Tag Archives: Tips for Professionals

Professionals

5 Secrets For Building A Highly Successful Career

building success

Everyone wants to build a successful career: to get promoted, to gain new responsibility and authority, to earn a higher salary.

[tabs type=”vertical”][tabs_head][tab_title]Be Deeply Curious.[/tab_title][tab_title]Learn how to get the people around you to do the best they can.[/tab_title][tab_title]Find a work-life rhythm you can maintain.[/tab_title][tab_title]Care deeply.[/tab_title][tab_title]Build your team.[/tab_title][/tabs_head][tab]When looking for people to place in leadership positions, especially senior leadership positions, look for people who deeply understand the business. Probe deeply into most companies and you’ll find way too many senior executives understand their role and their division but not the overall business, much less the broader economy. An outstanding executive: 1) Deeply understands their specific areas of responsibility; 2) Thoroughly understands the aspects of the rest of their company; 3) Has a solid understanding of their industry, other industries, and macro-economic forces and trends. Sound like a lot to know? It is – but it is knowledge that will separate you from the pack. Most people work hard to check the “I’m doing a great job in my job” box, but to be a leader you need to be able to step up, care about, and truly understand the larger issues of the business. People instantly recognize when you truly care about your business and truly care about learning. That always shines through – and will always take you far. [/tab][tab]Remember: different people have different leadership styles and different ways they influence others. Authenticity is the real key to leadership at any level, especially the senior level. The goal is to be authentic and learn to work within the framework of your personality to get people to follow your lead. Be yourself and leverage your strengths. Don’t try to act like someone else; people can instantly tell. If you’re casual and easygoing, don’t try to switch personalities and become refined and polished. You’ll just come across as insincere and plastic. People like, respect, and follow real people. Be yourself and learn how to get people to do what you want them to do – as yourself.[/tab][tab]You can’t treat your career like a crash diet: Cut your calories in half and exercise like crazy and you will lose weight, but eventually you won’t be able to stick with a program like that and you’ll gain back the weight you lost. A career works the same way. While there will be periods of intense stress, in general you must find a business and life rhythm you can maintain over the long term. Find a rhythm where you can have enough time for family and friends, feel satisfied emotionally, and still excel at work, because building a great career is a marathon, not a sprint.[/tab][tab]Don’t kid yourself: Everyone knows when you’re only in it for yourself. Unless you truly care about the company you work for and are personally invested in its success, you will never work as hard as you need to work to truly succeed. Every great leader is deeply invested in the success of others; every great business leader, regardless of position or level, cares deeply about their company and the people around them. If you don’t care deeply now, find something you do care deeply about: Another function, another mission, another company, etc. You can only reach your full potential, both personally and in a career, when you truly care.[/tab][tab]Outside of work we all need a broader group of people we can rely on to provide advice and guidance – people who care about our success the same way we care about theirs. In other words you need a team. The people on your team don’t need to be older, grizzled sages – they just need to know you and care about you. Make sure you have people in your life you can always turn to and for whom you will always do the same.[/tab][/tabs]

Professionals

10 Qualities of Highly Successful People

The attributes here are shared by successful people everywhere, but they didn’t happen by accident or luck. They originate in habits, built a day at a time.

success-sign

1. Drive – You have the determination to work harder than most and make sure things get done. You pride yourself on seeing things getting completed and you can take charge when necessary. You drive yourself with purpose and align yourself with excellence.

2. Self-reliance – You can shoulder responsibilities and be accountable. You make hard decisions and stand by them. To think for yourself is to know yourself.

3. Willpower – You have the strength to see things through–rather than vacillate or procrastinate. When you want it, you make it happen. The world’s greatest achievers are those who have stayed focused on their goals and been consistent in their efforts.

4. Patience – You are willing to be patient, and you understand that, in everything, there are failures and frustrations. To take them personally would be a detriment.

5. Integrity – This should not have to be said, but it’s seriously one of the most important attributes you can cultivate. Honesty is the best policy for everything you do; integrity creates character and defines who you are.

6. Passion – If you want to succeed, if you want to live, it’s not politeness but rather passion that will get you there. Life is 10 percent what you experience and 90 percent how you respond to it.

7. Connection – You can relate with others, which in turns makes everything reach further and deepen in importance.

8. Optimism – You know there is much to achieve and much good in this world, and you know what’s worth fighting for. Optimism is a strategy for making a better future–unless you believe that the future can be better, you’re unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.

9. Self-confidence – You trust yourself. It’s as simple as that. And when you have that unshakeable trust in yourself, you’re already one step closer to succeeding.

10. Communication – You work to communicate and pay attention to the communicators around you. Most important, you hear what isn’t being said. When communication is present, trust and respect follow.

No one plans on being mediocre; mediocrity happens when you don’t plan. If you want to succeed, learn the traits that will make you successful and plan on living them out every day.

Be humble and great. Courageous and determined. Faithful and fearless. That is who you are, and who you have always been.

SOURCE

Professionals

For Professionals: 4 Tips for More Productive Meetings

Meetings are a corporate oxymoron: an essential practice that generates groundbreaking ideas but also sucks the life out of a workforce. Employees waste away in conference rooms trying to pay attention to others give languorous presentations on mind-numbingly boring TPS reports and listening to overviews with no impact on his or her job function. Don’t do this to your employees.

meeting-room-prev1217769718W2VzN7

Here are four key considerations you can use to keep co-workers engaged and productive.

1. Be timely.
Meetings are major investments and should be expected to create a substantial return. Before holding a meeting, ask yourself if the opportunity cost of conducting the meeting is worth it — will the benefits exceed the cost? Additionally, meetings should be no longer than 45 minutes, as humans focus best within that timeframe. If the agenda clearly looks to take longer (it shouldn’t unless there are special circumstances), split the meeting into 45-minute periods with a rest in between.

2. Have an agenda that makes sense.
Not only do meetings take time, but they also impact the way we manage our time. Consider the frequency with which meetings are called around a specific project. Do you really need daily status updates or can it be shifted to weekly? Meetings take people out of their workflow and promote procrastination. Most workers see the half hour before and after meetings as dead time, because there isn’t enough time to dig into work tasks.

3. Be selective on who attends the meeting.
Only invite people capable of contributing to the discussion. This way, employees feel valued and are more likely to positively engage in the discussion. Employees need to understand that their time is more valuable than their presence at every meeting. Management is giving people more time to complete their work task — not diluting their value to the company. In fact, fewer meetings should increase interoffice communications and keep everyone informed.

4. Determine if you really need the meeting.
This is the ultimate question people should ask themselves. We live in a world of Skype, email, Wikis and a million other collaboration tools. These tools do not make all meetings irrelevant — particularly for those involving problem solving, brainstorming and other types of creative thinking — but they can be used to free up quite a bit of time if used effectively.

Source: CEO.COM

Professionals

Decision Making Types

 

decision making concept on blackboardDecision Making types. Which one are you?

You know you need great ideas, a critical mass of talent, and a decent amount of luck to build a successful business. But there’s something even more fundamental to putting together a smart organization.

Before everything else, you, the founder, need an honest understanding of your strengths and weaknesses. Without it, you won’t know how to build a great supporting team. One place to start is to look at how you make decisions.

A new survey of about 5,000 McKinsey Quarterly and Harvard Business Review readers might offer some insight. After in-depth work on 1,021 of the responses, study authors Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony identified five decision-making styles. They are: Visionary, Guardian, Motivator, Flexible, and Catalyst.

Each style is a combination of preferences from a set of six pairs of opposing characteristics:

 

  • prefers ad hoc or process
  • prefers action or caution
  • gathers information narrowly or widely
  • believes corporate interests or personal interests prevail
  • likes continuity or change
  • prefers storytelling or facts

Although the authors stress that the research is still in an early stage, here is a summary of what they have learned so far.

Decision makers all have particular ways they like to work and there are actions each should take to keep their tendencies from undermining their intent.

Visionary

The visionary decision maker is “a champion of radical change with a natural gift for leading people through turbulent times.” Such people like change, gather information relatively narrowly, and are strongly biased toward action but “may be too quick to rush in the wrong direction.”

If you are a visionary leader, you should seek the opinions and views of a broad group and “encourage dissenters to voice their concerns.” Only that way can you get a wider set of views and information that can be critical to success.

Guardian

A guardian is a “model of fairness who preserves the health, balance, and values of the organization.” Such people have sound decision-making processes, try for fact-based choices, and plan carefully. They like continuity, are moderately cautious, and gather information relatively widely.

Those are fine characteristics for normal times. But the guardian can be too cautious and slow moving during a crisis, when there is “desperate need for change.” That is why a guardian should talk to people outside the organization and have them “challenge deeply held beliefs about the company and its industry.” Task forces are then in order to “explore major changes in the environment.”

Motivator

Motivators are good choices for change. They are charismatic, can convince people of the need for action, and build alignment among parts of the company. But like all good storytellers, they risk believing the story in the face of countervailing facts. They gather information relatively narrowly, and strongly believe that self-interest prevails over corporate interest.

Rather than looking simply for outside counsel, motivators need to explore the existing facts and see if there are other ways to interpret them–ways that do not necessarily play into the narrative they have created. Formal processes are a help. Motivators can use surveys to get a realistic sense of the rest of the company.

Flexible

Flexible leaders are, as you might expect from the name, more versatile than other types of leaders: “comfortable with uncertainty, open minded in adapting to circumstances, and willing to involve a variety of people in the decision making.” They mildly lean to ad hoc approaches rather than formal processes and are fairly cautious.

The problem with flexible leaders is that they can become too open-minded. Looking at all the potential issues, solutions, and outcomes can paralyze the decision-making process. They should set deadlines for decisions before the paralytic debate can commence. It can also make sense to create a framework for ordinary repetitive decisions, making them the subject of a set of rules so as not to waste time on reconsidering.

Catalyst

The catalyst is an excellent person to lead the work of groups, whether making decisions or implementing them. They are balanced, being in the middle on four out of the six characteristics, although they slightly prefer action to caution and are slightly biased toward broadly, rather than narrowly, gathering information. The more extreme the necessary decision, the more they can naturally resist inherent biases.

That said, being middle of the road can yield only average results. To avoid that, a catalyst should watch for circumstances that require high-stakes decisions and realize that they may need a different type of decision process, like having a team look at the situation and suggest potential approaches.

How does this research square with your assumptions and decision-making tendencies?

[button color=”blue” size=”small” link=” http://www.inc.com/erik-sherman/which-of-the-5-kinds-of-decision-maker-are-you.html#ixzz32zDppSN8″ target=”blank” ]Read More[/button]

 

Professionals

5 Team Building Exercises

Teamwork: team working together.

Five main categories of team building exercises exist. They consist of activities that build communication, promote problem solving and decision making, encourage adaptability and the ability to plan, work to build trust, and develop a cooperative spirit. The team building exercises that promote these various skills are meant to be enjoyable and instructional.

Depending on what you want to improve on your team, you can try some of the following activities:

1. Build communication. Activities that develop open lines of communication and listening increase communication. Try games like telephone, where you sit in a circle and one person whispers a scenario into the ear of the next person, such as how an important report was not delivered to the president in time. The “telephone” chain continues until the last person, who announces what he or she heard. Generally, by the end of the chain the story has been altered substantially. This gives employees a chance to discuss how the story changed along the way and methods they could use in the future to improve communication.

2. Promote problem solving and decision making. Used often in science fairs, the egg drop is a particularly effective activity for promoting problem solving. Split the employees into two groups and have them rig up a package that ensures a raw egg doesn’t break when dropped from a distance. Make it more challenging by timing them and limiting the types of materials they can use to protect the egg.

3. Encourage adaptability and planning. Survival scenarios work well to encourage planning and adaptability. Announce a survival situation, such as the fact that everyone will be deserted on an island indefinitely. Instruct the group to come up with a list of 15 items they must bring with them in order to ensure their survival. The process of choosing will require that they adapt and plan for the unexpected.

4. Build trust. One of the most efficient ways to test the trust between two individuals is to have them protect one another physically. This can be done by having one person close his or her eyes and fall backward into the arms of another. Or, you could have employees stand facing each other in pairs; with their elbows bent, they place their palms together, leaning toward each other and moving their feet back further and further until they’re supporting each other. Such exercises quickly highlight trust issues and help everyone learn to believe in one another.

5. Nurture a cooperative spirit. Assigning employee teams to volunteer with charitable causes is the best way to encourage cooperation. When people work on a cause that the team cares about, they will bond. The opportunity to give back to those less fortunate often creates a charitable, cooperative attitude among everyone involved.

Armed with these ideas for team building exercises, you can create the best working culture for your business.

Professionals

6 Business Skills Every Entrepreneur Should Have

entrepreneur

When starting out in business, you may be able to fumble your way to short-term success if you have a good product and a measure of business savvy.

If you want to experience long-term success, however, there are some core disciplines you learn and execute.

At some point (sooner is better than later), you will need to become skilled in the following six areas:

1. Conducting market research

Doing market research will provide you with key information about the industry in which you operate. It will also help you develop your business plan and adapt it over time. Adequate market research includes, at a minimum, the following areas:

2. Testing your ideas

Starting a new business or launching a new product can be intimidating, but it’s also very exciting. Sometimes the excitement causes entrepreneurs to over-commit time and resources on untested or unproven ideas. This is a recipe for failure.

Find ways to test every idea before rolling it out. With the Internet, testing an idea does not have to be difficult or expensive. Search engines and social networks provide some incredible tools that can be used to effectively test and perfect business ideas.

3. Developing business plans

Another important discipline involves proper planning. Creating a business plan in the beginning will raise your likelihood of future success because it forces you to think about and plan for critical issues you will face down the road. Furthermore, by devoting time to planning each year, you will be better equipped to adapt to changing market conditions.

There are several mobile and desktop applications that make creating business plans much simpler than it used to be.

4. Saving vs. spending

It’s easy to spend money on a new venture, and many entrepreneurs overspend in the beginning. Because it can take awhile to get established and begin generating revenue on a consistent basis, it is wise to maintain a cushion at all times. A new business owner should have at least six months of operating costs socked away before going into business.

5. The art of negotiating

Knowing how to negotiate is one of the most powerful skills an entrepreneur can acquire. When opportunities arise, you must know how to negotiate for lower prices when buying and higher prices when selling. If negotiating is not one of your strengths, study the art of negotiating and practice doing it whenever you get the chance.

 

6. Mental toughness

If you’re not resilient, you won’t be able to bounce back from the setbacks that you will face. Every entrepreneur inevitably faces setbacks and failures. Some will be small, and some will be so big that they will seem overwhelming. You must cultivate mental toughness and the determination to press on despite obstacles if you’re going to survive in the business world.

You have the ability to build a successful business. Thousands of people have done it who have no more ability than you do. To succeed, they simply learned the necessary behaviors to make their dreams a reality, and consistently took action to reach their goals. You can do the same.

Read more at: http://startupcollective.com/6-business-skills-every-entrepreneur-should-have/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=6-business-skills-every-entrepreneur-should-have#ixzz30AKXV0yv

Teachers, Training & Conferences

Classroom Management Discipline Solutions

Classroom management is a term used by teachers to describe the process of ensuring that classroom lessons run smoothly despite disruptive behaviour by students. The term also implies the prevention of disruptive behaviour. It is possibly the most difficult aspect of teaching for many teachers; indeed experiencing problems in this area causes some to leave teaching altogether. Classroom management is closely linked to issues of motivation, discipline and respect.

How do the teachers get students to behave in class? Usually not by telling them to behave, but using behaviour patterns that ensure they behave.

Before starting teaching, each teacher should ask herself these questions:

  • Have you set a code of behaviour in the classroom?
  • Are the students really understanding you or are they missing most of what you are saying?
  •  What type of troublemaker are they?

Below, solutions are given to classroom discipline problems from an ELT teacher:

[box type=”shadow” align=”aligncenter” ]How can a teacher prevent irritating classroom behaviors?

1. The students and teacher should first discuss and then write a “group” contract adopting acceptable classroom rules and procedures by the end of the first week of school.

2. Periodically review the rules and procedures of the classroom until the students can successfully adhere to them.

3. Use simple verbal reprimands when the misbehavior occurs. Make sure that they are to the point, moderate in tone, and private (e.g., “Stop talking and work on your math problems, please”).

4. Give praise to the entire class as frequently as possible (e.g., “Thank you for working so quietly,” or “I’m delighted to see you all working so well today”).

5. A student who continually exhibits an unacceptable behavior (e.g., out of his/her seat) might profit from an “individualized” contract pinpointing the “desired” behavior (e.g., remaining in his/her seat) and delineating the consequences (e.g., if goal is reached, then student will receive designated reward or recognition).

6. Intervene as soon as possible in order to prevent the misbehavior from occurring (e.g., say “Harry, may I help you with your assignment?” when the student begins to show signs of frustration).

7. Use facial expressions to convey to the student that the misbehavior was not totally overlooked. Circulate around the room frequently, to avert potential behavior problems.[/box]