I see GREEN people

I had a wonderful conversation with a wonderful friend last week. At about the two hour mark, I got asked how it is that I assess people I meet. I have been asked that question before by others and myself. The process has evolved over the years.

Listen !!

In reading several human capital magazines and online forums in the past few months, there seems to be a growing recognition of the epidemic of poor listening skills, especially at leadership levels. I was recently asked if there was a connection between listening skills and EQ. Yes!

Employee Satisfaction

I read a very interesting study last week on employee satisfaction surveys. These are surveys that organizations use to assess the overall satisfaction and engagement of employees. The data is often used to make important decisions by leadership regarding leadership behavior and values, employee work place rewards and perks, and sometimes used by external organizations as a metric for a “best place to work” for.

Fear Not

 

If you have bought or sold a home in the past 5 years or so, then you are familiar the concept of virtual tours of homes. For example, your realtor might send you a link to a home that, from the convenience of wherever in the world you are, you can tour that actual home via a real video walk-through.  You can imagine the countless hours and weekend time this new method has saved all parties.

Visualize Past Success

It is often implied when using the term visualization that you are referring to the future. You are often told to visualize success, or a goal, or a desired outcome before it has happened. There are so many good quotes out there from inspiring people on the power of dreaming about something better in the future. This is all good.

Defining Growth

In a seemingly innocuous conversation last week, I was asked how to define and measure personal growth. How do you know you have grown from say a year ago, several years ago, or even from last week? The obvious answer was that you are doing something that you routinely do, but you are doing it better. Perhaps you are happier or you are meeting your goals or you have been promoted or are getting actual formal feedback from your boss, peers, or customers. But these are “outcomes” of a process where “you are doing things better.”

5-1 Ratio of Surprises

I received quite a substantive amount of messages regarding the last blog post on surprises. As folks begun to ask direct reports, and peers (and even family members) of what surprised them in the previous few weeks or months, there were predictable surprises at the surprises.

Workplace Surprises

Surprises are contextually good. When you think of the term “surprise,” historically in your life, the experiences are usually positive. A surprise trip or a visit from loved one or a gift. When someone says they have a surprise for you, it’s almost always associated with a smile or smirk and the context is positive. Most of us love surprises because of this.

Change Agent

Being a great leader these days almost implies that you have to concurrently be a great change agent as well.  I agree with the correlation as the rate of change of both how we live and how we work has accelerated. It feels like we have been saying this for the last 20-30 years or so. In this context of constant change, the ability of leaders to orchestrate change and do it quickly is a key competency for sure.

Lead in Different Ways

I heard from many of you on last week’s blog post inspired by the legacy of Steve Jobs. At a lunch meeting with a peer, we asked ourselves: Why are there so few Steve Jobs and the like? There are now millions of leadership books, webinars, blogs, conferences, programs – all touting the recipe for such great leaders.

Mobile Learning

The following statistics were generated by Future Workplace and IESE Business School.

1. By year end of 2011: nearly forty percent of executives plan to incorporate media tablets into learning and development initiatives and three-quarters of these learning executives plan to incorporate smartphones by the end of this year.
2. By 2015: Human Resource executives plan to leverage mobile devices not only for learning & performance support but also for coaching and mentoring employees (37%), micro-blogging (27%), augmented reality (14%), and mobile gaming (12%).

Higher Ups Lose Leadership Capacity

I had a wonderful conversation with a client and friend last week – Jane.  She attention a session in the Northeast with David Rock. He had shared the notion that as the higher-up working professional progress in their career, the lesser their leadership capacity becomes. This seems very counter-intuitive at first pass.

Managing Change Emotionally

I recently facilitated a session on Emotional Intelligence with a small group of CEOs of mid-size companies who are in growth mode. I was hired for the round-table session to help them appreciate the impact of change on their employees. Change Management is certainly not a new topic and there are dozens of very good books out there on the subject.  I chose to discuss this from an EQ perspective and a personal perspective.

Bosses

The past few weeks I’ve facilitated several sessions with managers and leaders. These sessions were with peer groups (people at the same level) and invariably, the “boss” came up. I was stunned at how many people tolerated to disliked or flat out hated their bosses.  I do not have any quantitative data on this but I tell you, it was well over 90% within the small sample size I experienced. There was only one person I can recall who actually thought of their boss as someone they looked up to, who was genuinely a human being with attributes worth emulating, and who modeled the values and skills that they thought their boss ought to have.  How is this possible? How can bosses be so poorly viewed by their subordinates?

#1 HR issue for 2011

I actually was going to write this morning about another subject until I read this article online this morning, which essentially reveals that 84% of those who are currently employed want to get new jobs in 2011. What??!!!  I just published a book this past May where the research showed that number at about 45%—which was a huge alarm in itself—but 84%?