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Automation is key in today's workforce and is a huge reason that we can do more with less people. This article gives 15 smart tips for introducing automation into your business. I think automation can be extremely helpful, however one must fully understand the entire process they are automating. It is important to test you ideas, plan ahead and work backwards from your ideal workflow to ensure you have a good understanding of the end affect of your automation.

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Automation is everywhere in today's business world. By programming software to complete tasks based on a series of "if-then" conditions, you can greatly increase the speed, efficiency and accuracy of processes like marketing and recruiting, freeing your team up to focus on bigger, more important strategy work.

It may seem tempting to dive in head-first and automate everything you can, but it's wise to have a plan in place to make the best use of the time and resources required to implement automation. We asked 15 members of the to each share their best piece of advice for companies looking to automate more of their business processes.
1. Let Your Team Test And Implement Solutions
Find the best automation tool and assign a team in charge of testing and implementing it gradually. You'll see that the amount of resources you'll be saving will be astonishing and that your collaborators will soon feel comfortable in adopting the new changes. - Nick Chandi ,
2. Fully Understand The Process You're Automating
I can't tell you how many times I've seen people try to automate an existing process without ever looking at the process itself. Take time to evaluate the process and, where necessary, change it, particularly in areas where automation can streamline it. - Lisbi Abraham ,
3. Help Your Team With Adopting Automation
Remember to help the team adopt the new automated processes. Perfectly designed automation will only work as well as it is adopted by the people who use it. Change is hard; most people don't like change, even if it will make their jobs and lives easier. So to make sure it's successful, remember to build in change management and training to any workflow automation you introduce. - Leah Allen, Radius
4. Plan Ahead For The Switch To Automation
Automation is a key to success in a lot of areas. However, when you're building a new product or an MVP, be careful about the number of things you automate. Often, it's more efficient to start fast, do things manually and then switch to automation when you understand the domain better. In the end, you're still going to have to wire everything up, so be ready! - Andrey Neverov, Trucker Path
5. Calculate The ROI Of Automation
Automation isn't always easy. Make sure to estimate the time/cost savings that automating a process will give and compare to the time/cost it will take to actually automate that process. If you invest the time/money now, is the amount of time it takes to recoup that investment acceptable? Make sure to prioritize automating the processes that will save the most time and have the biggest ROI. - Matthew Kolb, AnyplaceAmerica.com
6. Think Long Term
When automating, consider what will make the most sense in the long run. Make sure that whatever solution you employ has the flexibility to grow and adapt to future changes in your development process. The worst thing is becoming dependent on a solution you have limited or no control over -- an issue many cloud-based systems and third-party apps are known for. - Chris Kirby, Voices.com
7. Use Task Dependencies Sparingly
Complex workflows can have multiple divergent critical paths. When you use task dependencies and logic-based deviation, you can easily create a workflow that is not user-friendly. To avoid this, allow larger blocks of tasks to be triggered at any given time. This will give users enough wiggle room to make the automated workflow work for them. - Dan Pennell, WMtek
8. Work Backward From Your Ideal Workflow
Far too many automation projects get blown out of proportion and go over budget. It's important to set a clear vision of what the end state of the automation will look and behave like and then work backward in defining the phases of delivery needed to address it. This makes it difficult for the project to fall by the wayside and sets clear expectations for all involved upfront. - Bijan Vaez, EventMobi
9. Consider The Security Risks Of Automation
What is automated and digitized can be hacked. Automation makes tasks one click easier and a thousand times faster for you -- it also does the same for the malicious attacker. Be mindful of security and plan accordingly. - Satyam Tyagi, Certes Networks
10. Seek Ready-Made Solutions
When you want to automate a process, research what's available before you decide to build your own. Using what's already available will save you time and money. And in business, time is money, so you need to move fast. Leverage as many ready-made solutions as you can, connect them together and test that they work. - Lubo Smid, STRV
11. Go Slow And Prioritize
Automating workflow takes a lot of upfront time and resources, both of which you'll recover exponentially if you do it right. There's also a steep learning curve involved, so start by creating a list of what measures will have the largest impact on the company and then prioritize by how much work/effort/risk is involved in implementing each. - Or Shani, Adgorithms, creators of Albert
12. Write Down Your Processes
Before you automate your workflow, you should document all of your processes and go through them with a fine-tooth comb. In this step, you're looking for edge cases -- problems that occur when something operates at an extreme parameter and will derail your systems when you automate. - Pin Chen, ONTRAPORT
13. Keep High Quality Control Standards
Automation, like any computer system, will have bugs. Sometimes these bugs are obvious oversights, and other times they are "corner cases" resulting from unlikely boundary conditions. You must subject your automation procedures to the same degree of quality control that you would do for your product development. Once your automation project is deployed, monitor and measure its effectiveness to ensure it works as expected. - Arvind Prabhakar, StreamSets
14. Start Off Simple
Automation is a bit like digging a tunnel: You don't know what you're going to run into. It's best to begin with something useful but simple. You'll avoid wasted time and resources but learn a lot about your organization and infrastructure. Carry those lessons forward, taking an incremental approach, and you'll maximize your productivity gains while preparing yourself for bigger projects. - Matthew Russell, Digital Reasoning
15. Use Automation To Solve Specific Problems
It's easy to develop the tech first and find applications later, but this can be a fool's errand. For instance, at Endgame, we recognized that sifting through queries took analysts too long. So we built and released Artemis, a chatbot assistant to automate analysts' data workflows into conversation-style queries, which frees them up to immediately stop suspicious activity from that pulled data. - Jamie Butler, Endgame

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15 Smart Tips For Introducing Automation To Your Business

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Automation is everywhere in today's business world. By programming software to complete tasks based on a series of "if-then" conditions, you can greatly increase the speed, efficiency and accuracy of processes like marketing and recruiting, freeing your team up to focus on bigger, more important strategy work.

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In both my personal life and business life I am working on building small businesses. My husband and I are working on a contracting business and at work I am launching a newly re-branded, physician developed skincare line. These 5 tips may seem simple and obvious, but they really do make a worlds' of difference.

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Every business owner likes to think that he or she has a commitment to quality. If that were truly the case, of course, no product would ever disappoint, and no service would result in a complaint. So how can you improve quality at your company? Here are 5 steps you can take to put you on the right path.

1. Make a commitment.

W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement, famously laid out 14 points for management-chief among them, the notion of "constancy of purpose."

Deming argued that a company's commitment to quality had to come from the top, and it had to be reinforced over and over again. Unless a business views quality as its single, non-negotiable goal, workers will inevitably feel the need to make tradeoffs and quality will slip.

"Constancy of purpose means that quality decisions are not situational," writes the operational expert Rebecca A. Morgan. "End of month quality is the same as beginning of month. It means that the long term benefit of the organization is not sacrificed to hit quarterly targets."

So are you ready to commit? If you are, you should tell your staff-and then think about how you will handle the first conflict between your stated objective and a pressing deadline or an attractive short cut.

Dig Deeper: The Power of Purpose

2. Track mistakes.

If you are going to commit to quality, first you must define exactly what quality is. For manufacturers, this process involves statistical quality control, the process of setting a product's specifications and then sampling a small number of units from the production line to see how closely they measure up to those specs. Standards are set and, if too much deviation occurs (or if quality appears to be trending in the wrong direction), the manufacturing process is altered.

Tracking quality is admittedly more difficult in a service business, and efforts by groups such as the International Organization for Standardization (known as ISO) to create meaningful benchmarks beyond manufacturing have had mixed results.

One way to gauge customer satisfaction (and, by extension, the quality of your service) is by tracking what is called a net promoter score. Devised by a Bain consultant named Fred Reichheld, a net promoter score keeps tabs on the number of customers who would recommend a business to their friends. A customer who answers 9 or 10 is seen as a promoter; a customer who answers 7 or 8 is seen as passive; and a customer who gives a company a score of 6 or lower is seen as a detractor. By subtracting the number of detractors from the number of promoters, a company arrives at its net promoter score.

Dig Deeper: How to Address Quality Issues

3. Invest in training.

An old saw of the quality movement is that any business with a quality control department is doomed to poor performance, for it has demonstrated to every other employee that quality is not his or her chief concern. Instead, quality experts recommend that businesses train workers at all levels to look for ways to improve quality and to ameliorate problems.

Training takes on several dimensions. For starters, you should set up a new-employee initiation program that trains workers to focus on quality issues from their first day on the job. Different CEOs have different perspectives on how best to do this. Ralph Stayer, the quality-obsessed CEO of Johnsonville Sausage in Sheboygan Falls, Wisconisn, believes your existing employees should be put in charge of training new employees, because only they can provide a firsthand perspective on how your company's operations work. Ari Weinzweig, founder and CEO of the Zingerman's Family of Companies in Ann Arbor, Michigan, takes a different approach: He personally leads all new-employee orientation training sessions (which last several days) because he believes an employer never has a better chance of instilling values and a sense of purpose than right after he or she has hired a new employee.

Whether you hand train duties to your employees, take them on personally, or some combination of the two approaches, it's important that you provide workers with a history of the company through the lens of quality. Let them know what problems you have had in the past, how you corrected these problems, and where your company stands with respect to its quality goals today. You should also go over your definition of quality in detail, and show them how you measure quality (see the previous section.) Finally, train workers to see the connection between their actions and, more broadly, their work ethic, and the company's overall performance. By tying individual behavior to an overall system of work, and then showing where that system can, on occasion break down, you will be giving workers the information they need to be good stewards of your business.

Dig Deeper: Ralph C. Stayer on How Johnsonville Sausage Embraced Quality

4. Organize quality circles.

Your staff members may roll their eyes at the introduction of such a dated technique, but organizing employees into quality circles can be an effective way to identify and address problems. Simply put, quality circles are groups of employees who are encouraged to assess processes and recommend improvements, all with the goal of promoting quality, efficiency, and productivity. The concept was developed by Deming in post-war Japan, and made its way to the United States in the late 1970s. At one point, half of all large corporations had adopted quality circles, but then interest in them faded.

That's a shame. Quality circles, by any other name, are teams of workers who are given the authority and responsibility for making a business better. To succeed, experts say that participation in a quality circle should be voluntary; circles should draw members from all corners of a company; and the circle should set its own agenda (rather than pursuing a company owner's agenda.)

Once you have invited workers to join a quality circle, provide them with adequate resources to pursue their analysis, and schedule a time in the future at which they may present their findings. It is important that you act on their recommendations, even if the group's conclusion is not necessarily one you would have drawn yourself. Remember, the purpose of the exercise is less to solve a particular problem than it is to engage workers in the process of finding and addressing concerns. Moreover, you should be tracking customer complaints or product defects on a regular basis, so if the circle's recommendations do not produce the desired result, you'll know it, and be able to act.

Dig Deeper: How to Set Up Quality Circles

5. Have the right attitude.

Too many people turn the quest to improve quality into something oppressive. No less an authority than Deming rejected the idea that the quality management had to be dreary and involve a lot of negativity. "The prevailing system of management has crushed fun out of the workplace," Deming moaned in an interview in the 1990s.

This attitude is not necessarily easy to adopt and runs afoul of some of the basic management practices we take for granted. For example, Deming was not a fan of performance reviews, as the writer John Case has explained. "[I]f your evaluations are fair, you will determine that half your workers (by definition) are below average, and you will tell them so," Case writes. "Result: half the work force is instantly discouraged and demoralized, and any sense of common purpose is undermined."

Rather than pointing out inadequacy wherever it might be found, Deming believe that the job of managers was to frame the pursuit of quality as an interesting, noble, and worthwhile goal. If you are to truly improve quality at your business, whether you manufacture products, distribute goods, or perform a service for your clients, your first step (and also the hardest) is to resist the temptation to dwell on your company's flaws and instead rally your team around the cause of rooting them out.

Dig Deeper: Zero-Defect Management

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Getty Every business owner likes to think that he or she has a commitment to quality. If that were truly the case, of course, no product would ever disappoint, and no service would result in a complaint. So how can you improve quality at your company?

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Having control of your staff and organization is of the utmost importance, but can also prove to be extremely challenging at times. I believe you must find a balance between being a micro managing and wanting to ensure that things are done correctly, but also allowing the staff to grow and express themselves within their work. As stated in the link, "you can tell a great leader by the talent they attract and the team that they build."

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As a manager, just how controlling are you? Many managers have a high need to control the environment and their team's work. In fact, managers with the highest need for control are labeled micromanagers. Other managers lean in the opposite direction and give their team members so much control that they lose sight of either the goal or the results people are producing.

When we ask managers why they have such a high need to control their staff, controlling managers say they have a:

Fear that staff will not complete the project correctly or exactly how the manager would prefer

High need to know what is being done and when

Need to ensure that the project is done on time

Lack of trust in the team member to complete the project or complete the project correctly

Fear that a negative outcome by the team member will be a poor reflection on the manager

High need to make sure the rules, policies and traditions are followed

Concern that the environment is changing too quickly to give up control

From the employees view point, here is the impact of micromanagement:

Employees sit around and wait to be told what to do

Employees are hesitant to make decisions without the blessing of the manager

Employees do only what they are told to do

Employees are disengaged

Employees do not feel valued or recognized

Employees feel blamed when things do not go right

Control is about making sure that a manager's orders are carried out, exactly the way they are prescribed. The biggest problem with being controlling is that these managers are doing a disservice to both the direct reports and their company. And, the irony of control is that the fastest way to lose control of your team is by trying to maintain tight control of your team. Control limits potential, limits initiative and innovation, inhibits talent, and puts a governor on results. The manager is single handedly limiting growth of results, people and profits.

Truth be told, you cannot control anyone, even the people who report directly to you. Any parent will verify this fact. If a controlling leader wants to become less controlling, the first step is admitting that you have an opportunity to become an even stronger leader, producing even greater results with a team that is highly motivated, by giving up control and power. Leadership has very little to do with control and everything to do with influence. Leaders may or may not have a title, but they always have a relationship where people want to follow them.

Great leaders are able to balance the fulcrum between maintaining control and giving up control. Leadership is all about setting a compelling positive vision, clear goals, delegating authority, relinquishing control, trusting staff to let people do their job and then recognizing team members for producing great results.

You can tell a great leader by the talent they attract and the team that they build. Managers who spend time complaining about their team or individual team members seldom rise to the level of being called a great leader. So what characteristics do these great leaders have that allow them to give up control?

Positive Vision: They have a powerful positive vision of what they are creating for both their team and the organization.
Focused Strategically: They are focused on strategic actions and turning the vision into a reality and only spend limited time on minute operational details.

They Trust People: Trust is your most valuable asset. Great leaders delegate authority to enable team members to make decisions and get things done.

Recognize and Value People: When things go right, they pass along the recognition and success to those who are responsible.

Take Responsibility: When things do not go right, they take responsibility to ensure the problem gets corrected and doesn't happen again.

Expect Growth: Great leaders expect team members to grow so they can add even more value to the team.

Accept Mistakes: Great leaders know that if they value innovation and continuous improvement, there are going to be mistakes. Congratulate people for trying something new, even if it didn't work, and move on.

High Confidence and Self Esteem: Great leaders truly believe they can give up control because they know that if something does not go well, they have confidence to lead the team to success.

Genuinely Care: Great leaders genuinely care about the success of their team members, both personally and professionally, as well as the team as a whole.

To grow your influence, authority, and respect as a leader, let go of control.

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How to Gain More Control as a Leader: Let Go

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As a manager, just how controlling are you? Many managers have a high need to control the environment and their team's work. In fact, managers with the highest need for control are labeled micromanagers. Other managers lean in the opposite direction and give their team members so much control that they lose sight of either the goal or the results people are producing.

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When reading chapter 17 of the textbook, I found the story about how Twitter uses their data to assist different organizations very interesting. I wanted to look more into that and found this article by Maria Scarfi about Social Media and the Big Data Explosion. Social media is so interesting...and to think that people are now hiring, as the article states, "social media conductors."

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This article is by Marita Scarfi, CEO of Organic, a digital ad agency unit of Omnicom Group with clients that have included Kimberly-Clark, Chrysler, American Express, Sony PlayStation, Sprint, and 20th Century Fox.

Consider the following statistic from a recent report from McKinsey & Co.: By 2009, large companies-with 1,000 employees or more-already had 200 terabytes of data stored about all facets of their consumers' lives.

To put such a huge number in perspective, consider that just 10 terabytes can hold the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress.

Now add to that mind-boggling amount of data the exponential growth we have seen in social-networking data in the past three years. We have millions of tweets about our brands, thousands of Facebook "likes," hundreds of thousands of check-ins on Foursquare. Pinterest and Instagram are adding even more to social-media data deluge. Watch the Twitter feed on your company's brand for just a few hours and you'll recognize soon enough that we are heading into a social-media data explosion that will soon be out of control-if it isn't already-at most companies.

So what are we going to do with all this data? How will we store it, how will we act on it? We already know how hard it is to analyze and then act on the data we already have, culled from rewards cards, transactional data, the personal information consumers provide when they set up an account on our shopping sites, to name just a few. The good news is that data are generally structured so that we can actually make use of it.

But social-media data are essentially unstructured-that's what makes it so interesting and so hard to analyze. There is no tagging system that allows us to make sense of social-media data through analytical tools. We already know that any attempt at analyzing this data on a human scale is not even conceivable. Gone are the days when you hired a college student to watch your Twitter feed and respond to consumers in real time.

Today, we need to hire and train people who can make sense of social-media data. You are going to need a whole orchestra of people to make sense of what you are "hearing" from social media. In a recent post, I talked about hiring a conductor for your social-media strategy. This person sets in motion the social-media plan and makes certain that all parts of the company are looped in. But how does that conductor know when to change strategies, when to act on "tweets" and when to dismiss them and how to determine what a "like" on Facebook really means for the brand? If we ask consumers on our social-media sites to help us create new products, can we actually analyze that information and digest it into actionable points that will help research and development move forward? Or are these queries destined to end up where so much of data already do? Stored, but not used.

In the past, we had structures around our data that made it possible to analyze and act on. We knew how to analyze our advertising on television from Nielsen ratings. We had circulation numbers finely tuned by Zip code for magazines and newspapers to micro-target consumers. I would argue we even had actionable data from digital channels.

But social-media data are completely different. Today, as we know all too well, people are interacting with our brands driven by their social-media patterns. I put social media in a very separate marketing arena, apart from even its digital cousins including websites. Social media is actually word of mouth on steroids.

Moreover, consumers are increasingly interacting with our brands via mobile social media on a very local level and that adds yet another dimension to the data. How many companies actually track a consumer and analyze her behavior as she shifts from "liking" your brand on Facebook (probably using her mobile phone to do this) to watching a television ad for the brand to using an app created by the brand to reading news about the brand on her tablet to picking up the phone to make a call to a customer service line. This is the way our consumers interact with our brands, often doing all these activities within in the space of just a few minutes.

But even as consumers have shifted almost seamlessly to this mobile social local media world, we are still in the early days of staffing for social media and we are way behind in staffing to analyze social-media data. We have new hires watching over Facebook and have outsourced our 1-800 lines to India. We need to build robust systems for analyzing the huge amounts of data flowing in from social media and how they then link to all the other touch points consumers have with the brand. (We've developed our Connection Index to do just this.)

If you want to make use of all this data, you will have to add people with skills you may never have needed before to your marketing research teams. You will need a strong database person to put the data into forms that can be analyzed. You also will need statisticians who can understand the data and its impact. You must have people adept at understanding behavioral data. The data we are receiving from social media is vastly different from the static, transactional data we had previously gathered. It is unstructured, fluid, mobile and often contradictory. You will need to hire people who know how to tag this data, to add structure to it, so your statisticians and database experts can turn it into research that you can then turn into actionable brand strategies.

You cannot leave this task to marketers, who have traditionally been in charge of social media. It's not enough anymore to tell people that you have 10 million impressions from a YouTube video. All that says is there is chatter about your brand. Pretty soon, your CFO is going to want to prove that there is an ROI for social media. Finance isn't going to care if you have people are watching your YouTube videos or adding you to their Pinterest boards, if you don't hit your sales goals. Without revenue, chatter is just chatter.

To meet those ROI needs, we need to turn social media into actionable data or we may end up harming the brand instead of helping it.The Holy Grail of marketing has always been creating great emotional engagement with utility. Social media has the power to connect consumers with brands in ways that go far beyond even the best word of mouth. But we still need to know if that emotion is turning into profit.

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This article is by Marita Scarfi, CEO of Organic, a digital ad agency unit of Omnicom Group with clients that have included Kimberly-Clark, Chrysler, American Express, Sony PlayStation, Sprint, and 20th Century Fox. Consider the following statistic from a recent report from McKinsey & Co.: By 2009, large companies-with 1,000 employees [...]

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Rescuing Teams That Have Gone Off the Deep End

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Rescuing Teams That Have Gone Off the Deep End

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Whoa...is this what I need right now! I recently had to terminate an employee for her toxic attitude. While she technically was great at her job, her demeanor with her coworkers was uncalled for. I then got notice from a patient that she was disrespectful to them as well...and well that was the last straw. I cannot have one toxic employee brings my stellar team down. We haven't quite gone off the deep end yet...but these tips are very helpful to reign things back in and move forward.

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Not everyone needs the same type of motivation from their leader. Some people respond to certain techniques better than others. To be a successful leader, you must be aware of your staff and have the emotional intelligence to understand how to properly motivate them to success.

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Matt Krumrie, Monster Contributing Writer

Managers who understand what motivates each employee can tailor incentives accordingly. But your motivational toolbox should go beyond rewarding excellent work. Just as important to keeping workers engaged is a plan for encouraging, consoling and embracing them when they invariably slip off track.

But how do you find the right balance between supporting employees and pushing them to meet high standards? Motivational pros offer some insights.
Provide Feedback, Both Positive and Corrective
Regular feedback -- both positive and corrective -- from managers helps keep employees on a path of continuous improvement, says Sharon Jordan-Evans of Jordan Evans Group and coauthor of Love 'Em or Lose 'Em: Getting Good People to Stay.

"Most people want feedback and will use it to improve," Jordan-Evans says. "Give them room to stretch, grow, make mistakes and excel. But be sure to reward the behaviors you want repeated. When talented people seem motivated to you, notice it and thank them. They'll repeat those actions and attitudes."
Create a Positive Atmosphere
A positive corporate culture also motivates employees to do their best, says Tracey Turner, executive director of The Creative Group. Professionals will work harder for managers who show they care about employees as individuals and want to help them succeed.
Coach Through the Ups and Downs
Carol E. Gilson, an adjunct professor in human resources and management at St. Paul College, offers these tips for coaching an employee through a rough period:

When an Employee Makes a Mistake: Help him determine why it happened and understand the consequences. Then show confidence that the employee can do a better job.

When an Employee Becomes Complacent: Meet with him to discuss his slip in performance. Is it due to a specific problem? Offer ideas to help the employee improve, and clearly define expectations.

When an Employee Has a New Project -- and More Work: Show your enthusiasm for the project, and ask everyone involved to commit to it. Offer an incentive when it's completed.

Turner stresses the importance of positive reinforcement as a motivational tool:

Celebrate Accomplishments: A simple thank-you note or public praise will increase an employee's confidence, while a staff lunch at the conclusion of a major project can help build team spirit. "The impact of showing appreciation for a job well done is tremendous," Turner says. "A recent survey commissioned by our company revealed that lack of recognition is one of the primary reasons employees quit their jobs."

Criticize Carefully: When you must criticize, do it privately, and keep the discussion performance-based, not personal. Be consistent, and hold all employees to the same standards.

Set Clear Expectations: Conduct regular performance appraisals so employees understand what's expected of them. Instill confidence and enthusiasm by noting an employee's strengths and special skills, not just perceived weaknesses.

Staff Strategically to Prevent Burnout: Bringing in extra help during peak workloads enables full-time employees to concentrate on special projects while temporary workers focus on day-to-day matters or vice versa.

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Managers as Motivators: Effective Motivational Tools

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Matt Krumrie, Monster Contributing Writer Managers who understand what motivates each employee can tailor incentives accordingly. But your motivational toolbox should go beyond rewarding excellent work. Just as important to keeping workers engaged is a plan for encouraging, consoling and embracing them when they invariably slip off track.

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7 quick and easy tips for increasing motivation. I believe that success starts by taking care of your people. It takes a special person to be a true leader and want to actually improve the lives of their subordinates while achieving the organizational goals.

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Increasing motivation in your workplace can help improve performance, raise morale and boost productivity. While different motivators work for different types of employees, there are several common ...

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Good Read! One of my favorite parts is the initial title description: Great leaders choose their leadership style like a golfer chooses his or her club, with a calculated analysis of the matter at hand, the end goal, and the best tool for the job. I truly strive to be an excellent leader in the position of management. I feel that since I have been on the other end as the subordinate, I have a better understand of how to interact and coach my staff. I believe in the success of all, not just the organization. I want my staff to also feel fulfilled and comfortable with their works and lives. It's all full circle.

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Taking a team from ordinary to extraordinary means understanding and embracing the difference between management and leadership. According to writer and consultant Peter Drucker, "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things."

Manager and leader are two completely different roles, although we often use the terms interchangeably. Managers are facilitators of their team members' success. They ensure that their people have everything they need to be productive and successful; that they're well trained, happy and have minimal roadblocks in their path; that they're being groomed for the next level; that they are recognized for great performance and coached through their challenges.

Related: Ask Yourself These 5 Questions Before Deciding On A Leadership Style

Conversely, a leader can be anyone on the team who has a particular talent, who is creatively thinking out of the box and has a great idea, who has experience in a certain aspect of the business or project that can prove useful to the manager and the team. A leader leads based on strengths, not titles.

The best managers consistently allow different leaders to emerge and inspire their teammates (and themselves!) to the next level.

When you're dealing with ongoing challenges and changes, and you're in uncharted territory with no means of knowing what comes next, no one can be expected to have all the answers or rule the team with an iron fist based solely on the title on their business card. It just doesn't work for day-to-day operations. Sometimes a project is a long series of obstacles and opportunities coming at you at high speed, and you need every ounce of your collective hearts and minds and skill sets to get through it.

This is why the military style of top-down leadership is never effective in the fast-paced world of adventure racing or, for that matter, our daily lives (which is really one big, long adventure, hopefully!). I truly believe in Tom Peters's observation that the best leaders don't create followers; they create more leaders. When we share leadership, we're all a heck of a lot smarter, more nimble and more capable in the long run, especially when that long run is fraught with unknown and unforeseen challenges.

Related: Five Things I've Learned As A New Manager At Google

Change Leadership Styles

Not only do the greatest teammates allow different leaders to consistently emerge based on their strengths, but also they realize that leadership can and should be situational, depending on the needs of the team. Sometimes a teammate needs a warm hug. Sometimes the team needs a visionary, a new style of coaching, someone to lead the way or even, on occasion, a kick in the bike shorts. For that reason, great leaders choose their leadership style like a golfer chooses his or her club, with a calculated analysis of the matter at hand, the end goal and the best tool for the job.

My favorite study on the subject of kinetic leadership is Daniel Goleman's Leadership That Gets Results, a landmark 2000 Harvard Business Review study. Goleman and his team completed a three-year study with over 3,000 middle-level managers. Their goal was to uncover specific leadership behaviors and determine their effect on the corporate climate and each leadership style's effect on bottom-line profitability.

Related: Why Your Leadership Skills Won't Get You Hired (But These Four Other Things Will)

The research discovered that a manager's leadership style was responsible for 30% of the company's bottom-line profitability! That's far too much to ignore. Imagine how much money and effort a company spends on new processes, efficiencies, and cost-cutting methods in an effort to add even one percent to bottom-line profitability, and compare that to simply inspiring managers to be more kinetic with their leadership styles. It's a no-brainer.

Here are the six leadership styles Goleman uncovered among the managers he studied, as well as a brief analysis of the effects of each style on the corporate climate:

1. The pacesetting leader expects and models excellence and self-direction. If this style were summed up in one phrase, it would be "Do as I do, now." The pacesetting style works best when the team is already motivated and skilled, and the leader needs quick results. Used extensively, however, this style can overwhelm team members and squelch innovation.

2. The authoritative leader mobilizes the team toward a common vision and focuses on end goals, leaving the means up to each individual. If this style were summed up in one phrase, it would be "Come with me." The authoritative style works best when the team needs a new vision because circumstances have changed, or when explicit guidance is not required. Authoritative leaders inspire an entrepreneurial spirit and vibrant enthusiasm for the mission. It is not the best fit when the leader is working with a team of experts who know more than him or her.

3. The affiliative leader works to create emotional bonds that bring a feeling of bonding and belonging to the organization. If this style were summed up in one phrase, it would be "People come first." The affiliative style works best in times of stress, when teammates need to heal from a trauma, or when the team needs to rebuild trust. This style should not be used exclusively, because a sole reliance on praise and nurturing can foster mediocre performance and a lack of direction.

4. The coaching leader develops people for the future. If this style were summed up in one phrase, it would be "Try this." The coaching style works best when the leader wants to help teammates build lasting personal strengths that make them more successful overall. It is least effective when teammates are defiant and unwilling to change or learn, or if the leader lacks proficiency.

5. The coercive leader demands immediate compliance. If this style were summed up in one phrase, it would be "Do what I tell you." The coercive style is most effective in times of crisis, such as in a company turnaround or a takeover attempt, or during an actual emergency like a tornado or a fire. This style can also help control a problem teammate when everything else has failed. However, it should be avoided in almost every other case because it can alienate people and stifle flexibility and inventiveness.

6. The democratic leader builds consensus through participation. If this style were summed up in one phrase, it would be "What do you think?" The democratic style is most effective when the leader needs the team to buy into or have ownership of a decision, plan, or goal, or if he or she is uncertain and needs fresh ideas from qualified teammates. It is not the best choice in an emergency situation, when time is of the essence for another reason or when teammates are not informed enough to offer sufficient guidance to the leader.

Bottom line? If you take two cups of authoritative leadership, one cup of democratic, coaching, and affiliative leadership, and a dash of pacesetting and coercive leadership "to taste," and you lead based on need in a way that elevates and inspires your team, you've got an excellent recipe for long-term leadership success with every team in your life.
Robyn Benincasa is a two-time Adventure Racing World Champion, two-time Guinness World Record distance kayaker, a full-time firefighter, and author of the new book, How Wining Works: 8 Essential Leadership Lessons from the Toughest Teams on Earth, from which this article is excerpted. (Harlequin Nonfiction, June 2012)
[ Image: Flickr user Bas Kers]

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6 Leadership Styles And When You Should Use Them

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Taking a team from ordinary to extraordinary means understanding and embracing the difference between management and leadership. According to writer and consultant Peter Drucker, "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things." Manager and leader are two completely different roles, although we often use the terms interchangeably.

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A total breakdown of leadership tips and tricks including problem solving, decision making, time & stress management as well as some useful tools. I have found MindTools.com to be super useful during this class!

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Types of Leadership Styles

There are as many approaches to leadership as there are leaders, from Lewin's Leadership Styles framework of the 1930s to the more recent ideas about transformational leadership. There are also many general styles, including servant and transactional leadership. Building awareness of frameworks and styles can help you to develop your approach and to be a more effective leader.

From Winston Churchill and Angela Merkel, to Queen Elizabeth I and Martin Luther King, there can be as many ways to lead people as there are leaders.

Fortunately, businesspeople and psychologists have developed useful frameworks that describe the main ways that people lead. When you understand these frameworks, you can develop your own approach to leadership, and become a more effective leader as a result.

In this article and video, we'll highlight some of the common approaches to leadership that you can use. We'll also look at some specific styles of leadership, and we'll explore the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Click here to view a transcript of this video.

Note:

These frameworks and styles of leadership are based on several different approaches to leadership. You can read more about these approaches in our article on Core Leadership Theories.

Useful Leadership Style Frameworks

So, let's look at some useful approaches - shown mainly in the order they appeared - that you can use to become a more effective leader. Your own, personal approach is likely to be a blend of these, depending on your own preferences, your people's needs, and the situation you're in.

Lewin's Leadership Styles

Psychologist Kurt Lewin developed his framework in the 1930s, and it provided the foundation of many of the approaches that followed afterwards. He argued that there are three major styles of leadership:

1. Autocratic leaders make decisions without consulting their team members, even if their input would be useful. This can be appropriate when you need to make decisions quickly, when there's no need for team input, and when team agreement isn't necessary for a successful outcome. However, this style can be demoralizing, and it can lead to high levels of absenteeism and staff turnover.

2. Democratic leaders make the final decisions, but they include team members in the decision-making process. They encourage creativity, and people are often highly engaged in projects and decisions. As a result, team members tend to have high job satisfaction and high productivity. This is not always an effective style to use, though, when you need to make a quick decision.

3. Laissez-faire leaders give their team members a lot of freedom in how they do their work, and how they set their deadlines. They provide support with resources and advice if needed, but otherwise they don't get involved. This autonomy can lead to high job satisfaction, but it can be damaging if team members don't manage their time well, or if they don't have the knowledge, skills, or self motivation to do their work effectively. (Laissez-faire leadership can also occur when managers don't have control over their work and their people.)

Lewin's framework is popular and useful, because it encourages managers to be less autocratic than they might instinctively be.

The Blake-Mouton Managerial Grid

With a people-oriented style, you focus on organizing, supporting, and developing your team members. This participatory style encourages good teamwork and creative collaboration.

With task-oriented leadership, you focus on getting the job done. You define the work and the roles required, put structures in place, and plan, organize, and monitor work.

According to this model, the best style to use is one that has both a high concern for people and a high concern for the task - it argues that you should aim for both, rather than trying to offset one against the other. Clearly, this is an important idea!

Path-Goal Theory

For example, highly-capable people, who are assigned to a complex task, will need a different leadership approach from people with low ability, who are assigned to an ambiguous task. (The former will want a participative approach, while the latter need to be told what to do.)

With Path-Goal Theory, you can identify the best leadership approach to use, based on your people's needs, the task that they're doing, and the environment that they're working in.

Six Emotional Leadership Styles

Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee detailed their Six Emotional Leadership Styles theory in their 2002 book, " Primal Leadership."

The theory highlights the strengths and weaknesses of six common styles - Visionary, Coaching, Affiliative, Democratic, Pacesetting, and Commanding. It also shows how each style can affect the emotions of your team members.

Flamholtz and Randle's Leadership Style Matrix

The matrix is divided into four quadrants - each quadrant identifies two possible styles that will be effective for a given situation, ranging from "autocratic/benevolent autocratic" to "consensus/laissez-faire."

Transformational Leadership

Transformational leaders have integrity and high emotional intelligence. They motivate people with a shared vision of the future, and they communicate well. They're also typically self-aware, authentic, empathetic, and humble.

Transformational leaders inspire their team members because they expect the best from everyone, and they hold themselves accountable for their actions. They set clear goals, and they have good conflict-resolution skills. This leads to high productivity and engagement.

However, leadership is not a "one size fits all" thing; often, you must adapt your approach to fit the situation. This is why it's useful to develop a thorough understanding of other leadership frameworks and styles; after all, the more approaches you're familiar with, the more flexible you can be.

Specific Leadership Styles

As well as understanding the frameworks that you can use to be a more effective leader, and knowing what it takes to be a transformational leader, it's also useful to learn about more general styles, and the advantages and disadvantages of each one.

Let's take a look at some other styles of leadership that are interesting, but don't fit with any of the frameworks above.

Note:

Remember, not all of these styles of leadership will have a positive effect on your team members, either in the short or long term. (See our article on Dunham and Pierce's Leadership Model for more on how your actions as a leader will affect your team.)

Bureaucratic Leadership

Bureaucratic leaders follow rules rigorously, and ensure that their people follow procedures precisely.

This is appropriate for work involving serious safety risks (such as working with machinery, with toxic substances, or at dangerous heights), or with large sums of money. Bureaucratic leadership is also useful for managing employees who perform routine tasks.

This style is much less effective in teams and organizations that rely on flexibility, creativity, or innovation.

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Charismatic Leadership

Charismatic leadership resembles transformational leadership: both types of leaders inspire and motivate their team members.

The difference lies in their intent. Transformational leaders want to transform their teams and organizations, while leaders who rely on charisma often focus on themselves and their own ambitions, and they may not want to change anything.

Charismatic leaders might believe that they can do no wrong, even when others warn them about the path that they're on. This feeling of invincibility can severely damage a team or an organization, as was shown in the 2008 financial crisis.

Servant Leadership

These people often lead by example. They have high integrity and lead with generosity. Their approach can create a positive corporate culture, and it can lead to high morale among team members.

However, others believe that people who practice servant leadership can find themselves "left behind" by other leaders, particularly in competitive situations.

This style also takes time to apply correctly: it's ill-suited to situations where you have to make quick decisions or meet tight deadlines.

Transactional Leadership

This style starts with the idea that team members agree to obey their leader when they accept a job. The "transaction" usually involves the organization paying team members in return for their effort and compliance on a short-term task. The leader has a right to "punish" team members if their work doesn't meet an appropriate standard.

Transactional leadership is present in many business leadership situations, and it does offer some benefits. For example, it clarifies everyone's roles and responsibilities. And, because transactional leadership judges team members on performance, people who are ambitious or who are motivated by external rewards - including compensation - often thrive.

The downside of this style is that, on its own, it can be chilling and amoral, and it can lead to high staff turnover. It also has serious limitations for knowledge-based or creative work.

As a result, team members can often do little to improve their job satisfaction.

Key Points

In business, transformational leadership is often the best leadership style to use.

However, no one style of leadership fits all situations, so it's useful to understand different leadership frameworks and styles. You can then adapt your approach to fit your situation.

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Leadership Styles: Choosing the Right Approach for the Situation

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There are as many approaches to leadership as there are leaders, from Lewin's Leadership Styles framework of the 1930s to the more recent ideas about transformational leadership. There are also many general styles, including servant and transactional leadership. Building awareness of frameworks and styles can help you to develop your approach and to be a more effective leader.

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Team work makes the dream work!

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Interesting read about influencing styles. I found it interesting when the text pointed out that the tactics we default to are usually the ones we are also most receptive to. I definitely feel that my influencing style is a combination of all listed, depending on the situation and the person.

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Effective leadership today relies more than ever on influencing others - impacting their ideas, opinions, and actions. While influence has always been a valuable managerial skill, today's highly collaborative organizations make it essential. Consider how often you have to influence people who don't even report to you in order to accomplish your objectives. Success depends on your ability to effectively influence both your direct reports and the people over whom you have no direct authority.

Have you ever thought about how you influence others? The tactics you use? We are all aware that people use different influencing tactics, but did you realize that we each naturally default to the same tactics every time? Or that the tactics we default to are also the ones to which we are most receptive when being influenced?

It is these preferred tactics that define our influencing style. Analyzing the different influencing tactics, researchers have identified up to nine primary influencing tactics. In our quest to further understand personal influencing styles, we did additional research to build on the existing knowledge base. From our research, we've identified five distinct influencing styles: rationalizing, asserting, negotiating, inspiring, and bridging.

You may have an idea what your style is just from hearing these labels, but the most accurate way to identify your style is with an influence style indicator - a self-scoring assessment that classifies your style based on answers to questions about preferred influencing tactics. But even without the indicator, here are some questions you can ask yourself to begin to understand your style:

Rationalizing: Do you use logic, facts, and reasoning to present your ideas? Do you leverage your facts, logic, expertise, and experience to persuade others?

Asserting: Do you rely on your personal confidence, rules, law, and authority to influence others? Do you insist that your ideas are heard and considered, even when others disagree? Do you challenge the ideas of others when they don't agree with yours? Do you debate with or pressure others to get them to see your point of view?

Negotiating: Do you look for compromises and make concessions in order to reach an outcome that satisfies your greater interest? Do you make tradeoffs and exchanges in order to meet your larger interests? If necessary, will you delay the discussion until a more opportune time?

Inspiring: Do you encourage others toward your position by communicating a sense of shared mission and exciting possibility? Do you use inspirational appeals, stories, and metaphors to encourage a shared sense of purpose?

Bridging: Do you attempt to influence outcomes by uniting or connecting with others? Do you rely on reciprocity, engaging superior support, consultation, building coalitions, and using personal relationships to get people to agree with your position?

While answering these questions, take your style a step further. How often does it work for you? Are you more successful with certain types of people? Have you ever wondered why? Since there are five different influencing styles, using only your preferred style has the potential to undermine your influence with as many as four out of five people.

Gaining awareness about our own influencing style and those of others is especially critical in light of today's fast-paced and stressful work environments, and here's why: When we are operating unconsciously out of a preference (our style) and not seeing the results we expect, we actually have the tendency to intensify our preferred behavior - even when it's not working!

If your individual success depends on gaining the cooperation of people over whom you have no direct authority, this should concern you. The way to begin to increase your odds of influencing more people is to learn to recognize and use each of the five styles.

Becoming aware that there are influencing styles other than yours is a good start. To further increase your influence, you must learn what each style sounds like when it's being used effectively and ineffectively. Gaining this awareness will help you recognize when the style you're using isn't working and how to determine one that will.

What's your influencing style? And what are you going to do about it?

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Effective leadership today relies more than ever on influencing others - impacting their ideas, opinions, and actions. While influence has always been a valuable managerial skill, today's highly collaborative organizations make it essential. Consider how often you have to influence people who don't even report to you in order to accomplish your objectives.

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A great, simple little cheat tool for reminders on effective communication.

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What I agreed with most here is that performance appraisals should be done as needed, rather than a scheduled, redundant thing. I completely see the value and importance of a performance appraisal for growth. However, I can see where they become something that really isn't doing much but wasting people's time. At my job, we do performance appraisals every 4 months. Now, during the beginning of someones employment, every 4 months is great. They are still learning and developing into a "rock star", as we say. However, I have some employees that have been there for years and are just plain fabulous. Having a review for them every 4 months just feels like a waste of my time and theirs. I end up having nothing to say but "keep doing what your doing." So I do agree on doing them as needed depending on the individual being reviewed and the position.

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Should organizations stop doing performance appraisals? The argument in favor of eliminating them is that they frequently do more damage than good. Among the damage that they are said to do, the least troublesome is wasting time, and the most troublesome is the alienation of employees and creating conflicts between them and their supervisors.

There is no doubt that in many organizations performance appraisals are poorly done, and that they create a multitude of problems. However, it is important to point out that they exist because of the need to motivate, direct, and improve the performance of individuals and organizations. Those who advocate eliminating performance appraisals don't disagree with these needs, but they point out that managers can and do this anyway, and that therefore performance appraisals are a redundant bureaucratic troublesome activity.

It is hard to argue with the point that "good managers" do what a good performance appraisal is supposed to do. The fact that they can and do it supports the argument that appraisals can be eliminated, or at least, radically simplified. The "problem" is that many managers do not manage in ways that make performance appraisals unnecessary. Despite this, some companies have declared that they are performance appraisal-free organizations.

Organizations do not have to make a choice between no performance appraisals and everyone having a performance appraisal. An interesting alternative is to require performance appraisals only where they are necessary. One approach organizations can take to eliminating unnecessary performance appraisals is to focus on identifying those managers who have the motivation, management skills, and behaviors that make their doing formal performance appraisals unnecessary. In essence, this approach identifies managers who are good managers and leaders and, as a result, do not need to do performance appraisals. They can be certified as not needing to do performance appraisals with their direct reports and their part of the organization can be declared performance appraisal-free.

The challenge in operating with this approach, of course, is deciding which managers in an organization need to do performance appraisals and which do not. Part of this process needs to be training managers to be sure they have the right skills, and gathering data showing that the people working for them have been treated in ways that make traditional performance appraisals unnecessary.

A clear advantage of this appraisal-free approach is that it will motivate managers throughout an organization to become certified as performance appraisal-free managers. It can make being appraisal-free valued as a part of a manager's package of skills. Without this approach, there often is little incentive for managers to learn the skills that are necessary to do good performance appraisals, and to learn the skills that make them unnessary.

One needed feature of an appraisal-free approach is a training course for employees about what they should expect from their manager given that there will be no formal performance appraisal. Unfortunately, in most organizations today, employees are not even trained in how they should behave in the performance appraisal. This is one of the many reasons why they are not particularly effective in most organizations.

Of course, even the best performance management system cannot make all managers effective at setting goals, coaching, and giving feedback. The answer for them is not eliminating the appraisal system; it is eliminating them.

At this point, you may be wondering if I know of any organization that has utilized the idea of certifying managers as appraisal-free. The answer is no, but there are probably some out there. If not, hopefully this piece will stimulate some organizations to seriously consider this idea, and develop a program that ultimately leads to performance appraisal free zones in organizations and ultimately organizations that are effective and performance appraisal-free.

***

Edward E. Lawler III is a distinguished professor of business at the University of Southern California (USC) Marshall School of Business and founder/director of the University's Center for Effective Organizations (CEO), one of the country's leading management research organizations. He's authored or co-authored more than 40 books, including his most recent - Effective Human Resource Management (Stanford University Press, 2012).

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Should organizations stop doing performance appraisals? The argument in favor of eliminating them is that they frequently do more damage than good. Among the damage that they are said to do, the least troublesome is wasting time, and the most troublesome is the alienation of employees and creating conflicts between [...]

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Performance Appraisals Are Driving Talent Away

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Performance Appraisals Are Driving Talent Away

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A good read that gives a different perspective on performance appraisals. I totally agree that performance appraisals can backfire, especially when it comes to top performing employees. They may find negative feedback "annoying" as the article stated. I have totally been there!!!

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There is a deep divide about the value of traditional performance appraisals. The argument is one of few HR topics elevated to C-suite conversations.

Annual Review: judges showing the words Try Again instead of a score

Many organizations use the annual performance appraisal as a tool to inform employees of the value added by their work throughout the year. Often this is the only feedback employees receive from a manager all year.

In 1950 the Performance Rating Act was passed, mandating annual reviews of all federal employees. Over the years, both private and public sector organizations created instruments to evaluate employees and linked bonuses and salaries to these assessments.

The now-traditional performance appraisal with a rating scale, not linked to a competency model or professional development plan, does more harm than good to retain high-performing employees. In a 2013 study conducted by Kansas State University Associate Professor Satoris Culbertson and colleagues, it was found that high-performing employees were annoyed by "negative" feedback on the annual performance appraisal.

The feedback provided on the appraisal was given without recommended actions to improve or a professional development plan. Simply highlighting the "performance problem" was a problem for these "star" performers.

According to Peter Cappelli, director of the Wharton School's Center for Human Resources, "If you wait a year to tell employees how they are doing, they are almost always surprised and unhappy if the results are not positive."

It seems documenting less than positive feedback on an annual appraisal form has the potential to demotivate high performers. Individuals who are at the top of their game on the job and highly engaged are discouraged by such feedback. Should this be considered a flashing red light?

There is a deep divide about the value of traditional performance appraisals. Many human capital experts believe the traditional approach is fundamentally flawed. This argument is one of few HR topics elevated to C-suite conversations.

During an interview with the Washington Post, Accenture CEO Pierre Nanterme said, "For the millennium generation, it's not the way they want to be recognized, the way they want to be measured. If you put this new generation in the box of the performance management we've used the last 30 years, you lose them. We're done with the famous annual performance review, where once a year I'm going to share with you what I think about you. That doesn't make any sense. Performance is an ongoing activity. It's every day, after any client interaction or business interaction or corporate interaction. It's much more fluid."

Successful companies such as Accenture, Adobe Systems Inc., Deloitte, IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp. and others have eliminated the traditional performance appraisal.

Samuel Culbert, author of " Get Rid of the Performance Review!" said: "They destroy the trust between the boss and the employee, and cost the company enormous amounts of money in terms of time and wasted effort. The people being reviewed worry about pleasing their boss before they concern themselves with delivering results to the company."

No Silver Bullet

Creating a culture that encourages continuous improvement in the way business goals are achieved and of individuals' skills, behavior and contributions to realize a mission is the target for most organizations. No doubt, a silver bullet does not exist, and one solution will not work for all. Taking time out to consider what works to motivate employees in a specific company or industry is doable, however, and should work for every management team committed to extraordinary success.

Changing the mindset to focus on creating a performance development process rather than a performance management system could create a workplace that enables people to perform on the job at their highest competency level.

Getting people in organizations to focus on the company's strategic plan and their role in execution is crucial. Management teams need to move away from undivided attention on the job description to engage its workforce.

Connecting employees to the mission and overarching purpose of the company requires understanding of "big picture" strategy: What does it mean to me? Where do I fit in the picture? What am I doing specifically to make this company successful?

Managers need to give feedback to each team member regularly and be held accountable for doing so. It needs to be meaningful - tied to measurable behavior that is linked to achieving specific results and aligned with the organization's strategy. Individual performance objectives discussed (throughout the year) and based on goals that support the overall direction of the organization is what employees need to leverage talent for the good of the company and their career.

When searching for talent to "get the job done" and execute strategy, management teams look for exceptional skill. People who are considered the best at what they do or have the right mix of education, experience, motivation and passion to excel desire for career advancement. How often do you hear, "We just need an 'average, normal' person to fill the role?"

Keeping the traditional performance appraisal as part of business process is analogous to accepting "average, normal" for the organization. That will not move the organization forward. It will not do anything to retain the most valued talent needed for innovation and critical thinking required to get to the next level.

Moving to the next level requires people working in the organization who have "skin in the game" - people going above and beyond. And, Evidence is mounting in support of throwing out the traditional performance appraisal to keep "star players."

Kim Morris Lee is director of organizational effectiveness at University of Illinois at Chicago. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Workforce on Twitter at @workforcenews.

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The Performance Appraisal Is Driving Your Talent Away - Workforce Magazine

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There is a deep divide about the value of traditional performance appraisals. The argument is one of few HR topics elevated to C-suite conversations. Many organizations use the annual performance appraisal as a tool to inform employees of the value added by their work throughout the year.

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10 Examples of Companies with Fantastic Culture. 

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10 Examples of Companies with Fantastic Culture. 

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A fantastic culture is as easy as taking care of your employees and putting them first. It all trickles down from there. Each company values what each individual brings to the table. I think an excellent culture should be of the utmost importance in any business.

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Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Every company has a culture that can heavily impact its productivity, employee morale and overall brand reputation.

Companies with positive, vibrant cultures attract the best talent to their teams and produce better products and services since their employees are more motivated to give 100% daily. A stellar workplace culture leads to a better work environment, improved employee engagement, and a better representation of a company's mission.

In contrast, poor company culture can negatively affect company performance and employee results. Employees are more likely to leave companies with poor, draining cultures and produce less than stellar products.
The bottom line: it's critical to understand how to cultivate a strong company culture in your enterprise, whether you run a small business or a larger firm.
There are various initiatives you can consider to foster different types of cultures, ranging from enhancing the onboardingemployee experience to improving employee satisfaction and mental health.

With so many different types of companies with distinct sets of values and mission statements, brainstorming the right kind of organization culture for your business can be challenging.

Fortunately, many world-renowned businesses offer excellent examples of company culture and key takeaways you can implement into your organization.
Related: The 4 Steps Needed to Instill an Entrepreneurial Mindset Into Your Company Culture
By examining these examples, you can live your company values and reinvent your corporate culture to attract top talent and boost employee retention.

1. Zappos

Zappos has become almost as well known for its culture as it is for the shoes that it sells online. What does that culture look like?

It starts with a cultural fit interview, which carries half the weight of whether the candidate is hired. New employees are offered $2,000 to quit after the first week of training if they decide the job isn't for them. Ten core values are instilled in every team member. Employee raises come from workers who pass skills tests and exhibit increased capability, not from office politics. Portions of the budget are dedicated to employee team building and culture promotion.

Great benefits and a workplace that is fun and dedicated to making customers happy all fit in with the Zappos approach to company culture -- when you get the company culture right, great customer service and a great brand will happen on its own.

Takeaway: Zappos hires according to cultural fit first and foremost. It has established what the company culture is, and fitting into that culture is the most important thing managers look for when hiring. This promotes the culture and happy employees, which ultimately leads to happy customers.

2. Warby Parker

Warby Parker has been making and selling prescription glasses online since 2010. It designs its own glasses, and sells directly to customers, cutting out the middleman and keeping prices low.

Company culture at Warby Parker instigates "culture crushes," and one reason for that level of success is a team dedicated to culture. That team means that a positive culture is on the forefront, setting up fun lunches, events and programs. The company makes sure that there is always an upcoming event so the entire team has something to look forward to, and it uses methods to make sure the entire team works well together by insisting everyone helps keep break areas clean or sending random employees out to lunch together.

Takeaway: Warby Parker has made company culture deliberate by creating a dedicated team tasked with coming up with events and programs to promote community. Great company culture doesn't happen on its own.

3. Southwest Airlines

The airline industry is often mocked for grumpy employees and poor customer service, but Southwest Airlines bucks those trends. Customers loyal to Southwest often point to happy and friendly employees who try hard to help.

Southwest isn't new to the game. It's been in operation for 43 years. Yet somehow, during all that time, the company has managed to communicate its goals and vision to employees in a way that makes them a part of a unified team. Southwest also gives employees "permission" to go that extra mile to make customers happy, empowering them to do what they need to do to meet that vision.

Takeaway: Employees who are convinced of a larger common goal are people who are excited to be part of a larger purpose.

4. Twitter

While Twitter used to be on the list for its incredible culture, it's unfortunately serving as an example of how a change in culture can change where a company stands in the public eye.

Recent developments in Twitter's ownership and management changed what Twitter once was.

Before Elon Musk, employees of Twitter couldn't stop raving about the company's culture. Rooftop meetings, friendly coworkers and a team-oriented environment in which each person was motivated by the company's goals inspired that praise.

Employees of Twitter could also expect free meals at the San Francisco headquarters, along with yoga classes and unlimited vacations for some. These and many other perks are not unheard of in the startup world. But what set Twitter apart?

Employees couldn't stop talking about how they love working with other smart people. Workers raved about being part of a company that was doing something that matters in the world, and there was a sense that no one leaves until the work gets done.

All of that said, Elon Musk's Twitter takeover has led to adverse shifts in Twitter's workplace culture, as revenue issues have led to mass firings, more intense workloads, and cutbacks on the old employee amenities.

Takeaway: While these changes may be temporary, the current state of Twitter HQ is not the tech oasis it once was, and that change in culture has led to a massive change in how the public views (and feels) about the company as a whole.

5. Chevron
Related: Design Your Office to Fulfill Employees' Most Basic Needs
While oil and gas companies are prime targets for a lot of negative PR and public ire, Chevron employees responded favorably towards the company's culture. Employees compared Chevron with other similar companies and pointed out " the Chevron way" as being one dedicated to safety, supporting employees and team members looking out for each other.

Chevron shows it cares about employees by providing health and fitness centers on site or through health-club memberships. It offers other health-oriented programs such as massages and personal training. Chevron insists employees take regular breaks. In other words, the company shows it cares about the well-being of employees, and employees know that they are valued.

Takeaway: Your company culture doesn't have to be ping-pong tables and free beer. Simply providing employees with a sense of safety and well-being and creating a policy where everyone looks out for each other can easily suffice.

6. SquareSpace

This successful startup is regularly voted as one of the best places to work in New York City. Its company culture is one that is "flat, open and creative." A flat organization is one where there is no (or very few) levels of management in between staff and executives. This approach is more common among startups, and can be tricky to maintain as a company grows larger, generally requiring groups to form.

SquareSpace also offers robust benefits and perks, including 100 percent coverage of health insurance premiums, flexible vacations, attractive office space, catered meals, stocked kitchens, monthly celebrations, relaxation spaces and periodic guest lecturers. Solid benefits such as these help a culture, but are not the sole instigator of successful culture. Down-to-earth leaders and direct access to management have a great deal of impact.

Takeaway: Employees feel their voices can be heard when they aren't muffled under layers of management. This level of freedom and empowerment creates confident employees and improves morale.

7. Google

It would almost seem wrong not to mention Google on a list of companies with great culture. Google has been synonymous with culture for years, and sets the tone for many of the perks and benefits startups are now known for. Free meals, employee trips and parties, financial bonuses, open presentations by high-level executives, gyms, a dog-friendly environment and so on. Googlers are known to be driven, talented and among the best of the best.

As Google has grown and the organization has expanded and spread out, keeping a uniform culture has proven difficult between headquarters and satellite offices, as well as among the different departments within the company. The larger a company becomes, the more that culture has to reinvent itself to accommodate more employees and the need for management.

While Google still gets stellar reviews for pay, perks and advancement, there are also some employees who note growing pains that you'd expect from such a huge company, including the stress associated with a competitive environment. Hiring and expecting the best from employees can easily become a stressor if your culture doesn't allow for good work-life balance.

Additionally, for all the venerable aspects of company culture that Google offers, the company is far from perfect. Many employees report an abundance of overqualified workers, paired with many in managerial roles who lack the skills required to lead teams.

As with many other tech giants, many employees also report unreasonable workloads and the regular cancellation of projects without adequate rationale.

Moreover, reports of sexual harassment, hate speech, and other patterns of workplace misconduct have circled around Google for years.

Former Google employees, including an anonymous executive, have reported that when employees speak out about difficulties with a colleague, Google's HR officers are expected to direct those employees to the 20 free therapy sessions offered annually as a benefit by the company.

When dealing with workplace harassment of any kind, this type of response is woefully inadequete. One lesson you can take away from Google's culture issues is this: offering benefits, no matter how competitive, is not a cure for a broken culture.

Takeaway: Even the best culture needs to revisit itself to meet a growing company's team. The most successful company culture leads to successful business, and that requires an evolving culture that can grow with it.

8. REI

For outdoor enthusiasts, REI has long been the company to turn to for great gear. Employees of REI, a cooperative where profits benefit its member-owners, also agree that this is a place where greatness happens, even beyond the beloved camping and outdoor products. REI's mission is to equip both customers and employees for the outdoors, not just to have fun but also in promoting stewardship of the environment.

REI says that its employees give " life to their purpose," firmly attributing company success to workers. The CEO of REI has acknowledged that employees can get benefits anywhere, but allowing outdoors-oriented employees to immerse themselves in REI culture is what makes it unique. Employees can win equipment through "challenge grants" where they submit a proposal for an outdoor adventure that would be challenging. Regular townhall-style meetings are held where employees can submit questions anonymously to help management understand what's happening in the company.

Takeaway: When your employees are completely immersed in the same interests as your company, the culture propels itself forward almost on its own. Culture that is owned and propelled by the same people puts value in their voices.

9. Meta

Just like Google, Meta - formerly known as Facebook - is a company that has exploded in growth as well as being synonymous with unique company culture.

Meta offers, as do many similar companies, lots of food, stock options, open office space, on-site laundry, a focus on teamwork and open communication, a competitive atmosphere that fosters personal growth and learning and great benefits.

Yet, Meta has the same struggles as similar companies: a highly competitive industry leads to a sometimes stressful and competitive workplace. Additionally, a free and organic organizational structure that worked for the smaller organization is less successful for the larger one.

To meet these challenges, Meta has created conference rooms, has separate buildings, lots of outdoor roaming space for breaks and has management (even CEO Mark Zuckerberg) working in the open office space alongside other employees. It's an attempt at a flat organizational culture using the buildings and space itself to promote a sense of equality among the competition.

Of course, Meta has recently been in the headlines for its massive swath of layoffs. In November 2022, Meta laid off 13% of its workforce (over 11,000 employees) in an effort to cut costs. Starting in February, Meta began a steady decline that continued throughout the year.

Perhaps the core of company culture is a sense of job security, upon which a healthy workplace environment can be cutlivated. In the face of enormous layoffs, it's safe to say that Meta has a culture problem (to say nothing else of their business woes).

Takeaway: When your company depends on new hires who excel in a competitive field, your company culture and any associated perks will likely be the tipping point for applicants. You must stand out from other companies vying for attention.

10. Adobe

Adobe is a company that goes out of its way to give employees challenging projects and then provide the trust and support to help them meet those challenges successfully. While it offers benefits and perks like any modern creative company, Adobe's is a culture that avoids micromanaging in favor of trusting employees to do their best.

Adobe products are synonymous with creativity, and only through the avoidance of micromanaging are the people who create those products truly free to create. For example, Adobe doesn't use ratings to establish employee capabilities, feeling that that inhibits creativity and harms how teams work. Managers take on the role of a coach, more than anything, letting employees set goals and determine how they should be assessed.

Employees are also given stock options so that they know they have both a stake and reward in the company's success. Continual training and culture that promotes risk taking without fear of penalty are part of Adobe's open company culture.

Takeaway: Putting trust in your employees goes a long way towards positive company culture, because trust leads to independent employees who help your company grow.

How you can create an excellent company culture

Many of these companies offer similar perks and benefits, but those do not determine the culture completely. The approach taken with how employees are treated and what level of ownership and trust they are given is also a key part of company culture.

One word of caution: focusing on company culture to the exclusion of other workforce considerations (safety, laws, regulations) can lead to abuses or create situations where employees aren't comfortable. Even the best examples of culture on this list have detractors.

Remember that the best culture makes all employees feel safe and welcome, never excluded or uncomfortable. Focusing on "culture fit" alone makes it difficult to hire and welcome employees who are different than the prevailing culture, even if they'd be an asset and great counterbalance at your company. Your company culture needs adjustment if it causes you to end up with a homogenized team who think and act the same.

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10 Excellent Company Culture Examples For Inspiration | Entrepreneur | Entrepreneur

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Company culture can help boost employee retention and create a safe workplace community. Here are 10 real-life examples to learn from.

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Overall a great read, but I love the quick checklist tool they give for proper delegation.

Ensure that the delegated task is:

-Specific
-Measurable
-Agreed
-Realistic
-Timebound
-Ethical
-Recorded

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effective delegation skills, delegating techniques, process, tips for effective delegation and delegation training

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Delegation of authority and tasks - how to delegate, plus more free online business training for management, sales, marketing, project management, communications, leadership, time management, team building and motivation.

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Breaks down delegation in different detailed categories such as team management, decision making, problem solving and others. Delegation was and sometimes still is one of the hardest things for me. I suffer from "it's just easier to do it myself." So I have to remind myself that it may be frustrating now, but long term once the employee has the task down, it will only benefit me.

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Even "Super You" needs help and support. There is no shame in asking for assistance. Push aside the pride and show respect for the talent others can bring to the table.

And, remember that there is no such thing as a single-handed success: when you include and acknowledge all those in your corner, you propel yourself, your teammates and your supporters to greater heights.
- Author Unknown

Do you feel stressed and overloaded? Or that your career seems stalled? If so, then you may need to brush up your delegation skills!

If you work on your own, there's only a limited amount that you can do, however hard you work. You can only work so many hours in a day. There are only so many tasks you can complete in these hours. There are only so many people you can help by doing these tasks. And, because the number of people you can help is limited, your success is limited.

However, if you're good at your job, people will want much more than this from you. This can lead to a real sense of pressure and work overload: you can't do everything that everyone wants, and this can leave you stressed, unhappy, and feeling that you're letting people down.

On the positive side, however, you're being given a tremendous opportunity if you can find a way around this limitation. If you can realize this opportunity, you can be genuinely successful!

One of the most common ways of overcoming this limitation is to learn how to delegate your work to other people. If you do this well, you can quickly build a strong and successful team of people, well able to meet the demands that others place. This is why delegation is such an important skill, and is one that you absolutely have to learn!

Why People Don't Delegate

To figure out how to delegate properly, it's important to understand why people avoid it. Quite simply, people don't delegate because it takes a lot of up-front effort.

After all, which is easier: designing and writing content for a brochure that promotes a new service you helped spearhead, or having other members of your team do it? You know the content inside and out. You can spew benefit statements in your sleep. It would be relatively straightforward for you to sit down and write it. It would even be fun! The question is, "Would it be a good use of your time?"

While on the surface it's easier to do it yourself than explain the strategy behind the brochure to someone else, there are two key reasons that mean that it's probably better to delegate the task to someone else:

First, if you have the ability to spearhead a new campaign, the chances are that your skills are better used further developing the strategy, and perhaps coming up with other new ideas. By doing the work yourself, you're failing to make the best use of your time.

Second, by meaningfully involving other people in the project, you develop those people's skills and abilities. This means that next time a similar project comes along, you can delegate the task with a high degree of confidence that it will be done well, with much less involvement from you.

Delegation allows you to make the best use of your time and skills, and it helps other people in the team grow and develop to reach their full potential in the organization.

When to Delegate

Delegation is a win-win when done appropriately, however, that does not mean that you can delegate just anything. To determine when delegation is most appropriate there are five key questions you need to ask yourself:

Is there someone else who has (or can be given) the necessary information or expertise to complete the task? Essentially is this a task that someone else can do, or is it critical that you do it yourself?

Does the task provide an opportunity to grow and develop another person's skills?

Is this a task that will recur, in a similar form, in the future?

Do you have enough time to delegate the job effectively? Time must be available for adequate training, for questions and answers, for opportunities to check progress, and for rework if that is necessary.

Is this a task that I should delegate? Tasks critical for long-term success (for example, recruiting the right people for your team) genuinely do need your attention.

If you can answer "yes" to at least some of the above questions, then it could well be worth delegating this job.

Tip:

Other factors that contribute to the delegability of a task include:

1. The project's timelines/deadlines.

How much time is there available to do the job?

Is there time to redo the job if it's not done properly the first time?

What are the consequences of not completing the job on time?

2. Your expectations or goals for the project or task(s), including:

How important is it that the results are of the highest possible quality?

Is an "adequate" result good enough?

Would a failure be crucial?

How much would failure impact other things?

That being said, having all these conditions present is no guarantee that the delegated task will be completed successfully either. You also need to consider to whom you will delegate the task and how you will do it.

The Who and How of Delegating

Having decided to delegate a task there are some other factors to consider as well. As you think these through you can use our free Delegation Log worksheet to keep record of the tasks you choose to delegate and who you want to delegate them to.

To Whom Should You Delegate?

The factors to consider here include:

1. The experience, knowledge and skills of the individual as they apply to the delegated task.

What knowledge, skills and attitude does the person already have?

Do you have time and resources to provide any training needed?

2. The individual's preferred work style.

How independent is the person?

What does he or she want from his or her job?

What are his or her long-term goals and interests, and how do these align with the work proposed?

3. The current workload of this person.

Does the person have time to take on more work?

Will you delegating this task require reshuffling of other responsibilities and workloads?

Tip:

When you first start to delegate to someone, you may notice that he or she takes longer than you do to complete tasks. This is because you are an expert in the field and the person you have delegated to is still learning. Be patient: if you have chosen the right person to delegate to, and you are delegating correctly, you will find that he or she quickly becomes competent and reliable.

How Should You Delegate?

Use the following principles to delegate successfully:

1. Clearly articulate the desired outcome. Begin with the end in mind and specify the desired results.

2. Clearly identify constraints and boundaries. Where are the lines of authority, responsibility and accountability? Should the person:

Wait to be told what to do?

Ask what to do?

Recommend what should be done, and then act?

Act, and then report results immediately?

Initiate action, and then report periodically?

3. Where possible, include people in the delegation process. Empower them to decide what tasks are to be delegated to them and when.

4. Match the amount of responsibility with the amount of authority. Understand that you can delegate some responsibility, however you can't delegate away ultimate accountability. The buck stops with you!

5. Delegate to the lowest possible organizational level. The people who are closest to the work are best suited for the task, because they have the most intimate knowledge of the detail of everyday work. This also increases workplace efficiency, and helps to develop people.

6. Provide adequate support, and be available to answer questions. Ensure the project's success through ongoing communication and monitoring as well as provision of resources and credit.

7. Focus on results. Concern yourself with what is accomplished, rather than detailing how the work should be done: Your way is not necessarily the only or even the best way! Allow the person to control his or her own methods and processes. This facilitates success and trust.

8. Avoid "upward delegation." If there is a problem, don't allow the person to shift responsibility for the task back to you: ask for recommended solutions; and don't simply provide an answer.

9. Build motivation and commitment. Discuss how success will impact financial rewards, future opportunities, informal recognition, and other desirable consequences. Provide recognition where deserved.

10. Establish and maintain control.

Discuss timelines and deadlines.

Agree on a schedule of checkpoints at which you'll review project progress.

Make adjustments as necessary.

Take time to review all submitted work.

In thoroughly considering these key points prior to and during the delegation process you will find that you delegate more successfully.

Keeping Control

Now, once you have worked through the above steps, make sure you brief your team member appropriately. Take time to explain why they were chosen for the job, what's expected from them during the project, the goals you have for the project, all timelines and deadlines and the resources on which they can draw. And agree a schedule for checking-in with progress updates.

Lastly, make sure that the team member knows that you want to know if any problems occur, and that you are available for any questions or guidance needed as the work progresses.

We all know that as managers, we shouldn't micromanage. However, this doesn't mean we must abdicate control altogether: In delegating effectively, we have to find the sometimes-difficult balance between giving enough space for people to use their abilities to best effect, while still monitoring and supporting closely enough to ensure that the job is done correctly and effectively.

The Importance of Full Acceptance

When delegated work is delivered back to you, set aside enough time to review it thoroughly. If possible, only accept good quality, fully-complete work. If you accept work you are not satisfied with, your team member does not learn to do the job properly. Worse than this, you accept a whole new tranche of work that you will probably need to complete yourself. Not only does this overload you, it means that you don't have the time to do your own job properly.

Of course, when good work is returned to you, make sure to both recognize and reward the effort. As a leader, you should get in the practice of complimenting members of your team every time you are impressed by what they have done. This effort on your part will go a long way toward building team member's self-confidence and efficiency, both of which will be improved on the next delegated task; hence, you both win.

Key Points

At first sight, delegation can feel like more hassle than it's worth, however by delegating effectively, you can hugely expand the amount of work that you can deliver.

When you arrange the workload so that you are working on the tasks that have the highest priority for you, and other people are working on meaningful and challenging assignments, you have a recipe for success.

To delegate effectively, choose the right tasks to delegate, identify the right people to delegate to, and delegate in the right way. There's a lot to this, but you'll achieve so much more once you're delegating effectively!

Check how effectively you're delegating now with our " How Well Do You Delegate?" quiz.
Download Worksheet

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Successful Delegation: Using the Power of Other People's Help

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Even "Super You" needs help and support. There is no shame in asking for assistance. Push aside the pride and show respect for the talent others can bring to the table. And, remember that there is no such thing as a single-handed success: when you include and acknowledge all those in your corner, you propel yourself, your teammates and your supporters to greater heights.

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This study guide breaks down organizing with several different specific sections such as importance and principles of organizing, as well as things like delegation and decentralization. Well organized and simple information.

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Organizing function helps in achieving effective administration by clarifying the authority and responsibility amongst superiors and subordinates.

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I have found one of the most useful tips in my career, education and personal life when it comes to planning anything is to give myself a start, and more importantly, an end date. I often would find myself setting all of these goals...I would have a good plan of how to implement them, but procrastination always takes over. I have realized that I need a deadline to commit to completing my goals.

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As an entrepreneur, you're always undertaking projects. Whether you realize it or not, your work is split up into distinct groupings of tasks around a specific goal (what I'll call "projects").
Related: The 5 Biggest Reasons Projects Fail
Ideally, your tasks drive completion of your projects, and the projects drive the accomplishment of your larger business goals.

More times than not, however, entrepreneurs -- especially those just starting out -- don't prioritize their projects enough. Instead, they try to do everything at once. This is a bad idea. It increases stress, decreases the likelihood that you'll finish what you need to and makes it that much harder to progress effectively toward a business goal.

To help you avoid that fate, here are five top project-planning tips to start or tune up your own project management:

1. Define your projects.

The first and most important thing in project planning is to figure out what projects you are dealing with. First, what is a project? My definition is anything that takes more than a few easy tasks to get done. Setting up that new sales software? That's a project. Expanding your network? Yep, that's a project, too. Growing your business? That's a collection of projects!

Some of your projects will be pretty obvious, but others will lurk in the background unacknowledged. To unearth all of your projects, write down everything you're currently working on and everything you want to be working on. Then, group that list around specific goals.

That action will likely lead you to your project list. You may have 10 to 20 (or even more) projects on this list, but to be effective, you'll want to pick the two to five projects that are most important, and focus on those for the remaining tips.

2. Give your projects a start and end date.

You should know (or decide) when each project should start and end. This will allow you to sequence projects by prioritizing them based on when they need to start or be finished. Start and end dates will also allow you to plan around your own business cycles and prevent projects from going on for much longer than they should.
Related: The 'Hard-Stop' Method Can Help You Save Time and Money on Testing New Ideas
3. Make a one-page plan.

A little planning goes a long way to helping a project succeed. To create a one-page plan, jot down your answers or notes for each of the following questions:

What problem will the project solve?

What is the benefit to the organization?

What kind of staff and budget do I need?

What are the major milestones?

What are the potential stumbling blocks?

What risks does this project pose?

What is my work plan (list of tasks or sub-items to be completed by when)?

What are the specific metrics for success?

How will you know the project is done?

Note: if you're going to keep the plan to one page, your answers need to be relatively concise!

4. Establish communication routines.

For any project that involves multiple team members, set up communication routines in advance. Will someone be reporting progress weekly? Monthly? Will there be a recurring call for all parties to check in? Who is responsible for checking on whether the project is meeting its milestones?

5. Know if and when to quit.

While it's best to finish what you start, sometimes it's necessary to pull the plug. If you have all of your projects laid out, with start and end dates and a clear one-page plan that includes milestones and communication guidelines, you should have all the information you need to know when to quit a project.

Certainly it's not always easy to quit, especially if you've already committed a lot of time, energy and emotion. But if a project is dragging on, here are some questions that can help you think through whether or not to abandon it:

Is the goal of this project still important to my organization?

What was the planned ROI for this project? What is the ROI now?

What is my opportunity cost in working on this? Could I better achieve my goals by spending this time on other projects?

What is the emotional toll of continuing with this project.

Related: Keeping Clients Happy: How to Ensure a Project Doesn't Go Over Budget

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5 Project-Planning Tips to Help You Meet Your Goals

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As an entrepreneur, you're always undertaking projects. Whether you realize it or not, your work is split up into distinct groupings of tasks around a specific goal (what I'll call "projects"). Related: The 5 Biggest Reasons Projects Fail Ideally, your tasks drive completion of your projects, and the projects drive the accomplishment of your larger business goals.

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What a fun little tool! How to make difficult decisions...I like that it says to ask yourself "why" the original issue had occurred. With each "why" the answer gets deeper and you have a better understanding of the decision you are facing.

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Making difficult decisions is...well, difficult. It helps to have a process to help you on your way.

This infographic gives you that process and it will help you in your life and work. Courtesy of: OnStride

About the Author

Scot Herrick is the author of "I've Landed My Dream Job-Now What???" and owner of Cube Rules, LLC. Scot has a long history of management and individual contribution in multiple Fortune 100 corporations.

I've Landed My Dream Job - Now What???

It's not over when you land your next gig. My book covers the critical tasks needed to set your new job up for success -- or learn that it isn't right for you so you can look to move on. Click to learn more!

Top 10 Posts on Cube Rules

About Cube Rules

This is not your ordinary career site. I help the corporate worker who toils away in the company cubicle make career transitions. You want to do your job well, following all the rules -- Cube Rules.

The career transitions where I can help you center on three critical career areas: How to land a job, succeed in a job, and build employment security.

Cube Rules Policies

Apple, the Apple logo, iPad, Apple Watch and iPhone are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. I'm a big fan.

© 2006 - 2017 Cube Rules LLC.

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How to make difficult decisions (and not just for work) | Cube Rules

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Making difficult decisions is...well, difficult. It helps to have a process to help you on your way. This infographic gives you that process and it will help you in your life and work. Courtesy of: OnStride About the Author Scot Herrick is the author of "I've Landed My Dream Job-Now What???"

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This is the website that I found the tree diagram at...it also had some other plannings tools. Some were mentioned in the book, others were not. This website explains how to use the tools with step by step instructions.

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Quality Glossary Definition: New management planning tools
New management planning tools are defined as the method(s) for achieving expected outcomes that previously have not been used.

In 1976, the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) saw the need for tools to promote innovation, communicate information, and successfully plan major projects. A team researched and developed these seven new quality control tools, often called the seven management and planning tools, or simply the seven management tools:

Affinity diagram: Organizes a large number of ideas into their natural relationships.

Interrelationship diagram: Shows cause-and-effect relationships and helps analyze the natural links between different aspects of a complex situation.

Tree diagram: Breaks down broad categories into finer and finer levels of detail, helping to move step-by-step thinking from generalities to specifics.

Matrix diagram: Shows the relationship between two, three, or four groups of information and can give information about the relationship, such as its strength, the roles played by various individuals, or measurements.

Matrix data analysis: A complex mathematical technique for analyzing matrices, often replaced by the similar prioritization matrix. A prioritization matrix is an L-shaped matrix that uses pairwise comparisons of a list of options to a set of criteria in order to choose the best option(s).

Arrow diagram: Shows the required order of tasks in a project or process, the best schedule for the entire project, and potential scheduling and resource problems and their solutions.

Process decision program chart: Systematically identifies what might go wrong in a plan under development.

Adapted from The Quality Toolbox, Second Edition, ASQ Quality Press.

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What are the Seven New Management & Planning Tools? | ASQ

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Quality Glossary Definition: New management planning tools New management planning tools are defined as the method(s) for achieving expected outcomes that previously have not been used. In 1976, the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) saw the need for tools to promote innovation, communicate information, and successfully plan major projects.

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I found the description of the decision tree in the book to be a little confusing. I understood the basis of it, but it wasn't too clear. This website breaks it down pretty simply.

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The tree diagram breaks down broad categories into finer and finer levels of detail.

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Pros and Cons of working abroad.

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By Mark Swartz
Monster Contributing Writer

Would you consider working in a foreign country? Millions of Canadians already have. We go when our employer sends us, or do so on our own either as students and grads, or later when we're looking for a change.

Working abroad means you'll need to get a visa. And learn about local customs. Do research on how workplace practices may differ from what you're used to. There could also be language requirements. For sure you'll need a place to stay before and during your employment.

Making all of these arrangements, and then adapting to local customs, highlights your flexibility and sense of adventure. When you return to Canada, you can leverage your foreign experience to give you a competitive advantage.
Why Do We Work Abroad?
Canadians look for work beyond our country for many reasons. Some want to learn another language, or put their existing foreign language skills to use. Others are drawn to the novelty and excitement of living in a different setting. Some enjoy the challenge of building character abroad. Cultural exploration, or wanting to work in one's country of heritage, are oft stated reasons as well.

Of course there are more conventional explanations too. Like not enough demand for your particular skills here at home. Or searching for a place where the cost of living is lower. Maybe just seeking a change of weather.
Key Benefits Of Working Internationally
If you go to work in a foreign country for a while, and then return to Canada afterward, your experience from abroad can be invaluable. Here are some things you'll gain while away:

· Insight into the workplace dynamics of a different country

· Independence in planning your travels, living arrangements and work habits

· Foreign language skills (or at a minimum, new dialects of your native language)

· A broader awareness of the world and its variety of people and cultures

Were you able to thrive in your new environment while away? If so, add adaptability to this list.
How Canadian Employers View International Work Experience
Perhaps surprisingly, not every employer here at home highly values your foreign work experience. Those that do tend to be multinational themselves, or else do business with countries abroad. They need your language skills, ability to work with international contacts, and familiarity with local conditions.

Another is by identifying companies in Canada that export to foreign nations. For this you can use the free search tool at Industry Canada's Company Capabilities database. Specify that you want to find companies that export to particular countries.
Some Downsides Of Foreign Employment
Before you pack your bags and plunk down money on an airline ticket, note that there are some drawbacks to working abroad.

The country you choose might have strict requirements for a work visa. Their economy might not be faring as well as Canada's, meaning less demand for employees. There may also be a preference to hire local applicants.

Staying away from our country too long has its disadvantages as well. You can lose touch with your contacts back home. And employers who don't value international experience might consider your time away a liability, if you haven't been keeping up with developments here. There are also income tax implications that can get complex for you.
Does Working Internationally Work For You?
Working abroad is a great way to see the world. What better route to expanding your worldview while getting paid?

If the benefits outweigh the downsides for you, think about which country (or countries) you'd like to work in most. Contact their embassy to inquire about your employment eligibility. Research local customs and places to live. Update your passport. Then off you go on an adventure of a lifetime. Just be sure to stay in touch with your Canadian colleagues. They'll help make your return far more hospitable.

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Would you consider working in a foreign country? Do so and leverage your foreign experience to give you a competitive advantage.

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By Mark Swartz Monster Contributing Writer Would you consider working in a foreign country? Millions of Canadians already have. We go when our employer sends us, or do so on our own either as students and grads, or later when we're looking for a change. Working abroad means you'll need to get a visa.

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Interesting facts about some of the biggest TNCs.

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Coca-Cola is a carbonated soft drink sold in stores, restaurants, and vending machines in more than 200 countries.It is produced by The Coca-Cola Company of Atlanta, Georgia, and is often...

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A different view of global organizations

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A different view of global organizations

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This is interesting as it states that global business is in deep trouble.

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IT WAS as though the world had a new appetite. A Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) outlet opened near Tiananmen Square in 1987. In 1990 a McDonald's sprang up in Pushkin Square, flipping burgers for 30,000 Muscovites on its first day. Later that year Ronald McDonald rolled into Shenzhen, China, too. Between 1990 and 2005 the two companies' combined foreign sales soared by 400%.

McDonald's and KFC embodied an idea that would become incredibly powerful: global firms, run by global managers and owned by global shareholders, should sell global products to global customers. For a long time their planet-straddling model was as hot, crisp and moreish as their fries.

Today both companies have gone soggy. Their shares have lagged behind America's stockmarket over the past half-decade. Yum, which owns KFC, saw its foreign profits peak in 2012; they have fallen by 20% since. Those of McDonald's are down by 29% since 2013 (see article). Last year Yum threw in the towel in China and spun off its business there. On January 8th McDonald's sold a majority stake in its Chinese operation to a state-owned firm. There are specific reasons for some of this; but there is also a broader trend. The world is losing its taste for global businesses.

Their detractors and their champions both think of multinational firms-for the purposes of this article, firms that make over 30% of their sales outside their home region (unless otherwise specified)-as the apex predators of the global economy. They shape the ecosystems in which others seek their living. They direct the flows of goods, services and capital that brought globalisation to life. Though multinationals account for only 2% of the world's jobs, they own or orchestrate the supply chains that account for over 50% of world trade; they make up 40% of the value of the West's stockmarkets; and they own most of the world's intellectual property.

Although the idea of being at the top of the food chain makes these companies sound ruthless and all-conquering, rickety and overextended are often more fitting adjectives. And like jackals circling an elderly pride, politicians want to grab more of the spoils that multinational firms have come to control, including 80m jobs on their payrolls and their profits of about $1trn. As multinational firms come to make ever more of their money from technology services they become yet more vulnerable to a backlash. The predators are increasingly coming to look like prey.

It all looked very different 25 years ago. With the Soviet Union collapsing and China opening up, a sense of destiny gripped Western firms; the "end of history" announced by Francis Fukuyama, a scholar, in which all countries would converge towards democracy and capitalism seemed both a historical turning-point and a huge opportunity. There were already many multinationals, some long established. Shell, Coca-Cola and Unilever had histories spanning the 20th century. But they had been run, for the most part, as loose federations of national businesses. The new multinationals sought to be truly global.

Companies became obsessed with internationalising their customers, production, capital and management. Academics draw distinctions between going global "vertically"-relocating production and the sourcing of raw materials-and "horizontally"-selling into new markets. But in practice many firms went global every which way at once, enthusiastically buying rivals, courting customers and opening factories wherever the opportunity arose. Though the trend started in the rich world, it soon caught on among large companies in developing economies, too. And it was huge: 85% of the global stock of multinational investment was created after 1990, after adjusting for inflation (see chart 1).

By 2006 Sam Palmisano, the boss of IBM, was arguing that the "globally integrated enterprise" run as a unitary organisation, rather than as a federation, would transcend all borders as it sought "the integration of production and value delivery worldwide". From the Seattle demonstrations of 1999 onwards, anti-globalisation activists had been saying much the same, while drawing less solace from the prospect. The only business star to resist the orthodoxy was Warren Buffett; he sought out monopolies at home instead.

Such a spree could not last forever; an increasing body of evidence suggests that it has now ended. In 2016 multinationals' cross-border investment probably fell by 10-15%. Impressive as the share of trade accounted for by cross-border supply chains is, it has stagnated since 2007 (see chart 2). The proportion of sales that Western firms make outside their home region has shrunk. Multinationals' profits are falling and the flow of new multinational investment has been declining relative to GDP. The global firm is in retreat.

The other end of the end of history

To understand why this is, consider the three parties that made the boom possible: investors; the "headquarters countries" in which global firms are domiciled; and the "host countries" that received multinational investment. For their different reasons each thought that multinational firms would provide superior financial or economic performance.

Investors saw a huge potential for economies of scale. As China, India and the Soviet Union opened up, and as Europe liberalised itself into a single market, firms could sell the same product to more people. And as the federation model was replaced by global integration, firms would be able to fine-tune the mix of inputs they got from around the world-a geographic arbitrage that would improve efficiency, as Martin Reeves of BCG, a consultancy, puts it. From the rich world they could get management, capital, brands and technology. From the emerging world they could get cheap workers and raw materials as well as lighter rules on pollution.

These advantages led investors to think global firms would grow faster and make higher profits. That was true for a while. It is not true today. The profits of the top 700-odd multinational firms based in the rich world have dropped by 25% over the past five years, according to FTSE, an index firm. The weakness of many currencies against the dollar is part of the story, but explains only a third of the fall. The profits of domestic firms rose by 2%.

A complementary measure comes from the foreign profits of all firms as recorded in balance-of-payments statistics. Though the data refer to firms of all sizes, big ones dominate the mix. For companies with headquarters in the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, foreign profits are down by 17% over five years. American firms suffered less, with a 12% drop, partly because of their skew towards the fast-growing technology sector. For non-American firms the drop was 20%.

Profits should be compared with the capital sunk. The return on equity (ROE) of the top 700 multinationals has dropped from a peak of 18% a decade ago to 11%. The returns on the foreign operations of all firms have fallen, too, based on balance-of-payments statistics. For the three countries which have, historically, hosted the most and biggest multinationals, America, Britain and the Netherlands, ROE on foreign investment has shrunk to 4-8%. The trend is similar across the OECD (see chart 3).

Multinationals based in emerging economies, which account for about a seventh of global firms' overall activity, have fared no better: their worldwide ROE is 8%. Several supposed champions-such as Lenovo, the Chinese company which bought IBM's PC business and parts of Motorola-have been financial flops. China's biggest completed cross-border acquisition was of Nexen, a Canadian oil firm, in 2012. Last year the buyer, CNOOC, a state-owned energy firm, wrote a chunk of it off.

About half of the deterioration in multinationals' ROE over the past 5-10 years is explained by the slump in commodity prices, and thus the profits of oil firms, mining firms and the like. Another 10% of the deterioration is due to banks. Firms that provide the specialist services behind globalisation have also been hammered. Profits have dropped by over 50% from their peak at Maersk, a Danish shipping line, Mitsui, a Japanese trading house, and Li & Fung, a supply-chain agent for retailers.

The pain extends beyond these core industries, however. Half of all big multinationals have seen their ROE fall in the past three years; 40% fail to make an ROE of over 10%, widely seen as a benchmark of whether a firm is creating any value worth speaking of. Even at powerhouses such as Unilever, General Electric (GE), PepsiCo and Procter & Gamble, foreign profits are down by a quarter or more from their peak. The only bright spot is the technology giants. Their foreign profits comprise 46% of the total foreign earnings of the top 50 American multinationals, up from 17% a decade ago. Apple made $46bn abroad last year, more than any other firm and five times more than GE, often seen as America's bellwether.

These figures mean multinationals are no longer achieving superior performance. The Economist has examined the record of the 500 largest firms worldwide. In eight out of ten sectors, multinational firms have expanded their aggregate sales more slowly than their domestic peers. In six out of the ten sectors they have lower ROEs (see chart 4). For American firms, returns are now 30% higher in their home market, where cosy oligopoly has become more enticing than the hurly-burly of an unruly world.

Individual bosses will often blame one-off factors: currency moves, the collapse of Venezuela, a depression in Europe, a crackdown on graft in China, and so on. But the deeper explanation is that both the advantages of scale and those of arbitrage have worn away. Global firms have big overheads; complex supply chains tie up inventory; sprawling organisations are hard to run. Some arbitrage opportunities have been exhausted; wages have risen in China; and most firms have massaged their tax bills as low as they can go. The free flow of information means that competitors can catch up with leads in technology and know-how more easily than they used to.

As a result firms with a domestic focus are winning market share. In Brazil two local banks, Itaú and Bradesco, have trounced global lenders. In India Vodafone, a Western mobile-phone operator and Bharti Airtel, an Indian multinational active in 20 countries, are losing customers to Reliance, a domestic firm. In America shale firms stole a march on the global oil majors. In China local dumpling brands are eating into KFC's sales. A blend of measures for listed firms shows that multinationals' share of global profits, 35% a decade ago, is now only 30%.

So much for the investors. What about the second constituency for multinationals, the "headquarters countries"? In the 1990s and 2000s they wanted their national champions to go global in order to become bigger and brainier. A study by McKinsey, a consultancy, based on 2007 data, outlined the sort of benefits they were after. Multinationals operating in America, which accounted for 19% of private-sector jobs, were responsible for 25% of private wages, 25% of profits, 48% of exports and 74% of research and development. Go them.

Citizens of nowhere

The mood changed after the financial crisis. Multinational firms started to be seen as agents of inequality. They created jobs abroad, but not at home. Between 2009 and 2013, only 5%, or 400,000, of the net jobs created in America were created by multinational firms domiciled there (although preliminary figures suggest that job creation picked up sharply in 2014). The profits from their hoards of intellectual property were pocketed by a wealthy shareholder elite. Political willingness to help multinationals duly lapsed.

As a result, the tapestry of rules designed to help businesses globally is fraying. Global accounting, antitrust, money-laundering and bank-capital rules have splintered into American and European camps. Takeovers of Western firms now often come with strings attached by governments to safeguard local jobs and plants. Two American-led trade deals, known as TPP and TTIP, that gave protection to intellectual property, have flopped. The global tribunals that multinationals use to bypass national courts have come under attack.

The deep roots of globalisation mean that trying to favour domestic companies by erecting tariffs no longer works as once it did. Over half of all exports, measured by value, cross a border at least twice before reaching the end-customer, so such tariffs hurt all alike. This does not mean that the inept or ignorant will not try them. But it does encourage the use of other avenues to try and right perceived wrongs, such as the tax system and good old political muscle.

A typical multinational has over 500 legal entities, some based in tax havens. Using American figures, it pays a tax rate of about 10% on its foreign profits. The European Union (EU) is trying to raise that figure. It has cracked down on Luxembourg, which offered generous deals to multinationals that parked profits there; it also hit Apple with a $15bn penalty for breaching state-aid rules by booking profits in Ireland, with which it had a bespoke tax deal. America, for its part, has barred big firms from using legal "inversions" to shift their tax base abroad, most notably in the case of Pfizer, a pharmaceutical company that is America's third-largest foreign earner.

Republicans in Congress are debating changes to the tax code which would see exporters and firms bringing profits home pay less than before, while firms shifting production abroad would face levies. Meanwhile, some firms have apparently been browbeaten into outsourcing decisions about where to base factories by Donald Trump, the new American president. On January 3rd Ford, a carmaker, agreed to cancel a new plant in Mexico and invest more at home. Mr Trump also wants Apple to shift more of its supply chain home.

If these trends continue global firms' tax and wage bills will rise, squeezing profits further. If American multinationals shifted a quarter of their foreign jobs home, at American wage rates, and paid the same tax rate abroad as they did at home, their profits would fall by another 12%. This excludes the cost of building the new plants in America.

Of all those involved in the spread of global businesses, the "host countries" that receive investment by multinationals remain the most enthusiastic. The example of China, where by 2010 30% of industrial output and 50% of exports were produced by the subsidiaries or joint-ventures of multinational firms, is still attractive.

Argentina's government wants to draw in foreign firms. Mexico has just sold stakes in its oilfields to foreign firms, including ExxonMobil and Total. India has a campaign called "make in India" to attract multinational supply chains. An index through which the OECD seeks to gauge the openness of host countries shows no overall deterioration since the financial crisis.

But there are gathering clouds. China has been turning the screws on foreign firms in a push for "indigenous innovation". Bosses say that more products have to be sourced locally and intellectual property often ends up handed over to local partners. Strategic industries, including the internet, are out of bounds to foreign investment. Many fear that China's approach will be mimicked around the developing world, forcing multinational firms to invest more locally and create more jobs-a mirror image of the pressures placed on them at home.

The price of hospitality

Host countries may also become less welcoming as activity shifts towards intangible services. For the top 50 American multinationals, 65% of foreign profits now come from industries reliant on intellectual property, such as technology, drug patents and finance. A decade ago it was 35%, and the share is still rising. (It is much lower in Europe and Japan, which do not have big technology firms.) There is no serious appetite among multinationals to recreate in Africa or India the manufacturing centres they spurred on in China, which removes a reason for those host countries to welcome them. The jobs and exports that can be attributed to multinationals are already a diminishing part of the story. In 2000 every billion dollars of the stock of worldwide foreign investment represented 7,000 jobs and $600m of annual exports. Today $1bn supports 3,000 jobs and $300m of exports.

Silicon Valley's latest stars are already controversial abroad. In 2016 Uber sold its Chinese operations to a local rival after a brutal battle. In December India's two digital champions, Ola, a ride-hailing firm, and Flipkart, an e-commerce site, said the government should protect them against Uber and Amazon. They argued that their rivals would build monopolies, create few good jobs and ship the profits to America.

The last time the multinational company was in trouble was in the aftermath of the Depression. Between 1930 and 1970 their stock of investment abroad fell by about a third relative to global GDP; it did not recover until 1991. Some firms "hopped" across tariffs by building new factories within protectionist countries. Many restructured, ceding autonomy to their foreign subsidiaries to try to give them a local character. Others decided to break themselves up.

Today multinationals need to rethink their competitive advantage again. Some of the old arguments for going global are obsolete-in part because of the more general successes of globalisation. Most multinationals do not act as internal markets for trade. Only a third of their output is now bought by affiliates in the same group. External supply chains do the rest. Multinational firms no longer have a lock on the most promising ideas about management or innovation. Where they have enforceable patents over valuable brands they are still at an advantage, as they are in products, such as jet engines, where economies of scale are best created by spreading costs over the entire world. But those benefits are less than they were.

The lack of advantage is revealed in the amount of activity that yields little value. Roughly 50% of the stock of foreign direct investment makes an ROE of less than 10% (40% of the stock if you exclude natural-resources firms). Ford and General Motors make 80% or more of their profits in North America, suggesting their foreign returns are abysmal.

Many industries that tried to globalise seem to work best when national or regional. For some, the penny has dropped. Retailers such as Britain's Tesco and France's Casino have abandoned many of their foreign adventures. America's telecoms giants, AT&T and Verizon, have put away their passports. Financial firms are focusing on their "core" markets. LafargeHolcim, a cement maker, plans to sell, or has sold, businesses in India, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam. Even successful global firms have gone on diets. P&G's foreign sales have dropped by almost a third since 2012 as it has closed or sold weak businesses.

It looks as if, in the future, the global business scene will have three elements. A smaller top tier of multinational firms will burrow deeper into the economies of their hosts, helping to assuage nationalistic concerns. General Electric is localising its production, supply chains and management. Emerson, a conglomerate that has over 100 factories outside America, sources about 80% of its production in the region where it is sold. Some foreign firms will invest more deeply in American-based production in order to avoid tariffs, if Mr Trump imposes them, much as Japanese car firms did in the 1980s. This is doable if you are large. Siemens, a German industrial giant, employs 50,000 in America and has 60 factories there. But midsized industrial firms will struggle to muster the resources to invest more deeply in all their markets.

Politicians will increasingly insist that companies buying foreign firms promise to preserve their national character, including jobs, R&D activity and tax payments. SoftBank, a Japanese firm that bought ARM, a British chip company, in 2016, agreed to such commitments. So has Sinochem, a Chinese chemicals firm that is buying Syngenta, a Swiss rival. The boom in foreign takeovers by Chinese firms, meanwhile, may fizzle out or explode. Many such deals, reliant on subsidised loans from state banks, probably make little financial sense.

The second element will be a brittle layer of global digital and intellectual-property multinationals: technology firms, such as Google and Netflix; drugs companies; and companies that use franchising deals with local firms as a cheap way to maintain a global footprint and the market advantage that brings. The hotel industry, with its large branding firms such as Hilton and Intercontinental, is a prime example of the tactic. McDonald's is shifting to a franchising model in Asia. These intangible multinationals will grow fast. But because they create few direct jobs, often involve oligopolies and do not benefit from the protection of global trade rules, which for the most part only look after physical goods, they will be vulnerable to nationalist backlashes.

The seeds of something more

The final element will be perhaps the most interesting: a rising cohort of small firms using e-commerce to buy and sell on a global scale. Up to 10% of America's 30m or so small firms already do this to some extent. PayPal, a digital payments firm, says its cross border transactions, which include activity from such multinationalettes, are running at $80bn a year, and growing fast. Jack Ma, the boss of Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce firm, predicts that a wave of small Western firms exporting goods to Chinese consumers will go some way to reversing the past two decades of massive American firms importing goods from China.

The new, prudent age of the multinational will have costs. Countries that have grown used to global firms throwing cash around may find that competition abates and prices rise. Investors, who all told have a third or more of their equity portfolios tied up in multinational firms, could face some unpleasant turbulence. Economies that rely on income from foreign investments, or capital inflows from new ones, will suffer. The collapse in profits from British multinationals is the reason why Britain's balance of payments looks bad. Of the 15 countries with current-account deficits of over 2.5% of GDP in 2015, 11 relied on fresh multinational investment to finance at least a third of the gap.

The result will be a more fragmented and parochial kind of capitalism, and quite possibly a less efficient one-but also, perhaps, one with wider public support. And the infatuation with global companies will come to be seen as a passing episode in business history, rather than its end.

This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline "The retreat of the global company"

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IT WAS as though the world had a new appetite. A Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) outlet opened near Tiananmen Square in 1987. In 1990 a McDonald's sprang up in Pushkin Square, flipping burgers for 30,000 Muscovites on its first day. Later that year Ronald McDonald rolled into Shenzhen, China, too.

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I know that I do not want to be involved in Global Management in my career, however, this article gives some good tips on developing global managers. I think the tips can translate to all aspects of management. With the growing diversity here at home, being able to understand, communicate and work with people of different views and origins will definitely be beneficial.

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Leadership training for the global stage should begin sooner in the average management-track employee's career, says Crown's Joanne Danehl. Instead of intensive training in their early 40s, companies should instead offer global mobility and leadership training to staff members a decade younger who are entering supervisory roles.

Globalization in business means that the world is shrinking - and that leaders need to be well equipped to manage a wide swath of employees, policies and cultural differences. According to a report on strategic leadership development by The Conference Board, the top five traits ranking most important now are: leading change, retaining/developing talent, global thinking/mindset, collaboration and integrity. And the five most important traits over the next five years are: leading change, global thinking/mindset, retaining/developing talent, learning agility and creativity.

An incredibly demanding role, it's clear that global managers must think both intuitively and analytically in order to produce sound decisions that inspire global teams to yield widespread results. Valerie Keller, the CEO of Veritas, recently said at a conference for global young leaders: "[Global] leadership doesn't happen in a vacuum; it must have context. Leaders need to be flexible and resilient; they need to be generals one day and consensus builders the next."

The emergence of global managers is changing how companies train leaders, but learning these skills requires time and experience. Certainly highly valued global leaders share common inherent traits and competencies but that does not preclude their development in others. Here are three tips for developing truly global managers:

Leadership training for the global stage should begin sooner in the average management-track employee's career. Instead of intensive training in their early 40s, companies should instead offer global mobility and leadership training to staff members a decade younger who are entering supervisorial roles. This provides them with both necessary training and direct experience in other countries, which will prove invaluable as they later transition into global managerial roles.
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And while there are costs associated with transporting, subsidizing and training employees for an overseas assignment, the payoff can be substantial when they transform into capable global leaders. It's especially attractive for millennials who often crave experiences over large paychecks and are willing to immerse themselves in other business cultures and languages.

Encourage collaboration and communication

Global managers must develop an "us" perspective among global team members. If a manager is handling 50 employees ranging in age from 25 to 65 who live in 14 different countries, then it's imperative to encourage sharing and collaboration. Managers should encourage team members to talk about their cultural differences as they apply to their work in order to develop understanding and connections.

A next step is to present unified goals. The successful global manager will relate each individual's work to the company's overall global goals; however, it's important to remember that global goals and values translate differently across cultures. For example, while "competitiveness" might translate to a goal of "aggressively seeking revenue opportunities in all markets," that wording would not sit comfortably across all cultures. The balancing act of the global manager is to link global, team and personal goals in a way that is understandable and comfortable to all.

Personal communication is essential for global leadership, despite the challenges of time zones and some language barriers. Successful global managers will take the time to reach out with phone calls to develop a trusting relationship and further team building. This is especially true if the manager expects similar communication among the team. If the expectation is for the developers in Moldova to talk frequently with the Australian design team, then the global leader in New York needs to set the right example.

The manager must understand that "leadership" looks different across the world. The western style is top-down, with leaders pushing down messages that they expect will be followed. Outside of the west is a more consensus-driven approach, where the group agrees to a goal and then develops a corresponding strategy.

Managers also need to adapt their speaking style to accommodate non-native language team members. For example, they should remove slang terms or any pop culture references, and instead speak slowly and clearly. Managers should also encourage staff members to speak up if something isn't understand, instead of allowing "lost in translation" moments to potentially disrupt important projects. The manager and the team members must learn from one another over time by explaining cultural differences

Encourage international assignments and multicultural teams

Exposure to multicultural teams is also an excellent way to develop managers that can understand different cultural perspectives and styles. Through such work prospective global managers develop the need for geographical context, where they better understand specific markets as well as the corresponding initiatives to reach those audiences.

Global managers also need to develop their communication skills to properly connect with different generational and geographic groups. For example, staff members in their 40's and 50's might be more receptive and used to a "command and control" style of interaction from their management teams. Millennials often prefer a softer style that seeks to challenge and inspire them without being autocratic. Effective global leaders will understand how to switch gears quickly between various styles, understanding they need to convey leadership while tailoring interactions for optimal results.

Take another cue from effective politicians such as Hillary Clinton who adjust their style of language depending on the audience. For example, she might utilize more inclusive phrasing such as frequent "we" sentences when trying to build a feeling of unity, and then a more "I" focused language when projecting strength, such as during contentious foreign affairs discussions. Global managers must understand how to shift gears quickly to both give firm direction and build a consensus among disparate groups that must come together.

Encouraging and leveraging diversity is crucial for global managers, as well as their ability to flexibly tackle problems. There is evidence that shows the most highly effective teams are those that leverage diversity-whether its cultural, gender or age based. The least effective teams are homogenous teams or those that minimize or ignore diversity. The most successful global leaders embrace diversity and develop a sound process for the team, one that overcomes any language or cultural barriers and relies on open and frequent communication.

Being a truly global manager and leader requires a lot of effort. Companies that want to thrive in the international arena need to conduct early-stage training of their top performers in order to give them the skills to operate everywhere from the skyscrapers of Singapore to the growing marketplaces of Tunisia. Through training and direct exposure to foreign markets, these managers will understand how to encourage team-building, effectively communicate across various barriers, and how to adapt on the fly to cultural differences.

Even with globalization and the international growth of many businesses, there remain significant cultural differences in both the ways people work together and what is important to local consumers. The idiosyncrasies between various regions are critical, and the best managers will embrace and leverage those differences - not push them to conformity.
Joanne Danehl is practice leader for Global Intercultural and Language Training at Crown World Mobility. In this role, Danehl is responsible for leading the Crown intercultural and language training team, and working with Crown clients to incorporate language and cultural training solutions to meet both their corporate goals and the needs of their international assignees. Crown World Mobility helps corporations manage global talent and talented individuals perform on the global stage.

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Three Tips for Developing Truly Global Managers

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Leadership training for the global stage should begin sooner in the average management-track employee's career, says Crown's Joanne Danehl. Instead of intensive training in their early 40s, companies should instead offer global mobility and leadership training to staff members a decade younger who are entering supervisory roles.

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This article gives a much different view of social responsibility. What interests me the most is when it says, "after engaging in socially responsible behaviors, companies are more likely to act unethically in the future because corporate leaders feel they’ve accumulated “moral credits” by doing good deeds." It is important to be socially responsible for the right reasons. Not to do it for everyone else, but to do it because it is what your organization believes at their core. 3 Tips to Pay It Forward

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What does it mean to be socially responsible? No matter how big or small your organization may be, it's an important question to ask yourself. While many think of community relations or environmental efforts as ways to be socially responsible, those may not be enough.

Businesses around the world are clearly aware of the need for corporate social responsibility, or CSR. In fact, more than 8,000 organizations have signed the United Nations Global Compact pledging to show good global citizenship in the areas of human rights, labor standards, and environmental protection.

But the motives for participating in CSR are not always for the greater good. Some organizations do it for the free PR. Many want what they see as the "gotcha media" off their backs. Still, others participate because 77% of customers say it's important to them. Translation: Efforts may not always originate from an authentic or internal place.

Donating to causes or participating in small community relations efforts aren't sustainable in the long-run.

Perhaps this is why many organizations do good now, yet fall off the wagon soon enough. A study by the London Business School and the University of California, Riverside found that, after engaging in socially responsible behaviors, companies are more likely to act unethically in the future because corporate leaders feel they've accumulated "moral credits" by doing good deeds.

Companies shouldn't be socially responsible for others. They need to be socially responsible for themselves. True social responsibility-the kind that's authentic and done because a company actually cares-can't happen if not everyone on the inside is involved. Action reflects efforts. If the effort isn't there, sustainable social responsibility will be hard to find.

While the path to social responsibility isn't an overnight one, getting everyone on board can have a major impact on your organization. Here are three simple ways to pay it forward from the ground up:

You need to encourage all employees to get involved in socially responsible initiatives given how little direction CSR has these days, as studies show. This starts with promoting the idea of a corporation as a single entity, not as various departments.

When you're promoting the idea of a corporation as an entity, triumphs and failures becomes each person's duty. Collected efforts, whether contributing to brainstorming meetings or revamping CSR tactics, will bring your employees together.

Start by reviewing the mission, values, and goals of your organization. Then, ask each employee how they would apply these company cornerstones toward social responsibility. While they may suggest the same environmental or community relations efforts, getting each person involved creates camaraderie, engagement, and a collective energy in your company.

Professional development opportunities are the key to moving your organization forward. While you may not have a department dedicated to social responsibility, you can give each employee the tools to create and implement strategies.

There are many certification courses, conferences, symposiums, and other CSR-related programs that can boost the knowledge of your team ( check out this list for lots of great options). Plus, there are choices for any budget, from free webinars to summits overseas. Giving your employees educational opportunities-particularly having to do with social responsibility-can help create better ideas and follow-through in the future.

Social responsibility is probably not on the daily task list for your employees. Often, they need motivation, perhaps in the form of an incentive to help them. Rewards and charity bonuses can help you create that push.

Here's how you can do it: Create a team-based rewards system around performance. The more teams get involved in a given project, the larger the charity reward becomes.

For example, you can introduce rewards into your employee referral program so that employees who bring in a certain number of referrals receive a charity donation in their name. Research shows that referral programs are the best way to retain and hire better quality employees with the lowest cost and time per hire. Though employees are not recruiters, playing a part in hiring top-tier talent builds team morale and can teach them firsthand about social responsibility. Plus, when the right charity incentive is offered, it can create healthy competition and increase participation.

Pick the charity reward that fits your budget and team needs. For example, my company has contributed to the Philippines relief fund based on the charity efforts of our team. Employees receive bonuses and rewards by volunteering in community relations efforts.

True social responsibility starts from the ground up. When you want to improve your processes, try looking at it from an overarching perspective. The solution to better social responsibility may not be as obvious as you thought. Donating to causes or participating in small community relations efforts aren't sustainable in the long-run. But by paying it forward internally, external social responsibility won't be as big a mountain to climb.
-Andrew Higashi is the Director of Strategic Accounts at RolePoint, a recruitment platform where the pipeline is driven by high-quality employee referrals. Connect with him and RolePoint on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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Think You're Being Socially Responsible? Think Again

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What does it mean to be socially responsible? No matter how big or small your organization may be, it's an important question to ask yourself. While many think of community relations or environmental efforts as ways to be socially responsible, those may not be enough.

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I can definitely learn something from these women!

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Photograph by Marvin Shaouni

Mary Barra repeats as Fortune's Most Powerful Woman after a year of dramatic improvement at the $152.4 billion in revenues auto giant. She ably steered GM through the ignition switch crisis that hit in 2014, made the tough decision to end operations in Russia, and invested in ride- sharing company Lyft. She also bought Valley startup Cruise Automation for $581 million. Oh, and she posted record profits in 2015 of $9.7 billion. What she hasn't done is boost the stock, which remains flat even as markets hit new highs. As an extra vote of confidence, GM's board handed her the chairman title in January.

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Photograph by Marvin Shaouni Mary Barra repeats as Fortune's Most Powerful Woman after a year of dramatic improvement at the $152.4 billion in revenues auto giant. She ably steered GM through the ignition switch crisis that hit in 2014, made the tough decision to end operations in Russia, and invested in ride- sharing company Lyft.

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What an impressive policy! Apple realizes the impact they have on their employees, their communities and all of their supporters.

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We are holding ourselves accountable for creating a culture of inclusion and increasing representation across every team at Apple.

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The difference between "Manager" & "Leader"

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The difference between "Manager" & "Leader"

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This is something that strikes so close to me. I strive every single day to be a leader. I believe in a team approach and empowering employees through a positive, helpful workplace. I love this!

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17 Key Traits That Separate Managers From Leaders [Infographic]

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Check out these 17 defining traits that separate good managers from great leaders.

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I thought this tool was cool to use when setting large goals. My husband and I have lots of dreams and goals, some big and some small. This tool could be really helpful in breaking down the details.

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A Tool to Help You Reach Your Goals in 4 Steps

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I currently work full time managing a private doctors office....but on top of my regular management duties, I also run the physicians eCommerce and social media where we sell her private labeled skincare line and promote her professionally in regards to radio, speaking engagements, tv appearances, etc. With this comes a lot of tasks that I feel I could easily do from home. My husband and I are trying to start a family, but I have always thought of myself as one to work even after I have kids. I have a plan to work from home and have thought about it many times. I am just waiting for the right moment to approach my boss about it...

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Neasden Control Centre for HBR

More and more people are working remotely, and many say it improves their productivity and satisfaction - while also saving them time and money. If you're commuting to an office every day but would like to work elsewhere on a weekly basis, how can you convince your boss to let you do so? What arguments or evidence should you use? And what factors will increase your chances of securing a regular work-at-home schedule?

What the Experts Say
The 9-to-5, Monday-to-Friday schedule has its "origins in the Industrial Revolution," says Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University professor. "But times, they are a-changin'. We live in a different era." Still, working from home has a bad rap. "Some people are deeply skeptical about it," he says. "They refer to it as 'shirking from home' or 'working remotely, remotely working. They think it means goofing off and watching cartoons." But, in fact, research suggests the opposite: Working from home increases productivity, efficiency, and engagement. "It is possible to be as, or more, productive" at home as in the office, says Karen Dillon, coauthor of several best-selling titles, including How Will You Measure Your Life? Not only does working from home eliminate your commute, which for most people is "total wasted time," but it also "allows you to be more focused and efficient." Of course, "you're only going to get this opportunity if you're already valued and trusted," Dillon says. So be sure you're in good standing with your manager before making the request. Here are some strategies to convince your boss to let you work remotely.

Reflect on your motivations
Before broaching the subject with your boss, be clear on why you wish to work from home in the first place. Perhaps your motivation is purely professional. Back-to-back meetings, a constant stream of conference calls, and obligatory break room chitchat make it next to impossible to complete important tasks. Working remotely, on the other hand, "gives you the time and space to concentrate without distractions," Bloom says. Or maybe your reasons are personal, Dillon adds. You're feeling "the tugs of your life," whether they're child care responsibilities, fitness goals, or caring for aging parents, encroaching on your time and sanity. Working from home on a regular basis could "change the dynamics of your week." Whatever your motives, you need "to be honest with yourself about what you're asking for" and make sure your intentions are pure, she says. It would be unfair to "do a bait and switch" with your boss "by saying you want to work from home to be more productive, but really it's that you want to be at home with your child and check email only occasionally."

Devise a plan
Next, Dillon says, you need to consider what a realistic remote work schedule would look like. What do you want? Is it to work Tuesdays and Thursdays from home? Every other Friday? Or would flex hours suffice? And try to "imagine how your boss will hear your proposal." Consider what will worry your manager, and then think of ways to preempt those concerns. For instance, you might need to have a backup plan for flexibility. "There should be no absolutes," Dillon says. "Your boss needs to know you can make it to an important Friday meeting, even if that's your work-from-home day." You should also strategize about how you'll manage "the optics" of working from home in terms of "being present on email and available by phone," she says. "Your manager needs for other people to not see your schedule as a four-day week." A tip: If you're proposing to work from home a single day per week, try for Wednesday. This way, your boss won't perceive your request as a means to elongate your weekends, Bloom says. "Wednesday is not a slacker day," he says. "It's the middle of the week, and it's a day for concentrated work, like detailed analysis."

Talk to your boss
Your proposal should be simple and straightforward, Dillon says. Explain to your boss, "Here's what I am thinking, here's why, and here's what the organization will gain." That last point is critical. "Don't steamroll your boss with research, but there's no harm in using empirical evidence" to make your case more compelling. You might say, for instance, " I read an interesting article in HBR that shows how allowing employees to work from home improves results." After all, "it's hard to argue with someone who is reasoned, reasonable, and prepared." Even though it's effective to frame your argument in terms of the benefits to your company, the personal gains derived from working from home, that fact that you'll be less stressed and therefore happier in your job, are also worth highlighting, Bloom says. "Many managers understand that people find working from home valuable and motivating," he says. It's a "cost-effective way to retain" your best people.

Give your boss time
As much as you'd like to leave your manager's office having made the sale, it's important "not to push for a yes or no right away," Dillon says. If your initial conversation goes well, "present your boss with a one-page proposal - nothing elaborate - that details your plan." And then back off. "Your manager needs time to think about the implications, or maybe get approval from HR. "Give them the time and space to do that." Take solace in the fact that if you've made a convincing argument, "your boss will not want to lose a good employee."

Be willing to experiment
One way to get your boss to warm to a regular work-from-home schedule is to suggest a three- or six-month trial period, Bloom says. "A pilot is a low-risk way to see whether an arrangement like this can work," he says. "Ask your boss if you can roll it out for a few months; if it doesn't work, you can roll it back." If your manager agrees to the plan, Dillon suggests "overcommunicating in the beginning" and "presenting your boss with a list of what you accomplished last week and your to-do list for the coming one." After the trial ends, she recommends having "a calibration conversation" to discuss whether " your mutual expectations were met."

Push for organizational change
"Allowing employees to work from home is increasingly a standard practice" at organizations around the world, Bloom says, but not all companies are so enlightened. If your request is denied, don't take it personally, Dillon adds. It's likely that there are "bigger cultural issues" at play; maybe your boss thinks, "If I do it for you, I'm going to have to do it for everybody." So think of "constructive ways to take no for an answer." You might talk to HR about implementing a new workplace policy or form a small group of colleagues "to investigate how other organizations handle this." The goal is to "remove the burden of making the decision" from one single manager.

There is an argument for "just taking the plunge" into remote working without explicitly asking for permission, Bloom says. "Luck rewards the brave." The next time an opportunity presents itself - a bad snowstorm, a disruptive event (such as your city hosting a large sporting event or convention), or even a planned home visit from your local cable company - "seize the day" and be as "effective as possible" in your remote work. Demonstrating that you can be productive is "a successful backdoor strategy" to getting your manager to sign off on a permanent arrangement, Dillon says. "It proves that you can manage it." Don't be sneaky, though. "You don't want your boss to think you're abusing their good will."
Principles to Remember Do:

Be honest with yourself about your motivations for wanting to work from home

Make your case with empirical evidence. It's hard to argue with someone who is reasonable and prepared

Experiment with a three- or six-month test run, after which you and your boss discuss what went well and what needs fine-tuning

Don't:

Bother with an elaborate presentation of your argument; a conversation followed up with a one-page proposal is appropriate

Be deterred if your request isn't granted. Form a group of colleagues to investigate how other organizations handle employees working from home, and present your findings to HR

Be sneaky. Take advantage of opportunities to demonstrate that you can work from home effectively and productively

Case Study #1: Propose a pilot and then ace it by being responsive and productive
Two years ago, when Mark Scott took the job as chief marketing officer at Apixio, a digitized medical records company, he knew that his commute would be bad. "But I didn't realize quite how brutal it would be," he says.

The 40-mile commute from his home in the East Bay to his office in San Mateo typically takes about an hour and a half - each way.

After about six months at the company, this "wasted productivity" was getting to him. In a previous job he'd worked from home four days a week, and he knew he needed to ask his current boss if he could do something similar in the new role.

While Apixio didn't have a formal policy on working from home, Mark was confident that the company's culture was "open, supportive, and adaptable" and that his boss would sympathize with him. But he also knew that he would need to "quell any concerns" about him not being physically present. "I lead the marketing team, and I am on the executive team," he says. "Face time in the office is important."

Mark suggested a pilot that involved him working from home every Tuesday. "Our staff meetings are on Mondays, so Tuesdays made a lot of sense," he says. "I told my boss I'd like to try it out for a few months and see how it goes."

He added that he would, of course, come in on any Tuesday he was needed. "I wanted him to know that I was committed to the team and that I would be flexible."

His boss agreed to the trial. All Mark had to do was "kill it" as a remote worker. "The best way to get traction is to demonstrate that you are accessible, productive, and responsive. The proof is in the pudding."

The new arrangement was indeed successful, and Mark continues to work from home regularly, with support from his boss. "We never had a formal conversation about it, because it was going so well," he says. "He said, 'Just work from home when you need to. It's fine.'"

Mark encourages his team members to work remotely on projects that require intense concentration. "Now even our CEO and CFO work from home from time to time," he says. "Sometimes you just need a break from the water cooler chat."

Case Study #2: Present evidence to make your case, and then be flexible and committed to the job
Wade Vielock had worked as a manager at Employer Flexible, a Houston-based human resources and recruitment company, for a year before he was transferred to San Antonio. At the time, the company had only a modest presence there, and Wade's business agenda included making hires and building out the sales and service teams.

Two years later Wade earned a promotion, and his boss asked him to come back to corporate headquarters. But returning to Houston was not something Wade was prepared to do. "I have a wife and two kids, and I really didn't want to pick up and move back" so soon, he says.

So he devised a plan. Wade would continue to live and work in San Antonio, both at the company's office and at home, but he would spend three days in Houston every other week. He would also make himself available for special meetings at headquarters, even on short notice. "I realized that it's a sacrifice for the company, so I have to be flexible," he says.

To build his case to his boss, Wade used internal examples of successful remote workers. For instance, he pointed to his own direct reports, who often spent days at home when they need "heads down" time to write surveys or handbooks, and were getting high marks from clients as a result.

Wade's boss agreed to a yearlong trial. "He said, 'Let's see how the role develops and reevaluate.'"

Wade stayed on schedule. When he was at headquarters, he often worked 12-hour days and made sure to have lots of one-on-one meetings with his team. When he was working remotely, he made sure he was "overly accessible."

"I wanted to make sure [my colleagues] would see no difference in my delivery, regardless of whether I was sitting at my desk in Houston or my desk in San Antonio," he says. "When you work remotely, you have to produce at 110%."

After the year was up, Wade received a positive performance review. "My boss said, 'You're hitting your numbers and the [remote work situation] is a nonissue.'" Wade was even told that he might not need to commute every other week and could cut it down to every three weeks instead. But he hasn't made that switch yet. "I like the face time with my team," he explains.

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How to Convince Your Boss to Let You Work from Home

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More and more people are working remotely, and many say it improves their productivity and satisfaction - while also saving them time and money. If you're commuting to an office every day but would like to work elsewhere on a weekly basis, how can you convince your boss to let you do so?

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Handling my stress is something I am always working on. While I put on a straight face and have great time management, my stress can sometimes be boiling inside. I do feel that I have good emotional intelligence and am able to determine when my stress is getting out of control. This article confirms for me that acknowledging your emotions and your stress plays a big factor in how you deal with it.

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Executive Summary

No matter how brave, hardworking and intelligent you may be, there comes a time when stress becomes overwhelming and you get triggered. Triggers are those things that cause you to have a knee-jerk reaction that may or may not be the best response to a given situation. When this happens, you have been emotionally hijacked, and it's difficult to see things as they really are. Over time, these reactions can lead to acute anxiety, depression, irritability, fatigue, and other health problems, from heart disease to lowered immune response. How we manage stressful situations plays a huge role in determining how resilient we are. To better manage stress, start by asking yourself how you typically respond when you're under pressure. Think about the physical symptoms you experience, as well as the psychological and emotional toll that stress takes. Find new ways to de-stress (e.g., laughing, meditating, practicing yoga, reading, etc.). Identifying your triggers and finding new outlets for stress are key components to growing emotional intelligence and resilience.

No matter how brave, hardworking, and intelligent you may be, there comes a time when stress becomes overwhelming and you get triggered. Triggers are those things that cause you to have a knee-jerk reaction that may or may not be the best response to a given situation.

When you are triggered, the emotional part of your brain takes over. You are flooded with adrenaline and cortisol, the same neurotransmitters and hormones that have evolutionarily protected us from threats like bear attacks (freeze, fight, or flight). Your logical brain temporarily shuts down, and you lose the ability to solve problems, make decisions, and think rationally.

When this happens, you have been emotionally hijacked, and it is difficult to see things as they really are. You go into protection mode, and until the perceived threat or trigger has dissipated, you will remain there. Over time these reactions can lead to acute anxiety, depression, irritability, fatigue, and other health problems from heart disease to lowered immune response.

You and Your Team Series

Resilience

Work-related stress has gotten a lot of attention lately. Recent studies estimate that in the United States alone it is costing the economy over $300 billion a year. And given the fact that workplace stress is blamed for 120,000 deaths per year, how we deal with it can literally be a matter of life and death - and a huge determining factor in our health, happiness, and productivity.

Stress is ubiquitous and inevitable, but we all react to difficult circumstances differently. How we manage stressful situations plays a huge role in determining how resilient we are. To better manage stress, start by asking how you respond when you are under pressure:

How does stress affect you physically (e.g., tightness in your chest, sweating, knots in your stomach, headaches, etc.)?

How does stress affect you psychologically or emotionally (e.g., feeling out of control)?

How do you destress (e.g., laughing, meditating, practicing yoga, reading, etc.)?

Identifying your triggers is a key component in improving your emotional intelligence and resilience. Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand your mood and emotions, to be aware of the moods and emotions of others and to use this awareness to guide your behavior. Emotional intelligence determines how you interact with others, maintain relationships, stay motivated, make decisions, manage your emotions, influence others, and much more. The stronger your emotions, the more likely they are to dictate your behavior.

As the mother of a special needs child with severe behavioral and emotional challenges, I get triggered regularly, and I have had to learn how to proactively manage my stress response. This starts with being aware of my emotions.

If you pay attention to the times when you experience stress, overwhelming emotions, and frustration, you'll begin to notice a pattern; there is usually someone or something or that triggers a stress response.

For example, take your typical workday, which is probably filled with meetings, deadlines, and other stressors. Imagine that a colleague embarrasses you in front of your manager and peers, sharing that you missed an important deadline. Your shoulders get tense, your palms get sweaty, and your stomach tightens. You have just been triggered, in this case by a feeling of embarrassment. If you're not careful, you can unknowingly think and behave in ways that impact your relationships and other experiences throughout the rest of the day.

Some common sources of stress we are all familiar with include:

work

children

finances

relationships

illness

overcommitting

loneliness

family dynamics

lack of work-life balance

uncertainty

The good news is, once you are aware of your triggers, you can manage how you choose to react to them. The following questions are helpful in identifying your triggers:

It makes me angry when ___.

I become overwhelmed when ___.

I feel offended when ___.

I think it's rude to ___.

At work I wish people would ___.

It makes me crazy when ___.

I get irritated when I come to work and ___.

In social psychology, fundamental attribution error refers to our tendency to judge others by their behavior and assign it to their character, but to judge ourselves based on our intent. Essentially, we make assumptions about people's motives and blame them for their actions. When they exhibit a behavior we don't like, we label it as a character flaw. What we don't realize is that in making these judgments about others, we increase our own levels of stress.

So, the next time someone says or does something that activates your stress triggers, practice acknowledging and understanding your emotions. Assume positive intent and look for the most hopeful interpretation of their behavior. Think about that example of a colleague pointing out that you missed a deadline. What if you interpreted the situation a bit differently? What if you assume that they were asked to give a status update and had no intention of embarrassing you? Yes, they could have approached it differently, but we're all human, and we all make mistakes.

When you focus your intentions on the most positive interpretation of a person or situation, you begin to see things differently. Not only does it reduce your stress levels but you will also be surprised at how much more optimistic you feel. You will be on your way to being happier, more productive, and more resilient.

To put this practice into action, start by identifying one situation that is challenging your emotional intelligence, and then ask yourself:

How is it impacting me physically, emotionally, and psychologically?

What triggers these feelings and emotions?

What action can I take to manage the situation and my emotional response more effectively?

Resilience is a set of skills that can be practiced and honed. While there is no shortage of stress in our lives, proactively managing your triggers will put you back in control. You will find that you are triggered less often and your responses are more manageable. By practicing these skills, you will not only reduce your levels of stress but also build emotional intelligence, grit, and resilience.

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Handle Your Stress Better by Knowing What Causes It

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Executive Summary No matter how brave, hardworking and intelligent you may be, there comes a time when stress becomes overwhelming and you get triggered. Triggers are those things that cause you to have a knee-jerk reaction that may or may not be the best response to a given situation.