Consider the postage stamp. It has one singular goal. It remains focused. This focus was a habit it developed in the face of fear. The fear of leaving its home and its other family of stamps, but it knows that in order to get what you want out of life, you must push through in order to create the life you want, and not just settle for the life that is given to you.
There are a lot of reasons performance appraisals can get wonky. Managers who don’t take the time to get the input they need or are just not paying attention; Forced stack ranks that have glowing words, and a “meets requirements” rating because there were too many other “exceptional” exceptional players in the mix; Or a boss who says, “You write it, I’ll sign it.”
So, you tidied up your Résumé, polished off your Cover Letter and sent your job application in. It seems like months ago that you did that and at last the phone call has arrived. You tell your friends and family that you think you’ve got the job, if you can only get through the interview next week! It can’t be that hard, could it?
It is far easier to focus on how well we are managing budgets, casting vision, charting direction and delegating responsibilities to others. It’s a simple task to focus on all the things we are doing correctly while systematically ignoring the very things that could be causing us to fail as leaders.
A paradigm shift is happening today about the meaning of work, what a job is, what it means to be an employee, and the changing nature of a working life. We are working and living longer, so it’s crazy to think of education as a single decade at the beginning of our lives when we might have seven or eight more!
Regardless of how advanced your organization is and how far you have gone down that path to paperless bliss you still have to deal with piles of old paper documents.
I’m blessed to have had many people in my life who demonstrated the benefits of simply being nice. I’m able to interact with and learn from, some of the nicest people on the planet, including my wife, Diane, Ken Blanchard, and others. I’ve learned the science of positive psychology and well being from the wonderful Lisa Zigarmi.
Face it, email is here to stay. We tend to have a love/hate relationship with email. On the one hand, it provides us the connection, information, and even business leads we need. On the other, it is the source of some ongoing problems. But there are ways to make changes that will help. Let’s look at four.
Many years ago, I enjoyed an all-too-brief read of Max De Pree’s, Leadership is an Art. In that book, De Pree encourages readers to ‘make the book your own’ by interacting with it, including the active writing along the pages’ edge with responses to key and significant concepts an author proposes or illustrates.