No Action … is Action

A few years ago, my son and daughter got into a typical sibling brouhaha. I was in an adjacent room and could hear the entire exchange. It was a low-level issue, to me, and I chose to let them work it out. About 30 minutes later, my son walked into the room I was in and appeared shocked to see me. “What?!” he yelled. “You were here the whole time? Why didn’t you say something? You always take her side!” Right or wrong, he felt terribly betrayed by me. I have told this simple story many times at leadership conferences on just how powerful an action of ‘no action’ can be to followers.

Workplace Athletes

As someone who lives both in the business workplace and in the professional sports world, I often get asked what the similarities and differences are between the two. I have answered this question in many ways but now realize that the biggest difference is in Performance Management.  The professional athlete gets constant feedback (statistics on each game) and it is objective. In golf, for example, the athlete can look at about a dozen different personal statistic at the end of each weekly tournament. Her coach can show actual video of what she did well and not so well. And very quickly, a plan is put together to address that weakness within hours or days. At the next tournament, the same thing is done and she may have fixed the problem from the week before but the feedback shows different issues and the focus changes to improve the new issues. This constant cycle of feedback is what creates the bedrock for that one competition where the magic happens. So let us juxtapose this to the professional worker who also gets paid, like a pro athlete, for her performance.

Happiness – Part 3

The key objective of the first blog on this topic was to define or redefine happiness from something that you pursue, to something that you eliminate – fear. For the second blog, it was to identify 3 distinctive scenarios of causes of that fear – yourself,  others and situations – or perhaps any combination of these. In this final part, let’s focus on removing fear specificallly from each of those scenarios.