Pick up the phone!

When you must communicate something emotional, pick up the phone or, if possible, arrange a face-to-face meeting.

"In one study participants thought that their sarcasm would be communicated 80% of the time. Face-to-face this was accurate, but over email the actual figure was 56%.

This overconfidence was also seen when people tried to communicate anger, sadness, seriousness and humour in an email. Without body language cues, it's hard to communicate more than literal meanings."

While emoticons are fun and can be helpful, they do not convey the breadth of emotion we convey in our body and facial language. If you must criticize, complain, or negotiate, try to get a face to face meeting with the other party. If that's not possible, at least use the phone where tone of voice cues help convey emotion. As a last resort, try a visual email tool, such as eyejot.

Every email costs 1 minute of distraction (in addition to reading and response time)

In a report of several studies of email use, Psyblog.com presents compelling reasons to limit email use:
1) every time we open an email, we need at least a minute to get our minds back to what we were working on previously
2) we open email far more frequently than we believe we do, with most people checking email every 5 minutes.

The report says we spend 23% of our work day checking email, or 110 minutes in an 8-hour work day. I'm not sure how many discreet emails this assumes, so I can't estimate how many minutes we spend getting our minds back into the task we were focused on before we opened email. However, I'm betting it's close to an hour.

Use email as a effectiveness and efficiency tool, not as a drain on your time and energy, by setting your email notification to 45 minutes rather than 5 (or immediate!) and disciplining yourself to check email only then.

Let me know how this works for you!

noncash motivators are more effective than financial incentives

"Three noncash motivators—praise from immediate managers, leadership attention and a chance to lead projects or task forces—are . . . even more effective motivators than the three highest-rated financial incentives: cash bonuses, increased base pay, and stock or stock options" according to the McKinsey Quarterly.

As managers we must use these motivators -- we are responsible for creating the context and exploiting opportunities that provide opportunities to employees to lead visible and valuable projects, and for noticing when employees do great work (and therefore praising and giving attention to those employees).

Managers and leaders establish the conditions that enable a person to access his internal motivation by demonstrating non-characterizing, direct, and specific appreciation and by coaching employees whenever possible.



1Dewhurst, M., Guthridge, M., & Mohr, E. (2009, November). Motivating people: Getting beyond money. Retrieved February 25, 2012, from McKinsey Quarterly : http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Motivating_people_Getting_beyond_money_2460

Have a habit you want to break?

If you have a habit you want to break, the key is figuring out the cues that tell your brain to start engaging in whatever the behavior is. According to Charles Duhigg in a NY Times article, "experiments have shown that most cues fit into one of five categories: location, time, emotional state, other people or the immediately preceding action.

When the urge strikes to engage in whatever bad habit you are in, ask yourself:

1. Where am I?
2. What time is it?
3. How do I feel?
4. Who else is around or what just happened?

Once you have a few data points recorded, you may see patterns. Break the pattern(s), and you are more likely to succeed in breaking the habit. Always smoke after an argument? Try going for a walk. Always eat tortilla chips while watching a football game? Watch the game at a different location -- perhaps a room in which you never eat, or with friends who aren't into salty snacks.

Let me know if it works!

Clearly state desired outcome, then let people make it happen

Itay Talgam, in a Ted talk on leadership, shares short clips of various famous orchestral conductors. In one clip, he presents a very controlling conductor and he tells us that this conductor received a letter signed by all 700+ members of the orchestra that said, “you’re a great conductor. We don’t want to work with you. Please retire.”

Why? When we work under so much control, we can’t develop our own stories. And happiness at work (whether in an orchestra or in an office) "does not come from only (the leader's) own story. The joy comes from enabling other people’s stories to be heard at the same time."

Talgam tells of another conductor who says, "the worst damage I can do to my orchestra is give them clear instructions because that would prevent the ensemble, the listening to each other.”

How do leaders give clear instructions, but not so clear that they stifle their employees' development and commitment?

By ensuring the outcome he desires is clear, that his employees are trained and skilled enough to reach that outcome, and then by trusting and celebrating the way those employees choose to get there. At the very end of Talgam's talk, he presents a conductor who makes none of the typical conductor movements with his hands. He merely watches his orchestra play, his broad smile evidencing his pure enjoyment of their playing.

Talgam tells us, "do without doing."

How much do retailers know about us?

In this case, Target knew a high school girl was pregant before her father knew:

"About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.

'My daughter got this in the mail!' he said. 'She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?'

The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. 'I had a talk with my daughter,' he said. 'It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.'"

itemprop="articleBody">I'm not sure what's most concerning: that we're all so predictable, that we get into habits that are so ingrained that we are completely unaware of them, that new habits (and generally ones that aren't great for us) are very easy for us to form when we start them as a result of a marketing outreach, or that retailers -- and everyone else-- knows more about us than we seem to know about ourselves!

Turn on your email at specific times of the day; then turn off

Have you found lately that you might be working intently on something when you hear that little ding or see the number change on your email icon that lets you know there's a new message and suddenly you cannot concentrate?

According to Charles Duhigg in a NY Times article, as soon as we get a signal that we have a new message, "the brain starts anticipating the neurological “pleasure” (even if we don’t recognize it as such) that clicking on the e-mail and reading it provides. That expectation, if unsatisfied, can build until you find yourself moved to distraction by the thought of an e-mail sitting there unread — even if you know, rationally, it’s most likely not important."

You'll save yourself a great deal of time, used up in the mental distraction as well as the physical distraction of clicking away from your work and onto the email, by turning off your email when working on something important. In your day-to-day schedule planning, I strongly recommend turning on your email during specific times, turning it off for a specified length of time, then turning it back on. For example, turn on the email in the morning and deal with important items. Then turn it off for 45 minutes while you focus on other work. Take a break from that work for 15 minutes by walking around for 5 or 10 and checking your email for 5 or 10 minutes. Then repeat. You'll find yourself to be far more productive during those 45 minute stretches.

As Duhigg goes on to say, "once you remove the cue by disabling . . . the chiming of your (email), the craving is never triggered, and you’ll find, over time, that you’re able to work productively for long stretches without checking your in-box."

before you send that email . . .

Created by: Online IT Degree

"Formal hierarchy is a declining construct"

-- Rosabeth Moss Kanter

The new college graduates in managerial positions with whom I've met recently are interested in shared leadership, concensus-building, and cultures that support employee development. They use terms such as "human potential", "shared meaning", and "social good." And they're not smirking when they use them.

In my earliest experiences in management, I worked for companies that would have thought these terms laughable. We expected managers to stay overnight Saturday so that we could save money on their airfare -- even though these managers would have to fly out later Sunday to get to their destination in time for a Monday morning meeting -- leaving them only a few hours on Sunday with their families. We expected everyone to work a minimum of 10 hours each day; anything less would have been seen as weak and uncommitted. Anyone gutsy enough to make a decision that unfortunately went wrong would be roundly criticized in front of his peers.

These new graduates are creating a whole new world. I can't wait to work for them.

How to be happy at work - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Positivity leads to productivity

the environment you create can influence your employees' IQ

I keep hearing people say that IQ is static and that EQ can change. I disagree: there is plenty of evidence that both can change. And, organizational leaders may influence their employees' IQs by the way they evaluate them:

"A group of participants suffered an average IQ drop of 17.4 points during an experiment in which they were ranked by their intelligence scores, suggesting that simply being ranked can profoundly diminish some people's ability to express their cognitive ability, says a team led by Read Montague of Virginia Tech." -- The Daily Stat, Harvard Business Review February 1, 2012

Do you rank your employees against each other? You might find being ranked motivating, but many people become stressed by these rankings -- and while some stress is good, this kind of stress limits the mind's ability to access information held in memory (psych.nyu.edu/phelpslab/papers/04_CON_V14.pdf ) and make good decisions (http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v10/n6/box/nrn2648_BX1.html).

I know you didn't devise a ranking system so that you could lessen your employees' ability to do well; you did it thinking a little healthy competition will generate the good stress -- the kind that gets everyone hussling a bit more. Can you share some other tools you can use to facilitate/develop your employees' innate motivation without preventing them from utilizing their greatest potential?

Coach whenever you can; Direct when your employee needs direction

Last year I wrote two posts on "Tiger Management", a play on the book "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother". I've been reminded how important it is for some managers and leaders to give themselves permission to be Tigers when necessary by several leaders with whom I've met recently.

Each relayed a story of how they had tried to coach an employee toward learning a new skill. Yet, in each scenario, they were working with employees who were simply too green to figure anything out on their own. Coaching works when the coach has some basic skills upon which to build! Without those, the coach has to first direct the coachee, perhaps step by step, toward acquiring the skills.

Know where your employees are and meet them there. Be the manager they need rather than the manager you want to be.

Gain clarity on your goals

Are you trying to get greater clarity on your goals or your organization's strengths? Do you want to communicate those goals more clearly to your team or your strengths more clearly to your clients?

The Thiagi Group has developed a list of "Concept Analysis Questions" that my friend Gayle Carney, founder of cctsbaltimore.org, found useful. It helps the user see where he has enabled scope creep, such that he is no longer focused like a laser on his goal but instead his focus has spread to seemingly related, but not useful, activities. I recommend going through the questions with your team, or at least a partner, so that you have others with whom to brainstorm.

Give it a try and let us know how it goes.

it's harder to be succinct

Several students were thrilled when they heard papers will be 600 words, rather than the 3-pages I used to assign.

I cautioned them to rethink their enthusiasm: it is much harder to be succinct than to be verbose. In a 3-page paper, a student has plenty of space to babble on. In 600 words, he has to get all the critical points articulated, delineate his action plan and persuade his reader of its utility and urgency.

Good luck!