What's Your Motivational Focus?

Everyone has motivators and understands, in a leadership context, that motivating others is critical to individual and team success. According to Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson and Dr. E. Tory Higgins, there are two primary ways in which we work to fulfill personal and professional goals:  (1) through a focus on promotion, or the opportunity to advance, grow, and avoid missing opportunities; or (2) through a focus on prevention, or a concentration on staying safe, not losing anything or incurring detrimental effects.  Promotion- and prevention-focused people can be recognized this way:

“Promotion-focused people:

• Work quickly
• Consider lots of alternatives and are great brainstormers
• Are open to new opportunities
• Are optimists
• Plan only for best-case scenarios
• Seek positive feedback and lose steam without it
• Feel dejected or depressed when things go wrong

Prevention-focused people

• Work slowly and deliberately
• Tend to be accurate
• Are prepared for the worst
• Are stressed by short deadlines
• Stick to tried-and-true ways of doing things
• Are uncomfortable with praise or optimism
• Feel worried or anxious when things go wrong”

Each type has its own strengths and weaknesses and most teams, regardless of industry, thrive when both types are involved.  Knowing your focus can help you choose a field in which your motivational focus strengths are utilized and understanding the focus of your supervisor and your team is critical to effectively persuading and motivating them.  For example, promotion-focused people can be best motivated through praise, inspirational stories, and understanding what they gain when they achieve something.  Prevention-focused individuals are motivated by understanding what they did wrong (criticism), cautionary tales, and understanding what they will lose if they don’t achieve something. 

I’d also like to point you to an hour-long webinar presented by Dr. Halvorson in which she delves deeper into this interesting topic, including describing how your focus can be changed by circumstances and by different domains, such as work and parenthood.  She also gives specific advice about working with people of both types of motivational focus.  I highly recommend it.

Dr. Halvorsen says you can figure out your motivational focus by reading the descriptions.  I’m pretty sure I’m a promotion-focused person.  What’s your focus?  Does reading the description immediately make you think of people you know who fit into them?

The Almighty Cover Letter

I rarely use this space for personal reflections but this week is an exception.  After 15 years of being involved in hiring, I have seen more applicant packages than I can count.  One of the most common places I see applicants go wrong (and right) is the cover letter.  Given that spring graduation is fast approaching and it’s the time of year that many people begin a job search process, I want to provide a list of dos and don’ts to help you make your cover letter or email as strong as it can be.  If you’d like to read more from the experts, go here, and here, and here. 

First the dos:

1. Do your research.  One of the quickest ways to get into the “take a second look” pile of resumes is to show that you have taken the time to do research on the position and organization to which you are applying.  It shows respect for the hiring authorities and that you are a knowledgeable professional.
2. Do have other people look over your cover letter and resume.  Faulkner and Hemmingway had editors, and you need one, too.  It’s important to have at least one other person look at your cover letter and resume before you submit it to look for typos and mistakes.  It’s important to choose reviewers who are good communicators and who will give you honest, constructive feedback.  If you are a student at a university, you have a built-in option – career services – that will help. These services are also often available to alumni as well. 
3. Do show definite interest in the position and organization.  Any reader of your cover letter should be able, after reading it, to state back why you are interested in that specific position at that specific organization.
4. Be honest and authentic.  Don’t over- or under-sell your experiences and accomplishments, and don’t gush when expressing interest.
5. Do state why you believe you are right for the job and frame it as how you can help the organization solve a problem or address a need. Most cover letters are all about the applicant.  That’s natural on some level, but you need to connect the dots for the hiring manager about how you can help the organization address a need. This is also one reason why #1 above is so important.
6. Do talk about your values and how they match the organizational mission and/or culture.  Don’t just highlight your experiences.   Also spend a sentence or two outlining your values and how those match the organization’s.  (Again, research!)
7. Do explain gaps in the resume.  A hiring authority has never met you.  If there are gaps in your resume when you weren’t employed – say a two-year timeframe where you returned to school full-time to get a master’s or started your own business – it’s important that you explain this.  Most applicant packages have literally seconds to make an impression so hiring authorities won’t take the time to piece together where you were for those two years. At worst, they may think you are trying to hide something, so it’s important to address the gaps concisely.

And now the don’ts:

1. Don’t ever send a generic cover letter. Ever.  “To whom it may concern, I am interested in a position at your company…” The message this type of letter sends is that you don’t care enough to even insert the organization’s name in the letter.  It’s the equivalent of never learning anyone’s name and just calling everyone “hey you.” In an age of social media and ubiquitous Google, you can find a name to whom to address your letter or email.  Of course, you should also double-check that you have the right organization listed as it is equally bad to send a cover letter that is specifically addressed…but sent to the wrong organization.
2. Don’t use humor.  Everyone loves a fun person to work with but humor is extremely difficult to convey in writing to people who’ve never met you, so it almost always falls flat.  Just don’t use it. 
3. Don’t try to be cute or clever.  You can write a letter that demonstrates your “voice” and point of view, but, along the same lines as #2 above, let your accomplishments and research set you apart.  Cuteness will make you look immature and unprofessional.   If you work in a creative field where creativity is a major differentiator, by all means ignore the second part of this advice and do something like this. But for everyone else, spend your energy on making your cover letter as correct and clear as it can be.

What other tips can you offer your fellow job seekers?  Want more?  How about some social media tips for job seekers?  Done.

Rewiring Your Brain for Better Leadership?

What if you discovered that there were very simple things you could do to increase your concentration, increase your thinking clarity, and make you feel calmer and more even-tempered?  Maria Gonzalez describes a few simple practices in “Mindfulness for People Who Are Too Busy to Meditate” that can do just that.  As the title indicates, these are things you can literally do in one minute or while you’re doing something else like sitting in a meeting. 

But what if the idea of mediating just feels too “soft” or isn’t for you?  If so, it’s important for you to know that repeating mindfulness practices -- which are different than traditional seated meditation -- has a cumulative effect on your brain that has been documented in neuroscience research, rewiring it for resilience and calm. Mindfulness practices change physical structures in your brain like the hippocampus and the amygdala in much the same way as working out changes your muscles and pulmonary system, and you don’t need to buy a gym membership or even appropriate clothing.  So set your calendar to remind you to do these two or three times a day and begin the rewiring process today.

Twitter Tips

Twitter.  You may love it, or hate it, or just be indifferent to it, but one thing is for sure:  It’s here to stay.  Many businesses and non-profits use Twitter, but a great many use it badly.   That occurs for many reasons, but one of them may be a misunderstanding what Twitter is and what the culture of Twitter entails.  This brief piece provides some simple Twitter tips (Twips?) to help you understand how to use it more effectively.  It is written for the non-profit world but almost all of the suggestions apply everywhere.  

Creating Gender-Inclusive Environments

Recent research indicates that both women and men are twice as likely to hire a man than a woman, even if the woman is more qualified.   This study pertains to business hiring, but research also exists demonstrating a similar hiring and pay bias for academic jobs in the STEM fields and the stories of women in those fields provide support for those conclusions. 

Both studies indicate that the biases exist in both men and women hiring authorities.  So how does a fair-minded leader remedy this?  Will Yakowicz offers three great suggestions:

1. Make gender bias a business issue, not a women’s issue:  An organization that is choosing less qualified men over more able women is going to lose in the long run, because their talent will go elsewhere or otherwise not be fully engaged. 
2. Educate yourself (regardless of your gender) instead of asking women to change:  Women tend to under-sell their abilities, while men tend to over-sell theirs.  When women are assertive about their abilities, they are perceived negatively and penalized.  So the burden is on the leader to understand this no-win dynamic for women and compensate for it rather than asking women to brag more about themselves.
3. Look for bias in hiring policies and systems:  Many hiring authorities believe that candidates who self-promote are the best, despite what’s noted above.  It’s important that they become aware of this erroneous bias and look for other ways to identify competence and ambition.

Samuel Bacharach offers some additional tips for leading in a way that includes everyone.

Do the stories of this kind of bias match with your experiences or observations?  If you work in a female-dominated field, do you see this playing out?  

The Greatest Barrier to Success is…Success?

Most of us think that there is a direct, linear relationship between effort and success.  The more time we spend working on something, the better results we see, right?  (The term education researchers use for this is “time on task.”) Greg McKeown is a leadership researcher and teacher, and his findings call that notion into question.  In a blog post called “The Unimportance of Practically Everything” and a 5-minute video he describes the principal he’s discovered by studying some of the most successful leaders and some who are talented and hardworking but never “break through” as they should.  That concept is essentialism, or as he calls it, “the disciplined pursuit of less.”  McKeown’s findings indicate that, as he says, “the biggest barrier to success is success” because it means an increasing number of opportunities and options, which overwhelm us and take away the mental space we need to separate the essential from the inessential in our lives.  He posits that you will never accomplish what you want at home or at work unless you actively eliminate these distractions. Effort, in other words, does not equal success unless it’s spent in the most important areas.  This is not a new idea – Covey fans will think back to the “first things first” habit – but it’s an important message nonetheless.  He gives you a tip that you can get started with today and provides real-life examples of how others, like Warren Buffett, have put this idea into action.  I hope you’ll take a look.

How do you eliminate the inessential in your own life?  Have you learned to say no effectively? What stops you from paring down the list of things you spend time on?

Culture Trumps Strategy

It's often said that culture trumps strategy.  Strategist Nilofer Merchant says, "After working on strategy for 20 years, I can say this: culture will trump strategy, every time.  The best strategic idea means nothing in isolation.  If the strategy conflicts with how a group of people already believe, behave or make decisions, it will fail." This short (two minute) video explores this a bit more. 

What makes a great organizational culture?  According to the John Coleman with the Harvard Business Review, there are six things to consider:

• Vision:  A strong, clear sense of what kind of impact the organization wants to create orients all stakeholders about what’s really important.  Coleman cites examples like Oxfam’s “a just world without poverty” and The Alzheimer’s Association’s “a world without Alzheimer’s.”
• Values:  If the vision is the “what,” values are the “how.”  Values are the standards for behavior that guide the organization as it works toward its vision and purpose.
• Practices:  What good are values without the actual practices to enact them?  If my office says we value student input, but then never ask your opinion on anything, we would be failing our values.  Practices that match organization values are “walking the walk” and making the values real.
• People: Organizations with strong positive cultures are extremely selective in who they hire in order to find those candidates who are excited about enacting the values and vision of the organization.
• Narrative:  Every organization has a story and the skill and frequency with which it shares that story, both internally and externally, are important to creating culture.  An example of telling the organization’s story that Coleman cites is Coca-Cola’s World of Coke museum in Atlanta.
• Place:  The physical environment influences human behavior.  Many companies where collaboration is key situate their staff in open environments where they see each other a lot.  What does your work space say to others?

What’s the culture of your workplace?  If you are in a management position, how do you create a culture that is supportive of great work?  As a team member, how do you contribute to such a culture?

The Difference Between Management and Leadership

How do you know when you have transitioned from managing to leading?  Do you ever actually transition or do you add leadership into existing management abilities and practices? 

If you Google the difference between management and leadership, you will likely find Warren Bennis’ semi-poetic piece that draws a pretty sharp line between the two.  “The manager administers; the leader innovates.  The manager has a short-range view; the leader has a long-range perspective. The manager accepts the status quo; the leader challenges it.”  He’s also often quoted as saying, "Managers are people who do things right and leaders are people who do the right thing."  In other words, leadership is the vision and management is the execution. 

Robert Sutton, however, says this distinction is misleading.  He rightly notes that leaders cannot simply sit in an office and come up with big ideas, without a detailed understanding of the industry in which the organization operates, the staff who actually implement the ideas, and the individuals served by the organization.  He proposes a better idea: "To do the right thing, a leader needs to understand what it takes to do things right, and to make sure they actually get done." In other words, a leader must have a vision for what should happen next and a detailed understanding of how to make that vision come to reality within the current context.

So rather than conceiving leadership and management as separate concepts with a bright line between them, perhaps it would be better to think of the two as a Venn diagram, incorporating the overlapping execution and contextual knowledge of good management and good leadership.

What are the differences and similarities between good management and good leadership from your experience?  How should a leader cultivate both

domains?

Three Words That Will Transform Your Career

Sometimes we like to keep it simple at Leadership Unleashed and with Snowjam 2014 exploding everyone’s plans, this seemed like a good week for simplicity.  So for this week's post, I'll point you to a piece called Three Words That Will Transform Your Career.  Many headlines these days seem to oversell what follows, so this post is a nice contrast because I actually think it undersells the content.  I think these are three words that could change not just your career, but your life.  This is seemingly simple but pretty profound advice.   Enjoy!

Taming the Email Beast

One resource that leaders never have enough of is time.  Strong time management requires you to say no and set priorities, which is something most of us can continually improve.  One of the biggest time-wasters is email.

Don’t get me wrong:  Email has provided some helpful benefits.  It allows you to keep a record of your communications and allows you to send information to people without being concerned about whether they are available at that time.  But most people use email a little addictively, checking it constantly and allowing it to take time away from more important tasks.  We also use it a little delusionally, believing it’s possible to check email while being productive at other things, despite the neuroscience research that explodes the multi-tasking myth.  Smartphones have only magnified this phenomenon.

So how do we fix this?  How do we put email in its place and use it as a tool but not a driver of our work lives?  Here are some tips.  (Some of these come from a book called, appropriately enough, Never Check Email in the Morning by Julie Morgenstern, which I highly recommend). 

1. Like Ms. Morganstern says, don’t check email until at least an hour into your day.  I’ll give you a minute to pick yourself up off the floor.  Yes.  I said wait an hour to check your email.  Use that hour to do the most critical task of that day.  Spend a minute or two at the end of the previous day deciding what that will be and then do it.  You will start your day with an important accomplishment, regardless of what vortex of crazy ensues from that point forward.  If you work in an industry that has mission-critical emails first thing in the morning, such as orders that come in overnight and must be filled immediately, move that hour to immediately after you look at the critical emails.
2. Turn off your email and only read and answer emails during set times during the day.  Most people fear that they are missing out on something by doing this, but it’s important to begin seeing that email is not for urgent matters.  Try setting times – say, 10 am, 2 pm, and 4 pm – as email times.
3. Answer emails immediately if you can do it in 2 minutes or less.  Productivity expert David Allen recommends that emails that require more than two minutes should be delayed.  You can move it to the end of your designated email checking time or to another of those time slots later in the day.  Then you can power through the quickies and reserve time for your more thoughtful responses.
4. If you genuinely can’t turn off your email or need to baby-step your way into it, at least turn the email alert sound off.  It’s almost impossible to ignore and takes you out of the flow of whatever you are working on.
5. If an email string involves two or more replies, use the phone or in-person discussions to address the issue.  If you need a record of what was decided, send a quick summary email after you talk.
6. Set your outbox so that it delays sending by 5 minutes to help avoid those “Oops, I forgot to include this” follow up emails.  This will also help you avoid the dreaded “I really wish I hadn’t sent that” emails.
7. Train yourself and others.  Ask them to use the phone or in-person discussions if an email is more than two paragraphs.  Morganstern recommends that you should state right at the top or in the subject line what you want from the receiver – please review and advise, double-check, etc. -- especially if you simply must send a long email.   Help others understand that email is not instant message and anything urgent should be handled by phone, text, or in person.
8. Realign your priorities.  If you wear your “I leave every day at zero inbox” priority like a badge of honor, rethink this.  In most workplaces, there are much more important tasks to be done each day than responding to each and every email on the same day. 
9. Use the organization tools in your email solution.  Some allow you to set rules so that newsletters, blog updates, and “FYI” type emails will go to a file to be read later.  Set alerts to remind you to reply to an email by a certain date or time.

These are a few tips to get you started with keeping email in perspective, allowing it to serve you and not vice versa. 

What other tips have you found to be helpful in taming the email beast?

Effective Leadership Practices, Part 4

Periodically over the preceding weeks, I’ve summarized the effective practices of servant leadership as described by Kent M. Keith, in The Case for Servant Leadership.  Those practices include self-awareness, listening, changing the pyramid, developing your colleagues, coaching (not controlling) and unleashing the energy and intelligence of others.  (If you’d like to review the posts, the links will take you back to each). The final effective leadership practice that Keith describes is foresight.  Foresight in this context is identical to what is more commonly called “vision” and I will use the terms interchangeably here.

Foresight is the ability to visualize the future, to anticipate the needs of your organization and industry, as well as to envision the impact you want to have.  In The Servant as Leader, Robert Greenleaf (the originator of servant leadership) speaks of foresight as the leadership skill.  He believed it was so important that he considered a lack of foresight to be an ethical failure because it prevents the leader to act for the good of his team or organization (Greenleaf, 2008).  Without it, he believed the leader is not leading, she’s reacting.  Leadership without vision and foresight is management. 

Greenleaf was not alone in seeing vision as the sine qua non of leadership. If you Google “vision and leadership” and you will receive a host of references, blog posts, books, and other exhortations of leaders to develop vision. 

So the natural next question is, how do you develop vision?  Kouzes and Posner (2009) note the importance of taking time out from pressing work matters to think and ask questions of yourself and your environments.  The leader must keep principles at the forefront, asking who do we want to be as an organization and as individuals?  What needs to change within the scope of our influence and what’s our role in bringing it about?  The visionary leader must listen to others and plug into her professional environment, seeking to constantly understand it (and predict it) better.  Finally, reflection is critical to vision.  None of the previous activities are worth the time if there isn’t a period of reflection in which they can all be synthesized. 

Do you agree with the idea that vision is the central characteristic of leadership?  Why or why not? 

How do you find time to withdraw and reflect on your own vision? 

Greenleaf, R. K. (2008).  The servant as leader. Westfield, IN:  The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership.

Keith, K. M. (2008). The case for servant leadership. Westfield, IN:  The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership.

Kouzes, J. M. & Posner, B. Z. (2009).  To lead, create a shared vision.  Harvard Business Review.  Retrieved from http://hbr.org/2009/01/to-lead-create-a-shared-vision/ar/1

The Happy Life or the Meaningful Life?

I recently read some fascinating research out of Stanford University that examines the happy life and the meaningful life.  I think it provides some insight for both leaders and graduate students, both of whom engage in activities that may require sacrifice and difficulty.  These actions may not make us happy in the immediate sense, but they add depth and meaning to our lives and those of others.

The full article can be found here, and I recommend it.  It’s not a lengthy piece.  Here are the points I’ve been chewing on since reading it:

1.  The happy life and the meaningful life are often not the same.  Meaningful experiences almost always mean that you will encounter stresses, obstacles, and challenges; otherwise, the opportunity for impact would not exist.  Examples would be parenting, doing social work, or being in graduate school.  Happiness is about getting what you want and need without challenges and struggles, which brings zing to our lives but not necessarily meaning.
2. Happiness is often about superficial things and taking, while meaning is about deeper relationships and giving.  Having coffee with a friend where you are silly and laugh a lot makes you happy but doesn’t ultimately provide much meaning.  Having coffee with a friend who you counsel and advise through a terrible personal situation may be stressful, but it has tremendous impact and meaning. 
3. The in-the-moment, “hakuna matata” mindset makes you happy but linking together past, present, and future increases meaningfulness. (You’re welcome for the hakuna matata earworm, by the way.)  The Stanford research showed that thinking about the past, present, and future makes you less happy but it’s the only way to create a more meaningful life.  

For most of us, our goal is to balance both superficial happiness and deeper meaning.  But I think this research could help with some of those more challenging...er, meaningful times.  The next time you have to talk to a colleague about something stressful or you have to sacrifice doing something fun to do your academic work, think about this idea.  Understand that you are increasing the meaning in your life and the lives of others through your actions today.

This research was somewhat surprising to me, as I’d never thought of happiness and meaning as so dichotomous.  What is your reaction?

I tend to believe that a meaningful life is the path to a happy life, but this research would seem to cast doubt on this idea.  What do you think?

How do you help colleagues, friends, and family to find create meaningful lives or find meaning in difficulty?