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6 Suggestions Guaranteed to Improve Performance in Almost Any Workplace

He took the words right out of my mouth! I was recently brainstorming with a business executive, and this list sounds VERY similar to the one we came up with! GREAT stuff.

Six suggestions guaranteed to improve performance in almost any workplace.

By Lawrence M. Miller
Jan. 3, 2012

Here are some suggestions guaranteed to improve performance in almost any workplace.

First, let’s agree to encourage others. I know it is a simple and obvious thing. But, we all thrive on encouragement. Let us agree to see the potential, not simply the current reality, in each of our team members.

There is something I like to call “creative dissatisfaction,” which is the gap between who we are and who we know we could become … and, there is always a gap, no matter how great we may be. Rather than pointing out what I am not (and there is lots you could point to!), how about pointing to what or who I could become? It’s a small difference that makes a huge difference. When I have a vision of who I could become, I develop a drive, that creative dissatisfaction, to achieve, to close that gap.

Second, strive to become a scientist in the coming year. It may sound strange, but how we make judgments is often colored by learned biases. Continuous improvement is the result of the continuous design of experiments, watching the data, understanding cause and effect and the humility to say, “Oh, well, that one didn’t work. Let’s try something else.” The great managers, like the great scientists, respect the data and have the courage to experiment and to learn from what the data are telling them.

Third, demonstrate through your deeds the value of the world’s greatest experts who are on-the-spot. The traditional culture of our organizations has taught us that “moving up” is valued; those who have been promoted up in the organization must be worth more. We naturally value them. But who actually serves customers? Who does the real work that adds value to customers and who become genuinely expert in the process of serving customers? It is most often not those who are “up” but those who have their hands on the real work. The gemba walk is a philosophy, not merely something you do with your feet and the philosophy is to learn from and value those who are on-the-spot.

Fourth, commit to your team. A very few significant successes are attributable to individuals alone. Individual successes are more likely to be achievements in the arts or sciences, rather than in business. Most success in business is the result of teamwork. You are a member of a team. Jim Collins, in his book “Good to Great,” defined what he called the Level 5 Leader who managed to sustain great companies over time. These leaders were not ego-driven charismatic stars, rather they were focused on building great teams. “Compared to high-profile leaders with big personalities who make head-lines and become celebrities, the good-to-great leaders seem to have come from Mars. Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy – these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. They are more like Lincoln and Socrates than Patton or Caesar,” Collins wrote.

So make this the year when you focus less on yourself and more on your team. Give them credit, demand that they work together as a team, and insist that they do what you expect from everyone else: know and serve their customers; know and improve their own processes; and strive to win against their own team’s scorecard.

Fifth, practice Four-to-One. In the mid 1970s I worked with Fran Tarkenton and Aubrey Daniels at Behavioral Systems Inc. We took the research of Dr. Ogden Lindsley, who studied the effects of positive reinforcement versus negative comments by teachers in the classroom. He found that the ideal ratio that maximized learning was 3.57 positive to 1 negative. We rounded it off and called it Four-to-One. We encouraged plant supervisors to record their positive and negative comments to employees, and too often it was one to four, in other words four times the number of negative comments than positive.

This year, try to achieve the four-to-one ratio of positive to negative interactions with your employees. This focus on positive behavior and achievements will increase positive behavior and achievements. Almost 40 years later that is now being practiced at Toyota and other great companies. It works!

Sixth, find the noble in your work. We all live our lives in the moment, struggling to do what is urgent, but always longing to find the important, that which is noble and worthy in our work. The most primary source of motivation is the search for meaning, the desire to accomplish something worthy. I believe it is important to meditate on what we do and why it is important.

The best public-speaking advice I ever heard was to be certain, before you stand in front of an audience, that you have something genuinely important to say, something important for that audience. If you don’t believe you have something important to say, there is no way you can fool the audience into believing it is important.

Management and leadership are the same. Have something important to say. Meditate on how you and your company are making this world just a little bit better each year. And, then say it to your employees. Make life in your organization important and worthy.

I am sure you can think of other commitments you can make going into the new year. It is a good time to reflect on how we can each improve, both personally and professionally. It would be a good idea to ask your entire management team to reflect on their own behavior and how they could each improve, how they could each contribute to the collective performance of the group.

And, oh … I will complete that book I have been working on for the past five years!!!


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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-12-04

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96% of The Universe is Missing

In today’s excerpt – astronomers and physicists are now grappling with evidence that suggests that all the things we can observe in the universe with even the most powerful telescopes is only four percent of what is there. The rest, they posit, is dark matter and dark energy:

“In 1610 Galileo announced to the world that by observing the heavens through a new instrument – what we would call a telescope – he had discovered that the universe consists of more than meets the eye. The five hundred copies of the pamphlet announcing his results sold out immediately; when a pack­age containing a copy arrived in Florence, a crowd quickly gathered around the recipient and demanded to hear every word. For as long as members of our species had been lying on our backs, looking up at the night sky, we had assumed that what we saw was all there was. But then Galileo found mountains on the Moon, satellites of Jupiter, hun­dreds of stars. Suddenly we had a new universe to explore, one to which astronomers would add, over the next four centuries, new moons around other planets, new planets around our Sun, hundreds of planets around other stars, a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, hundreds of billions of galaxies beyond our own.

“By the first decade of the twenty-first century, however, astrono­mers had concluded that even this extravagant census of the universe might be as out-of-date as the five-planet cosmos that Galileo inher­ited from the ancients. The new universe consists of only a minuscule fraction of what we had always assumed it did – the material that makes up you and me and my laptop and all those moons and planets and stars and galaxies. The rest – the overwhelming majority of the universe – is … who knows?

 

” ‘Dark,’ cosmologists call it, in what could go down in history as the ultimate semantic surrender. This is not ‘dark’ as in distant or invisible. This is not “dark” as in black holes or deep space. This is ‘dark’ as in unknown for now, and possibly forever: 23 percent something mysterious that they call dark matter, 73 percent some­thing even more mysterious that they call dark energy. Which leaves only 4 percent the stuff of us. As one theorist likes to say at public lectures, ‘We’re just a bit of pollution.’ Get rid of us and of every­thing else we’ve ever thought of as the universe, and very little would change. ‘We’re completely irrelevant,’ he adds, cheerfully.

 

“The ‘ultimate Copernican revolu­tion,’ as [astronomers] often call it, is taking place right now. It’s happening in underground mines, where ultrasensitive detectors wait for the ping of a hypothetical particle that might already have arrived or might never come, and it’s happening in ivory towers, where coffee-break conversations conjure multiverses out of espresso steam. It’s happen­ing at the South Pole, where telescopes monitor the relic radiation from the Big Bang; in Stockholm, where Nobelists have already be­gun to receive recognition for their encounters with the dark side; on the laptops of postdocs around the world, as they observe the real­time self-annihilations of stars, billions of light-years distant, from the comfort of a living room couch. It’s happening in healthy collabora­tions and, the universe being the intrinsically Darwinian place it is, in career-threatening competitions.

 

“The astronomers who have found themselves leading this revolu­tion didn’t set out to do so. Like Galileo, they had no reason to expect that they would discover new phenomena. They weren’t looking for dark matter. They weren’t looking for dark energy. And when they found the evidence for dark matter and dark energy, they didn’t be­lieve it. But as more and better evidence accumulated, they and their peers reached a consensus that the universe we thought we knew, for as long as civilization had been looking at the night sky, is only a shadow of what’s out there. That we have been blind to the actual universe because it consists of less than meets the eye. And that that universe is our universe – one we are only beginning to explore.

 

“It’s 1610 all over again.”

 

 

 

Author: Richard Panek

Title: The 4 Percent Universe
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (hardcover), Mariner (Paperback)
Date: Copyright 2011 by Richard Panek
Pages: xiv-xvi
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Thanksgiving & Gratitude

Over and Over again the research is CRYSTAL CLEAR.  Gratitude works.  Those who take a moment every day to list what they are grateful for lead better lives.  So this Thanksgiving, try a serving of gratitude!

New York Times Online
Findings: A Serving of Gratitude May Save the Day

The most psychologically correct holiday of the year is upon us.

Thanksgiving may be the holiday from hell for nutritionists, and it produces plenty of war stories for psychiatrists dealing with drunken family meltdowns. But it has recently become the favorite feast of psychologists studying the consequences of giving thanks. Cultivating an “attitude of gratitude” has been linked to better health, sounder sleep, less anxiety and depression, higher long-term satisfaction with life and kinder behavior toward others, including romantic partners. A new study shows that feeling grateful makes people less likely to turn aggressive when provoked, which helps explain why so many brothers-in-law survive Thanksgiving without serious injury.
But what if you’re not the grateful sort? I sought guidance from the psychologists who have made gratitude a hot research topic. Here’s their advice for getting into the holiday spirit – or at least getting through dinner Thursday:
Start with “gratitude lite.”That’s the term used by Robert A. Emmons, of the University of California, Davis, for the technique used in his pioneering experiments he conducted along with Michael E. McCullough of the University of Miami. They instructed people to keep a journal listing five things for which they felt grateful, like a friend’s generosity, something they’d learned, a sunset they’d enjoyed.
The gratitude journal was brief – just one sentence for each of the five things – and done only once a week, but after two months there were significant effects. Compared with a control group, the people keeping the gratitude journal were more optimistic and felt happier. They reported fewer physical problems and spent more time working out.

Further benefits were observed in a study of polio survivors and other people with neuromuscular problems. The ones who kept a gratitude journal reported feeling happier and more optimistic than those in a control group, and these reports were corroborated by observations from their spouses. These grateful people also fell asleep more quickly at night, slept longer and woke up feeling more refreshed.
“If you want to sleep more soundly, count blessings, not sheep,” Dr. Emmons advises in “Thanks!” his book on gratitude research.

Don’t confuse gratitude with indebtedness. Sure, you may feel obliged to return a favor, but that’s not gratitude, at least not the way psychologists define it. Indebtedness is more of a negative feeling and doesn’t yield the same benefits as gratitude, which inclines you to be nice to anyone, not just a benefactor.

In an experiment at Northeastern University, Monica Bartlett and David DeSteno sabotaged each participant’s computer and arranged for another student to fix it. Afterward, the students who had been helped were likelier to volunteer to help someone else – a complete stranger – with an unrelated task. Gratitude promoted good karma. And if it works with strangers ….

Try it on your family. No matter how dysfunctional your family, gratitude can still work, says Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, Riverside.

“Do one small and unobtrusive thoughtful or generous thing for each member of your family on Thanksgiving,” she advises. “Say thank you for every thoughtful or kind gesture. Express your admiration for someone’s skills or talents – wielding that kitchen knife so masterfully, for example. And truly listen, even when your grandfather is boring you again with the same World War II story.”

Don’t counterattack.If you’re bracing for insults on Thursday, consider a recent experiment at the University of Kentucky. After turning in a piece of writing, some students received praise for it while others got a scathing evaluation: “This is one of the worst essays I’ve ever read!” Then each student played a computer game against the person who’d done the evaluation. The winner of the game could administer a blast of white noise to the loser. Not surprisingly, the insulted essayists retaliated against their critics by subjecting them to especially loud blasts – much louder than the noise administered by the students who’d gotten positive evaluations.  But there was an exception to this trend among a subgroup of the students: the ones who had been instructed to write essays about things for which they were grateful. After that exercise in counting their blessings, they weren’t bothered by the nasty criticism – or at least they didn’t feel compelled to amp up the noise against their critics.

“Gratitude is more than just feeling good,” says Nathan DeWall, who led the study at Kentucky. “It helps people become less aggressive by enhancing their empathy. “It’s an equal-opportunity emotion. Anyone can experience it and benefit from it, even the most crotchety uncle at the Thanksgiving dinner table.”

Share the feeling. Why does gratitude do so much good? “More than other emotion, gratitude is the emotion of friendship,” Dr. McCullough says. “It is part of a psychological system that causes people to raise their estimates of how much value they hold in the eyes of another person. Gratitude is what happens when someone does something that causes you to realize that you matter more to that person than you thought you did.”

Try a gratitude visit. This exercise, recommended by Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania, begins with writing a 300-word letter to someone who changed your life for the better. Be specific about what the person did and how it affected you. Deliver it in person, preferably without telling the person in advance what the visit is about. When you get there, read the whole thing slowly to your benefactor. “You will be happier and less depressed one month from now,” Dr. Seligman guarantees in his book “Flourish.”

Contemplate a higher power.Religious individuals don’t necessarily act with more gratitude in a specific situation, but thinking about religion can cause people to feel and act more gratefully, as demonstrated in experiments by Jo-Ann Tsang and colleagues at Baylor University. Other research shows that praying can increase gratitude.

Go for deep gratitude. Once you’ve learned to count your blessings, Dr. Emmons says, you can think bigger.

“As a culture, we have lost a deep sense of gratefulness about the freedoms we enjoy, a lack of gratitude toward those who lost their lives in the fight for freedom, a lack of gratitude for all the material advantages we have,” he says. “The focus of Thanksgiving should be a reflection of how our lives have been made so much more comfortable by the sacrifices of those who have come before us.”
And if that seems too daunting, you can least tell yourself -Hey, it could always be worse. When your relatives force you to look at photos on their phones, be thankful they no longer have access to a slide projector. When your aunt expounds on politics, rejoice inwardly that she does not hold elected office. Instead of focusing on the dry, tasteless turkey on your plate, be grateful the six-hour roasting process killed any toxic bacteria.

Is that too much of a stretch? When all else fails, remember the Monty Python mantra of the Black Plague victim: “I’m not dead.” It’s all a matter of perspective.

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The Science Behind Our Emotions & Our Bodies

Our emotions are closely linked to areas of the brain that contain maps of the body. Really? Once again it shows that brain physiology correlates with coaching methodology. One of the many places that coaching works to connect the individual to is their emotions, and one of the easiest ways to help people get better connected to their emotions is to help them become more aware of their body’s response to those emotions.

In today’s excerpt – there are over ten trillion cells in the human body – some estimates are far higher – and one hundred billion in the brain alone, yet all these are disproportionately affected and governed by the eighty thousand spindle cells that are involved in handling emotion and moral judgment. (Spindle cells are found in abundance in the anterior cingulate cortex, which has strong connections to the amygdala – the site where our first emotional judgments begin):

“[We are attempting] to [better] understand how human brains differ from those of other mammals. The answer is that the differences are slight but critical, and they help us discern how the brain processes emotion and related feelings. … [A] key distinguishing feature is that emotionally charged situations appear to be handled by special cells called spindle cells, which are found only in humans and some great apes. These neural cells are large, with long neural filaments called apical dendrites that connect extensive signals from many other brain regions. This type of ‘deep’ interconnectedness, in which certain neurons provide connections across numerous regions, is a feature that occurs increasingly as we go up the evolu­tionary ladder. It is not surprising that the spindle cells, involved as they are in handling emotion and moral judgment, would have this form of deep inter­connectedness, given the complexity of our emotional reactions.

“What is startling, however, is how few spindle cells there are: only about 80,000 in the human brain (about 45,000 in the right hemi­sphere and 35,000 in the left hemisphere). This disparity appears to account for the perception that emotional intelligence is the province of the right brain, although the disproportion is modest. Gorillas have about 16,000 of these cells, bonobos about 2,100, and chimpanzees about 1,800. Other mammals lack them completely. …

“These findings [regarding spindle cells and related activities] are consistent with a growing consensus that our emotions are closely linked to areas of the brain that contain maps of the body, a view promoted by Dr. Anto­nio Damasio at the University of Iowa. They are also consistent with the view that a great deal of our thinking is directed toward our bodies: protecting and enhancing them, as well as attending to their myriad needs and desires.

“A tiny area at the front of the right insula [of the brain] is called the fronto-insular cortex. This is the region containing the spindle cells, and fMRI scans have revealed that it is particularly active when a person is dealing with high-level emotions such as love, anger, sadness, and sexual desire. Situations that strongly activate the spindle cells include when a subject looks at her romantic partner or hears her child crying. …

“Interestingly, spindle cells do not exist in newborn humans but begin to appear only at around the age of four months and increase significantly from ages one to three. Children’s ability to deal with moral issues and perceive such higher-level emotions as love develop during this same time period.

“The spindle cells gain their power from the deep interconnectedness of their long apical dendrites with many other brain regions. The high-level emo­tions that the spindle cells process are affected, thereby, by all of our perceptual and cognitive regions. … It is remarkable how few neurons appear to be exclusively involved with these emotions. We have fifty billion neurons in the cerebellum that deal with skill formation, billions in the cortex that perform the transformations for perception and rational planning, but only about eighty thousand spindle cells dealing with high-level emotions. It is important to point out that the spindle cells are not doing rational problem solving, which is why we don’t have rational control over our responses to music or over falling in love.”

Author: Ray Kurzweil
Title: The Singularity is Near
Publisher: Penguin
Date: Copyright 2005 by Ray Kurzweil
Pages: 191-194

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Chili Mobile

I did a service project this week with my church group.  We went to serve Chili to 300 homeless people. What a powerful reminder of all that we have.  We are SO rich and we really don’t realize it.

The images of these poor souls are etched on my mind.

What would it look like to serve every day?

What would it look like to be grateful every day, all day?

What would it look like to “put on” our grateful or appreciator hats and outfit as we walk out the door to work and life today?