What Are Some Team Problems?

Lencioni tells it like it is when he explains that many teams lack the kind of engagement they need. In particular, they can’t effectively argue about issues and decisions that are critical to success. “If team members are never pushing one another outside their emotional comfort zones, then it is extremely likely that they are not making the best decisions for the organization” he says.

In my experience, members succumb to apathy or disengagement when they don’t feel safe enough to speak up.

SOLUTION:  Learn the skills to have a Crucial Conversation! This two day course teaches skills to make it safe for any kind of conversations even when it’s emotional, high-risk and with opposing points of view.

Some other dysfunctional team problems include:

• Lack of trust
• Lack of commitment
• Avoidance of accountability
• inattention to results

Also team members are often unclear about their role and responsibilities and pressures to perform drive people toward safe solutions that are justifiable (CYA) rather than innovative. Sound familiar?

SOLUTION: Research shows teams need to trust members, have a sense of group identity and a sense of group efficacy. First, identify common goals and purpose. Have teams identify their core purpose, values, business definition, strategy, goals and roles and responsibilities. Without this foundation, its hard to achieve cohesiveness. From there, teams need to be intentional: what are the goals bothqualitative and quantitative?

T.E.A.M.

Trust You have to have a foundation of trust and this is hard in this ego-driven, self-preservation world! I like how Patrick defines it: “When it comes to teams, trust is all about vulnerability. Team members who trust one another learn to be comfortable being open, even exposed, to one another around their failures, weaknesses, even fears.” Yet this is the foundation for forgiveness and acceptance. Authenticity depends on members’ willingness to admit weaknesses and mistakes. They have to be able to say “I messed up” or “I’m sorry” or “I need some help here.”

SOLUTION: Share your DISC assessment with the team! Explain how you deal with things and what turns you off. We’re all different; share who you are fully! Show up!

Engagement Our engagement level is ever changing from one end of apathy, disengagement and maybe even sabotage to the other extreme of unbridled enthusiasm and passion. And once again, being able to speak up and be heard (maybe even confront someone) is key. Active debate allows the team to discuss what matters most. Again, trust needs to be there.

SOLUTION: Mine for conflict! Yes, encourage it! Use your Crucial Conversation skills to say it in a way that prevents defensiveness! After a member shares, remember–no consequences for being honest! Everyone is watching, you know. If you blow it here as a leader, NO ONE will speak up and you’re doomed.

Accountability This is a big one with me.You should be able to hold each other accountable and even offer suggestions to help others win! Peer-to-peer accountability talks are essential to maintain focus and monitor progress. Don’t be afraid to comment: “I notice ____ hasn’t been finished. What do you need to get it done?” or “What resources we missing here?” Effective team members are quick to spot problems and are willing to speak up without assigning blame. Remember, you don’t have all the information possibly. Seek solutions together.

SOLUTION: Ask Soft Solutions for their Totally Responsible Person (TRP) program or Crucial Accountability course! As a manager or employee, these are essential skills for your life and as a member of a team.

Metrics Metrics are important to assess achievements. This doesn’t have to be fancy! Visual aids are good! Also positive feedback or employee recognition are good too as they provide renewed motivation, energy and drive! People like to see they have the power to “move the needle”.

SOLUTION: Even a whiteboard with your metrics works. Some companies use a stoplight approach where green=good, yellow=caution and red= we’re off track and missing the mark. What gets measured gets treasured; and what gets treasured gets done! Make sure individuals put aside personal gains & attention or trying to fulfill personal career aspirations and/or boosting their egos. There is no “I” in TEAM!

The Big Takeaway

If you’re still with me now, decide where your team is by asking confidentially each member how well they feel you’re working as a team on a scale from 1 to 10 on the T.E.A.M. outlined above. Then ask where they think you need to be working together as a team.

Research of hundreds of teams in multinational organizations think his/her team operates at a 5.8 level of effectiveness but recognizes the need to be a 8.7.

Discuss and explore performance gaps and choose one behavioral change that everyone can agree to prioritize. Make team-building a regular part of your meetings!

Before asking for a raise — even if you need and deserve it — it’s easy to let self-doubt take over: What if your boss doesn’t think you’re worth the extra money? What if your boss hasn’t had a pay bump for a while, either, and labels you a complainer?

Lobbying for a better salary or perks shouldn’t jeopardize your career, though, if you do it the right way — especially if you’re a valued employee, says Joseph Grenny, who wrote the bestselling Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High.

The key to getting what you want? Stick to the facts, Grenny advises.

“First, research salary data online to find out what other people get paid for jobs like yours in your geographic area,” he says. “Then, be ready to give solid evidence for why your performance merits more money.”

Whatever you do, don’t say you need more money for personal reasons (no matter how urgent), says Grenny.

To make it easier to sell the idea to higher-ups, “you want your boss to see this as an informed business decision, not a charitable contribution,” he says.

If your annual review didn’t reflect your true wonderfulness, don’t stew in silence, says Joseph Grenny, an executive coach at VitalSmarts, a leadership development firm in Provo, Utah.

Even the best-intentioned leaders are so overworked in these lean times that your achievements may sometimes slip past them. Or they may blame you for a problem when there are other, fixable reasons why it’s occurring.

“Saying nothing may be a bigger risk than speaking up,” says Grenny.

Since a so-so (or worse) appraisal in your HR file could unfairly block you from bigger career opportunities down the road, “you need to calmly set the record straight” about specific comments or complaints you believe are inaccurate, says Grenny.

Also ask your boss to go into detail about what he or she needs from you. Try to get insights into how this manager defines a job well done, says Grenny, and be prepared to do more listening than talking.

Grenny also advises: “Ask for more frequent feedback — maybe even once a week — so you can make course corrections if needed, long before your next formal evaluation.”

Let’s hope you never work for a Bernie Madoff type. But if you discover bad deeds are happening in your company, what can you do? Say nothing to your boss, and you risk seeming complicit in the wrongdoing. Speak up and you could earn that dreaded label, “not a team player.”

Luckily, you can be a whistleblower without blowing your career, says Grenny. You’ll need to be diplomatic, though.

“Start the conversation by sharing your good intentions and stressing that you have the boss’s best interest in mind,” Grenny suggests. “Explain the negative consequences you think will follow if the behavior continues.” After all, bilking customers, deceiving investors, and other dodgy practices have been known to destroy companies, taking thousands of careers straight down the tubes. Remember Enron?

If your boss pooh-poohs your worries (“This is how we’ve always done it”), or even retaliates against you (goodbye, raise), take your concerns upstairs.

“At that point, it’s appropriate to approach your boss’s boss,” Grenny says. “But, so you don’t seem to be going behind your boss’s back, suggest that the three of you meet together.”

What if the rot seems to go all the way up the organization chart? In that case, start looking for a new job.

If you’re coping with outdated equipment, vintage software, pointless paperwork, unrealistic deadlines, or a perennial shortage of skilled support staff, it’s much harder to work efficiently. And you may blame your boss for being unsupportive or just clueless.

Don’t charge into your boss’s office when you’re completely fed up with the situation, though, says Grenny. Instead, schedule a meeting, and keep in mind that your boss is almost certainly not trying to make you miserable.

“Start the conversation with curiosity rather than anger,” Grenny suggests. So the boss isn’t tempted to tune you out, avoid accusatory, judgmental, or inflammatory language.

Instead, calmly describe the gap between the support you need and the support you’re getting, Grenny advises.

“Explain why you’re concerned, with emphasis on your common goals,” he says. “Next, invite dialogue. Your boss may see the problem differently. If you’re open to others’ points of view, they’ll be more open to yours.”

Ever think, “If I were in charge around here, we’d go in a whole different direction …”? The safest option, of course, is to keep that opinion entirely to yourself.

But if your corporate culture encourages debate and consensus, respectfully disagreeing can pay off. Just make sure it’s clear you have the best intentions for doing so, Grenny says.

“You want to establish up front that, far from trying to undermine your boss, you’re offering a different viewpoint that might help,” he says.

It’s not so much what you say as how you say it, Grenny notes. So tread softly and ask lots of questions. Lay out facts supporting your view that a given plan won’t work, then keep reassuring your boss that your goal is to help the whole team succeed.

Tactfully taking issue with the status quo shows you care, Grenny points out, so “the result of your openness could be a greater openness on your boss’s part as well.” Here’s hoping.

These are crazy times. I had an opportunity to speak about resilience last month to a group of unemployed HR professionals.  Being in this job market is no fun. Being able to adapt to stress and adversity is critical to maintaining your balance, even your sanity! Resilience won’t make your problems go away but it will help you see past them and find some enjoyment in life.

What goes hand in hand with resilience is motivation. Resilience and motivation are two critical skills successful people strengthen through deliberate practice. It’s that deliberate practice part that gets most of us. Discipline is required. This month we will explore the difference having these two will make in adapting to the many losses, failures and bad situations we all have faced lately.

Use Your Brain!

Developing a winner’s brain can be achieved!  In previous issues, I have mentioned using the power within–your brain–to achieve results no matter the circumstances that surround you.

PRACTICE.

When you start a new habit, you are actually making new pathways in your brain. Winners know this and through deliberate practice, control their thoughts and focus in.

FOCUS.

Winners are adept at tuning out distractions and choosing the best way to focus on a task to achieve a desired outcome. Their brains even “light up” differently when they’re focused. Many are able to get into “flow” despite distractions. This world has distractions!

ENERGY.

Winners know how to keep the pump flowing. They can embrace a bottomless supply of energy. And believe it or not, they know how to nap when they need to! Yep, sometimes you just need to let go and let your brain figure it out!

PERSISTENCE.

Average people have limited persistence and winners keep at it! They just can’t let a problem go unsolved and are able to muster up even more energy to get the job done!

Talk to Yourself!

We all talk to ourselves. Winners seem to have an optimistic explanatory style rather than a pessimistic style. People can be taught to be optimistic and resilient by changing their explanatory style. They don’t fall into helplessness with their thinking. They say things to themselves like “I can handle this” vs. “This always happens to me”. No victim mentality for them!

I believe that leaders in today’s organizations need to take a look at this whole resiliency and motivation thing. Looking toward the future with optimism, painting a picture of that vision for their companies, is critical in these chaotic times.

Life isn’t about what happens to us, but how we respond to what happens. It’s a choice. It can be made a better choice if we practice.

There are many flavors to this coaching thing:

• Life coaching
• Wellness coaching
• Business coaching
• Executive coaching
• Career coaching…to name a few.

I’m expecting Happiness Coach to pop up any day now since Happiness is so hot now. It’s the number one course in Harvard’s history. Maybe there is a correlation to the number of people on anti-depressives?

I have a few friends that have a different twist on coaching to which  I’d like to introduce you. Feel free to contact them if you want and say HR Momma sent you. There is no referral fee to me, promise. I just like them!
Meet Susan Harding
Susan is a total wellness coach for women.

As an integrative health coach, Susan Harding is educational and motivational. Susan believes in the power of the mind-body-soul connection. She helps women of all ages empower themselves to not only believe in possibilities, but step into optimally healthy lifestyles through her business,The Next Step.

What is Integrative Health coaching??

On-Line Wellness Coaching

Meet Randy Moser

Randy has launched LifeZone4 after almost a decade of research  to address the corporate world need for mass education and accountability in their wellness programs (or in place of!) . Through workshops or the site, LifeZone®4 uses interactive discovery methods that encourage preventative wellness, life satisfaction and peak performance.  The outcome of his discovery exploration driven experience is personal enrichment and self-actualization leading to a positive impact on life and work.

Empirical data gives evidence that work/life balance is still the #1 concern of many people. Organizations that “Close the Gap” between their need for productivity and their employees’ need for balance in their lives are more productive and innovative; leading to higher profitability. Such companies also attract and maintain the best talent.

People and organizations are searching for solutions that are realistic and realizable before traumatic consequences occur; whether it be wellness, relationships or work environment. Organizations have a right to expect productivity, performance, creativity, team-work and ultimately profitability from their workforce.  In return, employees have the right to optimize their life dimensions centered around self, relationships and work.

On-Line  Leadership Development Coaching

Meet Meredith Bell

Performance Support Systems has been my 360 Feedback provider (20/20 Insight) for almost 15 years and they celebrate their 20th year in business this month. Recently they added a tool to address the need for leadership development in a very cost effective way when they launched ProStar Coach.

ProStar Coach is a totally new kind of online subscription service that will transform the way you help supervisors and managers improve their leadership skills. ProStar Coach combines assessment, development, coaching and reinforcement programs into a single unified resource. It’s a self-paced, self-directed system for long-term follow-through that helps leaders ingrain skills over time. It’s like giving a manager a 24/7 personal leadership coach. Managers work on one skill or one personal strength at a time, as they apply best practices with the people they supervise every day. They access learning resources anytime, anywhere and as often as needed to make real changes in their behavior.

Through assessments, training videos, exercises and ability to get feedback on your performance, PSS has hit a home run! The feedback functionality is awesome. This unique hybrid of social networking and forum technology supplements the built-in virtual coaching with input from real people who care about the individual’s development, such as managers, coworkers, team members, training co-participants, coaches and others who share information, feedback, coaching, advice and encouragement.

Check it out HERE. I believe leadership development is a journey, not an event, and ProStar Coach will be there for your employees.

Seth on Leaders

Seven questions for leaders

Do you let the facts get in the way of a good story?
What do you do with people who disagree with you… do you call them names in order to shut them down?
Are you open to multiple points of view or you demand compliance and uniformity? [Bonus: Are you willing to walk away from a project or customer or employee who has values that don’t match yours?]
Is it okay if someone else gets the credit?
How often are you able to change your position?
Do you have a goal that can be reached in multiple ways?
If someone else can get us there faster, are you willing to let them?
No textbook answers… It’s easy to get tripped up by these. In fact, most leaders I know do.

Seth on Trust

Assuming goodwill

Productivity comes from interactivity and the exchange of ideas and talents.
People are happiest when they’re encouraged and trusted.
An airport functions far better when we don’t strip search passengers. Tiffany’s may post guards at the door, but the salespeople are happy to let you hold priceless jewels. Art museums let you stand close enough to paintings to see them. Restaurants don’t charge you until after you eat.
Compare this environment of trust with the world that Paypal has to live in. Every day, thousands of mobsters in various parts of the world sit down intent on scamming the company out of millions of dollars. If the site makes one mistake, permits just one security hole to linger, they’re going to be taken for a fortune. As a result, the company isn’t just paranoid–they know that people really are out to get them.
This is the fork in the road that just about all of us face, whether as individuals or organizations. We have to make an assumption about whether people are going to steal our ideas, break their promises, void their contracts and steal from us, or perhaps, that people are basically honest, trustworthy and generous. It’s very hard to have both postures simultaneously. I have no idea how those pistol-packing guys in the movies ever get a good night’s sleep.
In just about every industry (except electronic money transfer, apparently), assuming goodwill is not only more productive, it’s also likely to be an accurate forecast.
Trust pays.

Seth on Legacy

The worst moments are your best opportunity

That’s how we judge you and how we remember you.
You are presumed to be showing us your real self when you are on deadline, have a headache, are facing a customer service meltdown, haven’t had a good night’s sleep, are facing an ethical dilemma, are momentarily in power, are caught doing something when you thought no one else was looking, are irritable, have the opportunity to extract revenge, are losing a competition or are truly overwhelmed.
What a great opportunity to tell the story you’d like us to hear about you.

Seth on Creating Linchpins

Three ways to help people get things done

A friend sent me a copy of a new book about basketball coach Don Meyer. Don was one of the most successful college basketball coaches of all time, apparently. It’s quite a sad book—sad because of his tragic accident, but also sad because it’s a vivid story about a misguided management technque.

Meyer’s belief was that he could become an external compass and taskmaster to his players. By yelling louder, pushing harder and relentlessly riding his players, his plan was to generate excellence by bullying them. The hope was that over time, people would start pushing themselves, incorporating Don’s voice inside their head, but in fact, this often turns out to be untrue. People can be pushed, but the minute you stop, they stop. If the habit you’ve taught is to achieve in order to avoid getting chewed out, once the chewing out stops, so does the achievement.
It might win basketball games, but it doesn’t scale and it doesn’t last. When Don left the room (or the players graduated), the team stopped winning.

A second way to manage people is to create competition. Pit people against one another and many of them will respond. Post all the grades on a test, with names, and watch people try to outdo each other next time. Promise a group of six managers that one of them will get promoted in six months and watch the energy level rise. Want to see little league players raise their game? Just let them know the playoffs are in two weeks and they’re one game out of contention.
Again, there’s human nature at work here, and this can work in the short run. The problem, of course, is that in every competition most competitors lose. Some people use that losing to try harder next time, but others merely give up. Worse, it’s hard to create the cooperative environment that fosters creativity when everyone in the room knows that someone else is out to defeat them.

Both the first message (the bully with the heart of gold) and the second (creating scarce prizes) are based on a factory model, one of scarcity. It’s my factory, my basketball, my gallery and I’m going to manipulate whatever I need to do to get the results I need. If there’s only room for one winner, it seems these approaches make sense.

The third method, the one that I prefer, is to open the door. Give people a platform, not a ceiling. Set expectations, not to manipulate but to encourage. And then get out of the way, helping when asked but not yelling from the back of the bus.
When people learn to embrace achievement, they get hooked on it. Take a look at the incredible achievements the alumni of some organizations achieve after they move on. When adults (and kids) see the power of self-direction and realize the benefits of mutual support, they tend to seek it out over and over again.
In a non-factory mindset, one where many people have the opportunity to use the platform (I count the web and most of the arts in this category), there are always achievers eager to take the opportunity. No, most people can’t manage themselves well enough to excel in the way you need them to, certainly not immediately. But those that can (or those that can learn to) are able to produce amazing results, far better than we ever could have bullied them into. They turn into linchpins, solving problems you didn’t even realize you had. A new generation of leaders is created…
And it lasts a lifetime.

Seth on Lists

Creating the list

…is not the same as obeying the list.
Do you make the list you check off, follow and work on every day? When does it get made? Who approves it? Do you identify tasks or perform them?
If you had a better list, would you do better work? If you made the list instead of just obeying it, would you be a more valuable member of the team?
Yes, asking questions is often more valued than answering them. (If they’re the right questions.)

And finally….Seth on Limitations

Accepting false limits

Long fascinated with Buckingham and Rath’s work on strengths, I got to attend a local coach group of organizational development folks. The topic was using StrengthsFinder 2.0 for leadership development. Wake Forest shared their experience with the group of having their leadership take the Gallup assessment as millions of others have done and then identifying everyone’s top strengths on a large grid.

It’s interesting to see a composite of a group when you have 34 different themes or strengths available. You can see if there are any similarities or commonalities in this profession.

I’d like to take it further though.

The concept, as Rath so vividly states, it that from the cradle to the cubicle, we devote more time to our shortcomings than we do our strengths. From grade school report cards (didn’t your parents want you to bring up your lowest grade?) to required courses in college you HAD to pass in order to get your degree ( even if the subject was so foreign to you) to  performance reviews at work that focus on “development plans”, we have all experienced the joy of having to improve in areas we’re just not that passionate about. Even Einstein was labeled a poor student because of his shortcomings! What about what we are good at along with our passion too? Why take the road of most resistance?

The key  to human development is building on who you already are!

I have VISION. What if we did focus on everyone’s genius and gave them a chance to use that talent often? What would happen then? Join me as I explore this topic and please do comment. I want to hear all you have to say about this approach!!

What are strengths ?

Let me explain the differences in terms. Talents come naturally, but strengths are earned.:

• A strength is the ability to have near perfect performance in a specific task to produce a positive outcome over and over again. At work, it can be the ability to consistently recommend the perfect products and services for a customer’s needs-that is a strength! At home, it can be the ability to always meet your family’s grocery needs on a tight budget.

A strength is made up of the following:

1. Skills: your basic ability to perform the steps of a task. We aren’t born with them; we acquire them through formal or informal training and practice.
2. Knowledge: What you know. Again, knowledge doesn’t naturally exist within us; we acquire it through formal or informal education.
3. Talents: The ways we naturally think, feel, and behave. Talents must come into existence naturally and cannot be acquired like skills and knowledge. We all have unique talents within us.

Your most powerful talents represent the best of your natural self and are your best opportunity to perform at levels of excellence through strength. You have dominant talents which are always at play and you have supporting talents when their support is needed, although they aren’t as powerful. Your lesser talents seldom contribute to strength.

You can take the Gallup’s Clifton StrengthsFinder 2.0 assessment by buying the book, $11 at Amazon, and using the code at the back of the book for the online assessment. Also keep in mind your yearnings (from childhood on that lead you to a particular activity or environment time and time again), rapid learning (that spark that comes when you’re in a new challenge or environment), satisfaction (the psychological fulfillment that results when you engage your talent and get energized),timelessness (“flow” state where you lose track of time because you are engaged at a deep, natural level), and glimpses of excellence (flashes of outstanding performance).

If you’ve ever worked with a coach, you may have been asked to recall these times in order to figure out your life purpose. They are important clues to your greatest talents and potential for strength.

What is next? Are you IN?

If you’ve been wondering how to harness the power of strengths in your business or personally, let me know your interest.

On an individual basis, self awareness is a powerful cornerstone for growth. Coaches can help you on this journey.

In business, imagine how strengths can provide you with a huge competitive advantage. When employees get to use more of their strengths, they are more engaged, productive and easier to retain. It’s a win-win for everyone because this can create a culture of happiness and intrinsic satisfaction.

Soft Solutions is embarking on using a strengths-based approach in leadership by providing a talent portal for labor deployment. Creating an ad hoc team on a short-term mission can enable powerful results in quicker time if the right strengths are used on the team.

Interested? Email Corliss@HRMomma.com for a free consultation of how this can be accomplished at your organization.

I’ll tell you right off, I’m not a slacker! I take care of more than my business of work and responsibilities and make the most of the time I’ve been given on this earth. Talk about multi-tasking–I’m the queen! But I cannot think of any good reasons not to nap when you’re tired, even when it’s the middle of the day. Even if you’re driving and get whoozy, stop and nap! If your brain is so tired and your thinking is going nowhere, nap! We all have our natural biorhythms you know?

Many countries have this down. I remember when I was in Greece, it irritated me that shops were closed and the world was at home napping after their mid-day meal when I hadn’t had mine yet! I was hungry! Same thing in parts of Italy. But one day I felt like my brain was mush and I took a full out nap and it did wonders!

Before you judge, read on.

Why Napping is a GOOD Thing

I have a friend, Cindy, who napped during her lunch hour the 12 years she was on a particular job . She took her alarm clock and snoozed along a shady spot on a nearby road. There was even another person at that spot who did the same..for TWELVE years! It made a huge difference in her afternoon productivity!

HR Daily Adviser recently pooled people about this subject and got varied answers, mostly positive:

• “How I wish our company would permit even a 30-minute nap at work!!! I experience an energy dip daily around 2-3 P.M.—I am definitely less than productive then. We’ve had a recent surge in accidents (most of which were determined to be due to inattention to detail and loss of focus). I’m going to ask our safety team to see if there is a correlation to the “drowsy period”. I have a very private office and could probably take a short nap … if only I didn’t snore!”
• “During both my pregnancies I napped at work in our lounge. I have napped at practically every job I have ever had (usually in my car over lunchtime). Now that I have children (and am subsequently up a lot at night), I frequently take naps in my supply closet.”
• “As the workforce ages, I can see naptime as a very valuable recruiting tool.”
• “Seven years ago, when I was working overseas, we had two-hour lunch breaks and I know that part of the secret to the mental acuity and high productivity of the more senior executives was their afternoon naps.”
• “I am currently in the midst of a post-grad for NeuroLeadership and one of the areas I would have liked to have done my research assignment is on the area of napping—particularly as it relates to recharging the pre-frontal cortex. However, the major issues, I suspect, are still social views of napping equaling laziness and also having the appropriate spaces to do this.”
• Napping Trick: “One trick: drink a cup of coffee just as you are about to take your nap. If you’re taking a 20 minute nap, it will hit your bloodstream at the time you’re awakening. Makes it a lot easier.”
• “As a labor and employment lawyer, I often experience the need for a mid-day nap. I close the door, close the blinds, put the phone on “do not disturb.” I enhance my sleep with noise-canceling earphones plugged into my iPhone that plays background noise (waves, rain, etc.) and certain wave sounds that stimulate particular brain waves conducive to sleep, dreaming, etc. After 20 minutes I awaken and am refreshed and ready to go forward for several more hours (til 8 pm usually).”

Show Me The Evidence!

With workers doing more with less now, stress is at an all time high. We need to manage this to stay healthy and productive! Here, look at this:

MedicalNewsToday.com says that “dozens of small medical studies have shown that napping for about 30 minutes to an hour in the early afternoon increases a person’s productivity, alertness and sometimes even their mood.

“Still, unsanctioned napping —or to put it more precisely, ‘drowsiness’ —on the job actually costs U.S. businesses $18 billion a year in lost productivity, according to a recent report in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.”

Medical researcher Sara C. Mednick (author of “Take a Nap! Change Your Life”)  says that “… without a midday rest, we are not able to perform at optimal levels throughout the day. In fact, our performance falls apart. Napping maintains and even boosts our skills.”

As reported by ABC News:

• Prime nap time is 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. That minidip in energy you experience is biological, not because you just ate lunch, Mednick says.
• Sleep has three stages:

1. Stage 2 Sleep. Within 20 minutes, you experience “Stage 2” sleep, which increases alertness and motor skills.
2. Slow Wave Sleep. Within 40 minutes, you’ll experience slow wave sleep, which increases memory.
3. REM Sleep. This is deep sleep you’ll get if you nap for up to 90 minutes, and it increases creativity.

• Low light and low noise will help you fall asleep faster.
• Studies show that naps up to 90 minutes won’t interfere with your sleep at night, so don’t sleep too long. And don’t nap within three hours of bedtime.

F. John Reh, of About.com, says “One of the reasons for the changing attitudes towards ‘sleeping at work’ (as opposed to ‘sleeping on the job’) is the growing recognition of the cost to business of sleep deficiency among employees. These costs include:

• increased errors and accidents
• increased absenteeism
• increased drug use
• increased turnover
• higher group insurance premiums
• decreased productivity

So there! Would it be so bad to take a recharging break mid-afternoon? I think not!

I saw an email the other day where a grandson asked his grandmother about her growing up days. She went on to explain all of the things her generation didn’t have available that are taken for granted today. At the end of the long list, it was disclosed she was “only” 59 years old today!

Oh, that hit home.

It made me realize the changes that us Boomers have experienced in our lifetimes and that indeed, changes are going on right now that will shape the world of work to come.

And it’s a good thing.

Boomers and Gen Y are leading the way to a world not so driven by profit, but by purpose and contribution. It’s almost like they are saying “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!!” (Remember that cry?)

This month I want to briefly explain what some of these profound changes are and what they could mean to you in business and in your personal life. I will focus on strengths and motivation.   I’ll also blog it so please…I’d like your comments. I’ll share them in future newsletters if there are enough!

Building on Strengths

Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman wrote “First, Break All the Rules” and later followed with Marcus and Donald Clifton writing  “Now, Discover Your Strengths“. This gave birth to the Clifton Strengths Finder assessment administered by our friends at Gallup. So?

Most of our lives have been focused on improving our deficiencies. Your parents marveled at your “A”s on your report card, but commented that you needed to improve those B’s or C’s. So the focus was on getting those grades up, the path of most resistance.  Our fixation on deficits affects young people in the home and classroom. At work, many performance reviews focus on “development plans” to help you be a more rounded person.

The truth is each person has greater potential for success in specific areas, and the key to human development is building on who you already are! The key is for you to be aware of your potential AND your limitations.

Tom Rath now has taken it to a new level with Strengths Finder 2.0 which includes a code to take the StrengthsFinder assessment. Not a bad deal for $13. You can find out your top five strengths of the 34 themes.

So what?

We talk a lot about employee engagement (or at least I do!) and the impact on business outcomes. After surveying 10 MILLION people, Gallup concluded that if you don’t have a chance to use your strengths at work, you’re SIX TIMES less likely to be engaged in your job. In other words, “you dread going to work, have more negative  than positive interactions with colleagues, treat your customers poorly, tell your friends what a miserable company you work for, achieve less on a daily basis, and have fewer positive and creative moments.” Well, THAT’s what!

Talent (a natural way of thinking, feeling or behaving)
X Investment (deliberate practicing, developing skills, building knowledge) =
Strength (the ability to consistently provide near-perfect performance)

Some of my clients and I are working on building a Strengths-Based culture and are looking at other companies as models who have already used this approach. By next year, we should have some surprising results to share. It’s radical, but it makes good business sense to maximize our talent development & deployment strategies!

Motivation 3.0

OK, I’m already enthralled with behavior and social science. I want to know what makes people tick, especially what motivates them. I suspected some time ago, a lot of what we were using in the corporate world (mostly carrots and sticks) wasn’t getting it anymore. It seemed contrary to what social scientists tell us about human nature. For instance, rewards can have a negative effect on performance! So there is a mis-match between what science knows and business does.

A great book came out last year that explains why reward and punishment systems no longer serve this new world of work. The book is by Daniel Pink–Drive,

Packed with interesting studies, this book shines a light on what motivates the people of today: our innate need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world. He calls it Type I, a way of thinking and an approach to business, grounded in the real science of human motivation.

Type I behavior can improve performance and deepen our satisfaction by employing three elements: autonomy (our desire to be self-directed), mastery (our urge to get better and better at what we do) and purpose (our yearning to be part of something larger than ourselves).

The old operating system, Motivation 2.0, was based on the assumption that the way to improve performance, productivity and excellence is to reward the good and punish the bad. Kinda like training animals. It worked very well until it didn’t.

Intrinsic motivation always trumps extrinsic motivators. We need to create an environment where our innate psychological needs can flourish. Notice the new kind of thinking in the positive psychology movement? A few months ago I wrote that the Happiness course at Harvard was it’s most popular course EVER. Many businesses are going beyond “flexible hours” to a ROWE (results only work environment) where employees are totally responsible for their results, not hours worked, meetings attended, or at the office time. Results, autonomously. Many companies like Zappos and JetBlue are also part of a movement to restore some measure of employee freedom in jobs usually know for a lack of it by offering jobs at home, unmonitored (“Homeshoring” vs. Offshoring”). The world is moving to greater freedom. Down with micromanagers!

When you move your employees from compliance to engagement, the results speak for themselves. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (don’t ask me to pronounce that), wrote about “flow”, that balanced place when we live deeply in the moment, so utterly in control with no sense of time, place or even self. And he says people are more likely to experience that state at work rather than leisure! This is where innovation and creativity reside, the very characteristics organizations need to survive in a world where transactional business can be easily done by computers.

Our current operating system has become less compatible with how we organize what we do, how we think about what we do and how we do what we do!

I could go on and on about this new world coming, including the new corporate legal structures forming that focus more on purpose than profits, the open-source projects of some of our most popular products (Wikipedia and Mozilla) –all done for FREE by people who are this new kind of motivated beings.

But you will need to wait until next month! In the meanwhile, Dan Pink can entertain you HERE.