each patient. It is not a question of ranking what in more important, but a question of leading and lagging indicators of success. In that regard, I firmly believe that the most successful organizations with the most loyal customers (or patients) have focused first on an internal culture of engagement where leadership shows a genuine interest in the growth and development of its people. If you do that, accountability will only increase, not create excuses for lack of execution.
Our industry needs to be shaken up a bit. My hope is that our book will stir healthy conversation and action to improve internal cultures in healthcare. It is sorely needed."
The elements of a successful exit breaks down into four stages: exploration, strategy, execution and transition--all potentially tricky.
Entrepreneurs who leave their positions with a sense of accomplishment, feeling well compensated and secure in the belief that their employees would be treated well by their successors, feel better about the move.
Some advice for anyone who owns a business or is planning to launch one:
If you haven't already begun thinking about your eventual exit, now is the time to start. You should do so even if you currently believe that you'll never want to sell the business. For your sake and your company's sake, you should begin to think now about the circumstances under which you might leave and do all you can to ensure that the company could be sold at some point for as much money as possible.
As noted, there are four stages in the exit process, and doing the deal comes not first or second, but third. It's preceded by the strategic phase, when you build into the company the qualities and characteristics that will allow you to have the kind of exit you want.
The timing has nothing to dowith whether you want to do it. It's just the right time to sell. You sell when the selling is good, not when you think you'd like to. Doing anything else, you run the risk of leaving a whole bunch of money on the table.
The more prepared you are when that day comes, the more likely it is that the parting will be a happy one.
Back in October 1971, an engineer (who I knew when we both went to a small high school in Upstate New York during the late 1950s) named Ray Tomlinson chose the '@' symbol for email addresses and wrote software to send the first network email.
At the time, it must not have seemed very important because Ray didn't bother to save that first message or even record the exact date. Ray Tomlinson has been called the father of email because he invented the software that allowed messages to be sent between computers. Ray made it possible to swap messages between machines in different locations; between universities, across continents, and oceans. At the time, he was working for Boston-based Bolt, Beranek and Newman, which was helping to develop Arpanet, the forerunner of the modern Internet.
Now, over forty years later email messages are a large part of our lives in today's network society and I bet you can't remember the first e-mail message you ever sent either?
While email and the Internet have "changed everything" in the way we work and communicate, many are finding that reading and answering email messages can consume too much time; time we would rather spend doing something else.
According to a new 'MailTime Email Mistakes Survey'conducted by MailTime -- a mobile app that makes business email on your smartphone faster, easier, and more conversational -- the top five biggest business email mistakes are:
TOP 5 BUSINESS EMAIL MISTAKES:
#1: Emails that are "insensitive" in tone (93% disapproval)
#2: Emails that are not personally addressed to you (88% disapproval)
#3: Emails that have numerous replies (87% disapproval)
#4: Emails that have numerous recipients (82% disapproval)
#5: Emails that are too long (81% disapproval)
To conduct this study, MailTime surveyed a sample representative of 1,000 working adults. Interestingly, survey data also indicated that excessively long business email communications are not only annoying, but also ineffective:
19% of people won't fully read an email longer than 1 paragraph
51% of people won't fully read an email longer than 2 paragraphs
76% of people won't fully read an email longer than 3 paragraphs
84% of people won't fully read an email longer than 4 paragraphs
Only 10% of people will actually read word-for-word an email longer than 7 paragraphs
Changes in the world of work are imposing new challenges on leaders, the most significant of which are:
Innovation: the challenge is to create an innovative and entreprenurial culture that meets ever-increasing customer needs.
Talent management: this involves not only attracting exceptional individuals, but also developing and retaining them.
Communication: the 21st Century knowledge economy poses both threats and opportunities for leaders. Companies must harness the communication opportunities of the Internet and social media in particular, in order to innovate, differentiate and encourage positive customer interaction.
Globalization: in an expanding business world, organizations and their leaders have to appreciate the challenges it poses. Cultural norms can impact on leader--follower relations due to the behavior and expectations of both parties.
The words of editor Ralph Dixey of Tevope in Fort Hall, Idaho published in 1939; "Friends, we are all Indians no matter how white or dark you are. It does not make any difference where you are, what you are doing, or how much money you are making. We are all Indians..."
For Mark Trahant, a "mixed blood" enrolled member of Fort Hall, the words had particular meaning. He thought about who he was and who he might become; he began to realize that being an Indian today included, as it always had, the incorporation of change. He started to understand more fully, as he later wrote, that Indian peoples had "always made alliances, inter-married, and borrowed ideas and technology from other people." "Indian history didn't end in the 1800s," Trahant added. "Indian cultures aren't some sort of museum piece, that are frozen in time, preserved under glass. They evolve, grow and continually try to renew themselves."
Five hundred years after Columbus, one hundred years after Wounded Knee, American Indians had not disappeared.
"The Life of Margretta" is the story of a 20th Century woman who was born, lived and was buried in a small village, named Broadalbin, in Upstate New York.
When her grandchildren were grown and had moved from their parent's home, she decided to write a reminiscence of her young life up to her marriage in 1939. Over the years, she would write her story, chapter by chapter, and send it to her son in Michigan to word process on his computer and send back to her for editing. Her story begins with her first childhood memories and ends at her marriage in 1939.
Within her book, she writes about how the name, Margretta, has been passed down in her family beginning from the marriage of a young woman named Otstock (born of a Mohawk woman and Frenchman by the name of Hartell) to a Dutchman, named Cornelius Antonissen Van Sleyck, who emigrated to the colonies in 1634.
Otstock was given the Dutch name "Margretta" and her husband was given the name "Broer" or brother and adopted into the Mohawk tribe after their marriage. The first North American Margretta and her new husband spent long periods of time in Canajoharies, the home of the Mohawks. As a family tradition, the name, Margretta, has been passed down as a middle name to girls thereafter....including the author's daughter, Jill Margretta.
As the only child of two career parents, Margretta's story resonates with today's children of full-time working parents who seek a better work/life integration.
She went on to raise four children, born in the 1940's, and her book is dedicated to their children. It is a duty for each generation to record their own doings in order that those of the future may use them as a guide for emulation or avoidance.
Data from the most recent censuses attested to the great body of American Indians that had become merged in the indistinguishable mass of the United States population. The American Indian population had reached its nadir early in the twentieth century with less than a quarter million people counted---increasing to 1.9 million in 1990.
Some of that demographic explosion can be explained through a change in how the census was compiled, whereby individuals could identify themselves as Indians or as Indians of multiple ancestry or as people of Indian descent. Many enrolled Indians were of mixed ancestry and had spent part, most, or all of their lives away from their "home" communities. Increased intermarriage with non-Indians had also been an important contributing factor.
For American Indians in the late 1990s, knowledge gleaned from Web sites could be combined with wisdom imparted from the elders. Familiarity with urban centers could be merged with strength drawn from the old landmarks on tribal terrain. There were lessons to be learned from the traditional stories and from the tales of new storytellers.
In its heyday, Eastman Kodak Company was an icon of innovation in photography; a juggernaut in its field. The film giant gave us the "Kodak Moment," which persists as the quintessential photographic experience even though in today's digital camera age "selfies" on smartphones are a major factor.
Supremely confident, making decisions that presumed the past was an appropriate guide to the future, Kodak executives didn't understand that the world was changing dramatically. Creative changes in customers' taste, technologies and global economic circumstance continue to destroy the Kodaks of this world.
Kodak leadership missed a number of innovative opportunities in the past. That is why it has been so difficult to change Kodak's corporate culture from film-based imaging to digital imaging.
One of those lost opportunities
In the late 1950s, Kodak owned the paper copy business using a photo sensitive paper and monobath solution to create an extra copy of a document. So, when Chester Carlson, a physicist and patent attorney, came calling with the xerography technology, Kodak leadership turned him down....primarily because to build such a copier would be very expensive, require continuous service support and Kodak management had seldom heard of a customer who needed more than one copy at a time.
Carlson then went over to the Haloid Company, also in Rochester NY, with his new technology where he was welcomed. Haloid then formed a joint venture with Battelle Development Corporation (BDC) in Columbus, OH, for 55% of the patient rights, to invest and develop the xerography technology resulting in three technical improvements.
In 1962, Xerox Corporation (the new name for the Haloid Company with Battelle owning $350 million of Xerox stock) introduced the Xerox 914, a revolutionary new copier that cost $15,000 each. Prior to the product introduction, Joe Wilson, Haloid Company president, had come up with an innovative marketing approach for this new expensive copier that led to the success of xerography: Lease the 914 copier for only $100 per month and charge the customer an additional $.01 for each copy made on the machine. The result for Kodak was its paper copier business quickly vanished.
Kodak Focus on Film
Eastman Kodak was a leader, until it wasn't. It was rock-solid and the dominant company in the photography industry until creative destruction turned granite to sand. With little or no competition, during which nearly every snapshot that mattered was "a Kodak moment," the introduction of the Instamatic Camera increased film consumption by four-times. Kodak was totally focused on its fim business.
When Polaroid came onto the scene, Kodak improved the technology of its cameras, projectors, film and processing equipment. And it priced aggressively to turn Polaroid into a luxury item, leaving Kodak as the supplier of film to Polaroid while continuing to be the primary source for photographs. After all, cameras were like razors, and Kodak was selling all the blades (the film and the film processing).
When focus causes you to wear blinders, you are far more likely to be blindsided, and that's exactly what happened to Kodak--over and over again.
Filmless Photography was Predictable
Given Kodak's reliance of film, the company's fall as a result of the turn to filmless photography was predictable. If that were the whole picture, the analysis would lead to a company failing to reinvent itself when it should have.
In 1975, two years after I was recruited from my eight-year career at Kodak as a marketing specialist, Steve Sasson, a Kodak engineer, created a digital camera. In such devices, images are stored on a silicon chip. Film is unnecessary. Sasson not only created the digital camera, he also applied for and later received a patent for the underlying technology. That was the genesis of creative destruction of film and the cameras that used it.
That patent could have been the basis for a Kodak reinvention. Is it possible that none of Kodak's executives understood that they had entered the doorway to a new industry with his invention? Were they blind to its potential or fearful that digital photography would adversely affect their precious film business? After all, film did contribute most of Kodak's revenue and profit.
That Kodak patented and then hid the digital camera is fascinating. It's difficult to recall where such an approach has succeeded. It would be better to move profit from one pocket to another before someone picks your pocket. The result has been devastating, leaving Kodak as a non-player in a new industry it could have owned.
Information needs to flow freely crossing professional boundaries within the organization, with engagement up, down and across the organizational structure.
The triangle of internal communications, employee engagement and HR needs to be effective across the organization, appealing to both the professional and personal aspects of individual employees. This triangle relationship will help to change the organization from being a place of people at work to a community of people working.
The principle to grasp is that all external communication is internal communication, and all internal communication is external communication.
This is because each individual in your organization is a communicator, and they communicate with each other and to the outside world. This communication is both formal and informal. Thus any external reports or events impacting your image also impact your employees internally. Good news can be energizing, while bad news can be demoralizing. We live in a new era of transparency and it is increasingly difficult to hide things from employees.
In the 21st century we have to communicate to engage, explaining why we are doing what we are doing, and extending our reach to connect with each other to create positive participation and change. This communication environment has changed greatly, and is more fluid and challenging. The outcome is that we will never be less transparent, have less information and be less connected than we are today.
With all of the digital information at our fingertips, there is no excuse for using incorrect spelling or bad grammar. A quick proofread to correct obvious misspellings, bad sentence structure or words with unclear meaning is appreciated in every medium.
Tone matters, too. People hear your tone of voice in your writing and it will affect how they interpret the meaning of your message. Reading what you write back to yourself out loud, in your conversational voice, is one of the best ways to check the tone of any message before you send, tweet or post.
In business, texting is probably the only medium in which the use of text abbreviations is acceptable, but even here they should be used with caution. Remember that clarity of communication is one of the objectives in business. Avoid OMG entirely as it can give offense. Safest route? If it's business, spell it out.
Another firmly established online convention is to avoid typing in all capital letters as it signifies that you are shouting your message.
With so many communication media to choose from, the medium you choose becomes an important part of the message you send.
A handwritten note lends extra weight to thanks for a job interview, gift or meal.
A well-formatted email resume sent to a tech firm shows respect for a paperless office culture.
If you have been working late on a project and have a breakthrough, an email to your boss might be appreciated.
Your ability to handle email well is a big part of your professional reputation. People usually expect a reply to email the same day or within twenty-four hours.
Whether you prefer to keep all your work communications confined to email or would rather receive work-related messages outside the office via text is up to you. Either is okay but establish your preferences and boundaries with your coworkers.
The 3rd edition of "The Etiquette Advantage in Business" touches on all aspects of business etiquette today, from why manners matter in the modern world to how ethical behavior and etiquette are intertwined. This new edition has advice for everyone from the job seeker to the C-Suite occupant. This updated edition focuses on areas that are particularly germane to the 21st century: data communications and relationships for anyone who texts, blogs, comments or emails with easy-to-remember tips.
