Self Belief

Leadership and Hostage Crisis

2012-09-01T08:18:00.001+03:00

Why being a boss is like a hostage crisis (Copied from CNN)

I'm no stranger to the kind of dehumanized violence we saw happen in a Colorado movie theater earlier this summer.

As a hostage negotiator, I've been held hostage myself four times in the line of duty. That's never a comfortable place to be, but I kept in mind that the success rate of hostage negotiators is as high as 95% and I knew why. Hostage negotiators are successful because they build trust through dialogue.

That dialogue changes the mindset of the hostage taker so he will surrender his weapons and hostages, even though he is aware he will probably go to prison.

In essence, the hostage negotiator becomes a "secure base" to the hostage taker. A secure base provides a sense of safety and stretch, just as a parent, grandparent, or caretaker provides their child both protection and encouragement to go out and explore and take risks.

Today, I work mostly with corporate leaders instead of hostage takers. In my book "Care to Dare" I define a secure base as "someone or something that gives protection or sense of protection, inspires or brings forth energy within an individual." With this inspiration and energy, individuals step out of their comfort zones and strive to fulfill their untapped potential.

I believe this quality is the single most important criterion for delivering sustainable high-performance leadership.

See also: Want be a leader? Act like one

Many hostage takers have few secure bases in their lives. Hostage taking is always preceded by a loss or a series of losses. The most dangerous hostage taker is the person who has no attachments and refuses to talk. However, when a hostage negotiator offers hopes, options, and positive solutions by gaining the trust of the hostage taker, he or she can become a secure base.

To become a secure base to my hostage takers meant caring about them as people and gaining their trust to explore positive solutions both for them and their hostages. Once I understood the motivation behind the hostage taking, I could begin the search for options.

By tactfully leading the way and while acting as a "secure base," I was able to disarm my four hostage takers without force. Each time, I survived precisely because I cared for the person who had a weapon trained on me.

That process involved creating a relationship -- an emotional bond -- with the hostage taker. Neuroscience explains why this bonding works. The human brain has one goal: to survive. That's why humans are always searching for the negative and instinctively act defensively. However, when a secure base creates a bond, the resulting sense of protection lets the brain shut down its defensive focus. Then the brain can look for positives and opportunities.

James Holmes, the accused shooter in the Aurora mass murder, is a typical example of a "loner" who has no secure bases or recently lost them: his university position as student, his identity, his apartment, his girlfriend, his father, to name just a few. As someone with extensive experience with severely troubled people, I see his lack of secure bases as a key contributing factor to his alleged crimes.

These days, I am a professor of leadership and organizational behavior, yet I still focus on the most basic human needs that drive behavior. If leaders are not secure bases to their employees, employees cannot trust them and they will be defensive and even feel like hostages.

Gallup studies show extremely low rates of employee engagement: 7% in France, 12% in Germany, 17 % in the UK, and 28% in the United States. The major finding was that high engagement was connected to high emotional care from the immediate boss -- a boss who became a secure base.

When caring was present, the employees would "dare" to take risks and stretch themselves to achieve great things. This winning combination of caring and daring not only shuts down defenses, it can also unleash extraordinary potential.

2012-05-23T13:52:00.002+03:00

How Will You Measure Your Life?

by Clayton M. Christensen

My class at HBS is structured to help my students understand what good management theory is and how it is built. To that backbone I attach different models or theories that help students think about the various dimensions of a general manager's job in stimulating innovation and growth. In each session we look at one company through the lenses of those theories-using them to explain how the company got into its situation and to examine what managerial actions will yield the needed results.

On the last day of class, I ask my students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves, to find cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I'll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I'll stay out of jail? Though the last question sounds lighthearted, it's not. Two of the 32 people in my Rhodes scholar class spent time in jail. Jeff Skilling of Enron fame was a classmate of mine at HBS. These were good guys-but something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction.

One of the theories that gives great insight on the first question-how to be sure we find happiness in our careers-is from Frederick Herzberg, who asserts that the powerful motivator in our lives isn't money; it's the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to others, and be recognized for achievements (answer to Q 1). I tell the students about a vision of sorts I had while I was running the company I founded before becoming an academic. In my mind's eye I saw one of my managers leave for work one morning with a relatively strong level of self-esteem. Then I pictured her driving home to her family 10 hours later, feeling unappreciated, frustrated, underutilized, and demeaned. I imagined how profoundly her lowered self-esteem affected the way she interacted with her children. The vision in my mind then fast-forwarded to another day, when she drove home with greater self-esteem-feeling that she had learned a lot, been recognized for achieving valuable things, and played a significant role in the success of some important initiatives. I then imagined how positively that affected her as a spouse and a parent. My conclusion: Management is the most noble of professions if it's practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team. More and more MBA students come to school thinking that a career in business means buying, selling, and investing in companies. That's unfortunate. Doing deals doesn't yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.

Doing deals doesn't yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.

I want students to leave my classroom knowing that.

Create a Strategy for Your Life

A theory that is helpful in answering the second question-How can I ensure that my relationship with my family proves to be an enduring source of happiness?-concerns how strategy is defined and implemented. Its primary insight is that a company's strategy is determined by the types of initiatives that management invests in. If a company's resource allocation process is not managed masterfully, what emerges from it can be very different from what management intended. Because companies' decision-making systems are designed to steer investments to initiatives that offer the most tangible and immediate returns, companies shortchange investments in initiatives that are crucial to their long-term strategies.

Over the years I've watched the fates of my HBS classmates from 1979 unfold; I've seen more and more of them come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children. I can guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated with the deliberate strategy of getting divorced and raising children who would become estranged from them. And yet a shocking number of them implemented that strategy. The reason? They didn't keep the purpose of their lives front and center as they decided how to spend their time, talents, and energy.

It's quite startling that a significant fraction of the 900 students that HBS draws each year from the world's best have given little thought to the purpose of their lives. I tell the students that HBS might be one of their last chances to reflect deeply on that question. If they think that they'll have more time and energy to reflect later, they're nuts, because life only gets more demanding: You take on a mortgage; you're working 70 hours a week; you have a spouse and children.

For me, having a clear purpose in my life has been essential. But it was something I had to think long and hard about before I understood it. When I was a Rhodes scholar, I was in a very demanding academic program, trying to cram an extra year's worth of work into my time at Oxford. I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying about why God put me on this earth. That was a very challenging commitment to keep, because every hour I spent doing that, I wasn't studying applied econometrics. I was conflicted about whether I could really afford to take that time away from my studies, but I stuck with it-and ultimately figured out the purpose of my life.

Had I instead spent that hour each day learning the latest techniques for mastering the problems of autocorrelation in regression analysis, I would have badly misspent my life. I apply the tools of econometrics a few times a year, but I apply my knowledge of the purpose of my life every day. It's the single most useful thing I've ever learned. I promise my students that if they take the time to figure out their life purpose, they'll look back on it as the most important thing they discovered at HBS. If they don't figure it out, they will just sail off without a rudder and get buffeted in the very rough seas of life. Clarity about their purpose will trump knowledge of activity-based costing, balanced scorecards, core competence, disruptive innovation, the four Ps, and the five forces.

My purpose grew out of my religious faith, but faith isn't the only thing that gives people direction. For example, one of my former students decided that his purpose was to bring honesty and economic prosperity to his country and to raise children who were as capably committed to this cause, and to each other, as he was. His purpose is focused on family and others-as mine is.

The choice and successful pursuit of a profession is but one tool for achieving your purpose. But without a purpose, life can become hollow.

Allocate Your Resources

Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your life's strategy (Answer to Q 2).

I have a bunch of "businesses" that compete for these resources: I'm trying to have a rewarding relationship with my wife, raise great kids, contribute to my community, succeed in my career, contribute to my church, and so on. And I have exactly the same problem that a corporation does. I have a limited amount of time and energy and talent. How much do I devote to each of these pursuits?

Allocation choices can make your life turn out to be very different from what you intended. Sometimes that's good: Opportunities that you never planned for emerge. But if you misinvest your resources, the outcome can be bad. As I think about my former classmates who inadvertently invested for lives of hollow unhappiness, I can't help believing that their troubles relate right back to a short-term perspective.

When people who have a high need for achievement-and that includes all Harvard Business School graduates-have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they'll unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments. And our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we're moving forward. You ship a product, finish a design, complete a presentation, close a sale, teach a class, publish a paper, get paid, get promoted. In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn't offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It's really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, "I raised a good son or a good daughter." You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn't seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers-even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.

If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you'll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification. If you look at personal lives through that lens, you'll see the same stunning and sobering pattern: people allocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once said mattered most.

Create a Culture

There's an important model in our class called the Tools of Cooperation, which basically says that being a visionary manager isn't all it's cracked up to be. It's one thing to see into the foggy future with acuity and chart the course corrections that the company must make. But it's quite another to persuade employees who might not see the changes ahead to line up and work cooperatively to take the company in that new direction. Knowing what tools to wield to elicit the needed cooperation is a critical managerial skill.

The theory arrays these tools along two dimensions-the extent to which members of the organization agree on what they want from their participation in the enterprise, and the extent to which they agree on what actions will produce the desired results. When there is little agreement on both axes, you have to use "power tools"-coercion, threats, punishment, and so on-to secure cooperation. Many companies start in this quadrant, which is why the founding executive team must play such an assertive role in defining what must be done and how. If employees' ways of working together to address those tasks succeed over and over, consensus begins to form. MIT's Edgar Schein has described this process as the mechanism by which a culture is built. Ultimately, people don't even think about whether their way of doing things yields success. They embrace priorities and follow procedures by instinct and assumption rather than by explicit decision-which means that they've created a culture. Culture, in compelling but unspoken ways, dictates the proven, acceptable methods by which members of the group address recurrent problems. And culture defines the priority given to different types of problems. It can be a powerful management tool.

In using this model to address the question, How can I be sure that my family becomes an enduring source of happiness?, my students quickly see that the simplest tools that parents can wield to elicit cooperation from children are power tools. But there comes a point during the teen years when power tools no longer work. At that point parents start wishing that they had begun working with their children at a very young age to build a culture at home in which children instinctively behave respectfully toward one another, obey their parents, and choose the right thing to do. Families have cultures, just as companies do. Those cultures can be built consciously or evolve inadvertently.

If you want your kids to have strong self-esteem and confidence that they can solve hard problems, those qualities won't magically materialize in high school. You have to design them into your family's culture-and you have to think about this very early on. Like employees, children build self-esteem by doing things that are hard and learning what works.

Avoid the "Marginal Costs" Mistake

We're taught in finance and economics that in evaluating alternative investments, we should ignore sunk and fixed costs, and instead base decisions on the marginal costs and marginal revenues that each alternative entails. We learn in our course that this doctrine biases companies to leverage what they have put in place to succeed in the past, instead of guiding them to create the capabilities they'll need in the future. If we knew the future would be exactly the same as the past, that approach would be fine. But if the future's different-and it almost always is-then it's the wrong thing to do.

This theory addresses the third question I discuss with my students-how to live a life of integrity (stay out of jail). Unconsciously, we often employ the marginal cost doctrine in our personal lives when we choose between right and wrong. A voice in our head says, "Look, I know that as a general rule, most people shouldn't do this. But in this particular extenuating circumstance, just this once, it's OK." The marginal cost of doing something wrong "just this once" always seems alluringly low. It suckers you in, and you don't ever look at where that path ultimately is headed and at the full costs that the choice entails. Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of "just this once." (Answer to Q III)

I'd like to share a story about how I came to understand the potential damage of "just this once" in my own life. I played on the Oxford University varsity basketball team. We worked our tails off and finished the season undefeated. The guys on the team were the best friends I've ever had in my life. We got to the British equivalent of the NCAA tournament-and made it to the final four. It turned out the championship game was scheduled to be played on a Sunday. I had made a personal commitment to God at age 16 that I would never play ball on Sunday. So I went to the coach and explained my problem. He was incredulous. My teammates were, too, because I was the starting center. Every one of the guys on the team came to me and said, "You've got to play. Can't you break the rule just this one time?"

I'm a deeply religious man, so I went away and prayed about what I should do. I got a very clear feeling that I shouldn't break my commitment-so I didn't play in the championship game.

In many ways that was a small decision-involving one of several thousand Sundays in my life. In theory, surely I could have crossed over the line just that one time and then not done it again. But looking back on it, resisting the temptation whose logic was "In this extenuating circumstance, just this once, it's OK" has proven to be one of the most important decisions of my life. Why? My life has been one unending stream of extenuating circumstances. Had I crossed the line that one time, I would have done it over and over in the years that followed.

The lesson I learned from this is that it's easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time. If you give in to "just this once," based on a marginal cost analysis, as some of my former classmates have done, you'll regret where you end up. You've got to define for yourself what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place.

Remember the Importance of Humility

I got this insight when I was asked to teach a class on humility at Harvard College. I asked all the students to describe the most humble person they knew. One characteristic of these humble people stood out: They had a high level of self-esteem. They knew who they were, and they felt good about who they were. We also decided that humility was defined not by self-deprecating behavior or attitudes but by the esteem with which you regard others. Good behavior flows naturally from that kind of humility. For example, you would never steal from someone, because you respect that person too much. You'd never lie to someone, either.

It's crucial to take a sense of humility into the world. By the time you make it to a top graduate school, almost all your learning has come from people who are smarter and more experienced than you: parents, teachers, bosses. But once you've finished at Harvard Business School or any other top academic institution, the vast majority of people you'll interact with on a day-to-day basis may not be smarter than you. And if your attitude is that only smarter people have something to teach you, your learning opportunities will be very limited. But if you have a humble eagerness to learn something from everybody, your learning opportunities will be unlimited. Generally, you can be humble only if you feel really good about yourself-and you want to help those around you feel really good about themselves, too. When we see people acting in an abusive, arrogant, or demeaning manner toward others, their behavior almost always is a symptom of their lack of self-esteem. They need to put someone else down to feel good about themselves.

Choose the Right Yardstick

This past year I was diagnosed with cancer and faced the possibility that my life would end sooner than I'd planned. Thankfully, it now looks as if I'll be spared. But the experience has given me important insight into my life.

I have a pretty clear idea of how my ideas have generated enormous revenue for companies that have used my research; I know I've had a substantial impact. But as I've confronted this disease, it's been interesting to see how unimportant that impact is to me now. I've concluded that the metric by which God will assess my life isn't dollars but the individual people whose lives I've touched.

I think that's the way it will work for us all. Don't worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.

Remarkable Bosses

2012-04-28T10:04:00.000+03:00

The Five Qualities of Remarkable Bosses (copied)

By Jeff Haden | April 9, 2012 http://business.time.com/2012/04/09/the-five-qualities-of-remarkable-bosses/#ixzz1sCFyoe4U

Great bosses aren't great on paper. Great bosses are remarkable based on their actions.Results are everything-but not the results you might think.

1. Develop every employee. Sure, you can put your primary focus on reaching targets, achieving results, and accomplishing concrete goals-but do that and you put your leadership cart before your achievement horse.

Without great employees, no amount of focus on goals and targets will ever pay off. Employees can only achieve what they are capable of achieving, so it's your job to help all your employees be more capable so they-and your business-can achieve more.

It's your job to provide the training, mentoring, and opportunities your employees need and deserve. When you do, you transform the relatively boring process of reviewing results and tracking performance into something a lot more meaningful for your employees: Progress, improvement, and personal achievement.

So don't worry about reaching performance goals. Spend the bulk of your time developing the skills of your employees and achieving goals will be a natural outcome. Plus it's a lot more fun.

2. Deal with problems immediately. Nothing kills team morale more quickly than problems that don't get addressed. Interpersonal squabbles, performance issues, feuds between departments... all negatively impact employee motivation and enthusiasm.

And they're distracting, because small problems never go away. Small problems always fester and grow into bigger problems. Plus, when you ignore a problem your employees immediately lose respect for you, and without respect, you can't lead.

Never hope a problem will magically go away, or that someone else will deal with it. Deal with every issue head-on, no matter how small.

3. Rescue your worst employee. Almost every business has at least one employee who has fallen out of grace: Publicly failed to complete a task, lost his cool in a meeting, or just can't seem to keep up. Over time that employee comes to be seen by his peers-and by you-as a weak link. While that employee may desperately want to "rehabilitate" himself, it's almost impossible. The weight of team disapproval is too heavy for one person to move. But it's not too heavy for you.

Before you remove your weak link from the chain, put your full effort into trying to rescue that person instead. Say, "John, I know you've been struggling but I also know you're trying. Let's find ways together that can get you where you need to be." Express confidence. Be reassuring. Most of all, tell him you'll be there every step of the way.

Don't relax your standards. Just step up the mentoring and coaching you provide.

If that seems like too much work for too little potential outcome, think of it this way. Your remarkable employees don't need a lot of your time; they're remarkable because they already have these qualities. If you're lucky, you can get a few percentage points of extra performance from them. But a struggling employee has tons of upside; rescue him and you make a tremendous difference. Granted, sometimes it won't work out. When it doesn't, don't worry about it. The effort is its own reward. And occasionally an employee will succeed-and you will have made a tremendous difference in a person's professional and personal life.

4. Serve others, not yourself. You can get away with being selfish or self-serving once or twice... but that's it.

Never say or do anything that in any way puts you in the spotlight, however briefly. Never congratulate employees and digress for a few moments to discuss what you did. If it should go without saying, don't say it. Your glory should always be reflected, never direct. When employees excel, you and your business excel. When your team succeeds, you and your business succeed. When you rescue a struggling employee and they become remarkable, remember they should be congratulated, not you. You were just doing your job the way a remarkable boss should.

When you consistently act as if you are less important than your employees-and when you never ask employees to do something you don't do-everyone knows how important you really are.

5. Always remember where you came from. See an autograph seeker blown off by a famous athlete and you might think, "If I was in a similar position I would never do that." Oops. Actually, you do. To some of your employees, especially new employees, you are at least slightly famous. You're in charge. You're the boss. That's why an employee who wants to talk about something that seems inconsequential may just want to spend a few moments with you. When that happens, you have a choice. You can blow the employee off... or you cansee the moment for its true importance: A chance to inspire, reassure, motivate, and even give someone hope for greater things in their life. The higher you rise the greater the impact you can make-and the greater your responsibility to make that impact.

In the eyes of his or her employees, a remarkable boss is a star.

Jeff Haden (@jeff_haden) learned much of what he knows about business and technology as he worked his way up in the manufacturing industry. Everything else he picks up from ghostwriting books for some of the smartest leaders he knows in business

8 Core Beliefs of Extraordinary Bosses

2012-04-25T14:19:00.000+03:00

COPIED FROM

http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/8-core-beliefs-of-extraordinary-bosses.html

1. Business is an ecosystem, not a battlefield.

Average bosses see business as a conflict between companies, departments and groups. They build huge armies of "troops" to order about, demonize competitors as "enemies," and treat customers as "territory" to be conquered.
Extraordinary bosses see business as a symbiosis where the most diverse firm is most likely to survive and thrive. They naturally create teams that adapt easily to new markets and can quickly form partnerships with other companies, customers ... and even competitors.

2. A company is a community, not a machine.

Average bosses consider their company to be a machine with employees as cogs. They create rigid structures with rigid rules and then try to maintain control by "pulling levers" and "steering the ship."
Extraordinary bosses see their company as a collection of individual hopes and dreams, all connected to a higher purpose. They inspire employees to dedicate themselves to the success of their peers and therefore to the community–and company–at large.

3. Management is service, not control.

Average bosses want employees to do exactly what they're told. They're hyper-aware of anything that smacks of insubordination and create environments where individual initiative is squelched by the "wait and see what the boss says" mentality.
Extraordinary bosses set a general direction and then commit themselves to obtaining the resources that their employees need to get the job done. They push decision making downward, allowing teams form their own rules and intervening only in emergencies.

4. My employees are my peers, not my children.

Average bosses see employees as inferior, immature beings who simply can't be trusted if not overseen by a patriarchal management. Employees take their cues from this attitude, expend energy on looking busy and covering their behinds.
Extraordinary bosses treat every employee as if he or she were the most important person in the firm. Excellence is expected everywhere, from the loading dock to the boardroom. As a result, employees at all levels take charge of their own destinies.

5. Motivation comes from vision, not from fear.

Average bosses see fear--of getting fired, of ridicule, of loss of privilege--as a crucial way to motivate people. As a result, employees and managers alike become paralyzed and unable to make risky decisions.
Extraordinary bosses inspire people to see a better future and how they'll be a part of it. As a result, employees work harder because they believe in the organization's goals, truly enjoy what they're doing and (of course) know they'll share in the rewards.

6. Change equals growth, not pain.

Average bosses see change as both complicated and threatening, something to be endured only when a firm is in desperate shape. They subconsciously torpedo change ... until it's too late.
Extraordinary bosses see change as an inevitable part of life. While they don't value change for its own sake, they know that success is only possible if employees and organization embrace new ideas and new ways of doing business.

7. Technology offers empowerment, not automation.

Average bosses adhere to the old IT-centric view that technology is primarily a way to strengthen management control and increase predictability. They install centralized computer systems that dehumanize and antagonize employees.
Extraordinary bosses see technology as a way to free human beings to be creative and to build better relationships. They adapt their back-office systems to the tools, like smartphones and tablets, that people actually want to use.

8. Work should be fun, not mere toil.

Average bosses buy into the notion that work is, at best, a necessary evil. They fully expect employees to resent having to work, and therefore tend to subconsciously define themselves as oppressors and their employees as victims. Everyone then behaves accordingly.
Extraordinary bosses see work as something that should be inherently enjoyable–and believe therefore that the most important job of manager is, as far as possible, to put people in jobs that can and will make them truly happy.

Decision Fatigue (Copied from NY times)

2012-02-04T15:37:00.000+03:00

Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? The best decision makers, are the ones who know when not to trust themselves.

· More choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain. You start to resist any change, any potentially risky move — like releasing a prisoner who might commit a crime. So the fatigued judge on a parole board takes the easy way out, and the prisoner keeps doing time.

· When you shop till you drop, your will power drops too. No wonder, impulse items are placed near the cashier after a shopper has depleted all the brain power during shopping.

· Once decision fatigue comes in, people tend to settle for recommended options.

· Financially challenged people, make so many tradeoffs daily, that their will power is low for school, work or other activities.

· Our brain does not stop working when glucose is low. It stops doing some things and starts doing others. It responds more strongly to immediate rewards and less to long term prospects. No wonder dieting is so difficult.

· Even the wisest people won’t make good choices when they are not well rested and their glucose Is low.

By JOHN TIERNEY

Three men doing time in Israeli prisons recently appeared before a parole board consisting of a judge, a criminologist and a social worker. The three prisoners had completed at least two-thirds of their sentences, but the parole board granted freedom to only one of them. Guess which one:

Case 1 (heard at 8:50 a.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.

Case 2 (heard at 3:10 p.m.): A Jewish Israeli serving a 16-month sentence for assault.

Case 3 (heard at 4:25 p.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.

There was a pattern to the parole board’s decisions, but it wasn’t related to the men’s ethnic backgrounds, crimes or sentences. It was all about timing, as researchers discovered by analyzing more than 1,100 decisions over the course of a year. Judges, who would hear the prisoners’ appeals and then get advice from the other members of the board, approved parole in about a third of the cases, but the probability of being paroled fluctuated wildly throughout the day. Prisoners who appeared early in the morning received parole about 70 percent of the time, while those who appeared late in the day were paroled less than 10 percent of the time.

The odds favored the prisoner who appeared at 8:50 a.m. — and he did in fact receive parole. But even though the other Arab Israeli prisoner was serving the same sentence for the same crime — fraud — the odds were against him when he appeared (on a different day) at 4:25 in the afternoon. He was denied parole, as was the Jewish Israeli prisoner at 3:10 p.m, whose sentence was shorter than that of the man who was released. They were just asking for parole at the wrong time of day.

There was nothing malicious or even unusual about the judges’ behavior, which was reported earlier this year by Jonathan Levav of Stanford and Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University. The judges’ erratic judgment was due to the occupational hazard of being, as George W. Bush once put it, “the decider.” The mental work of ruling on case after case, whatever the individual merits, wore them down. This sort of decision fatigue can make quarterbacks prone to dubious choices late in the game and C.F.O.’s prone to disastrous dalliances late in the evening. It routinely warps the judgment of everyone, executive and nonexecutive, rich and poor — in fact, it can take a special toll on the poor. Yet few people are even aware of it, and researchers are only beginning to understand why it happens and how to counteract it.

Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain. You start to resist any change, any potentially risky move — like releasing a prisoner who might commit a crime. So the fatigued judge on a parole board takes the easy way out, and the prisoner keeps doing time.

Decision fatigue is the newest discovery involving a phenomenon called ego depletion, a term coined by the social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister in homage to a Freudian hypothesis. Freud speculated that the self, or ego, depended on mental activities involving the transfer of energy. He was vague about the details, though, and quite wrong about some of them (like his idea that artists “sublimate” sexual energy into their work, which would imply that adultery should be especially rare at artists’ colonies). Freud’s energy model of the self was generally ignored until the end of the century, when Baumeister began studying mental discipline in a series of experiments, first at Case Western and then at Florida State University.

These experiments demonstrated that there is a finite store of mental energy for exerting self-control. When people fended off the temptation to scarf down M&M’s or freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies, they were then less able to resist other temptations. When they forced themselves to remain stoic during a tearjerker movie, afterward they gave up more quickly on lab tasks requiring self-discipline, like working on a geometry puzzle or squeezing a hand-grip exerciser. Willpower turned out to be more than a folk concept or a metaphor. It really was a form of mental energy that could be exhausted. The experiments confirmed the 19th-century notion of willpower being like a muscle that was fatigued with use, a force that could be conserved by avoiding temptation. To study the process of ego depletion, researchers concentrated initially on acts involving self-control — the kind of self-discipline popularly associated with willpower, like resisting a bowl of ice cream. They weren’t concerned with routine decision-making, like choosing between chocolate and vanilla, a mental process that they assumed was quite distinct and much less strenuous. Intuitively, the chocolate-vanilla choice didn’t appear to require willpower.

But then a postdoctoral fellow, Jean Twenge, started working at Baumeister’s laboratory right after planning her wedding. As Twenge studied the results of the lab’s ego-depletion experiments, she remembered how exhausted she felt the evening she and her fiancé went through the ritual of registering for gifts. Did they want plain white china or something with a pattern? Which brand of knives? How many towels? What kind of sheets? Precisely how many threads per square inch?

“By the end, you could have talked me into anything,” Twenge told her new colleagues. The symptoms sounded familiar to them too, and gave them an idea. A nearby department store was holding a going-out-of-business sale, so researchers from the lab went off to fill their car trunks with simple products — not exactly wedding-quality gifts, but sufficiently appealing to interest college students. When they came to the lab, the students were told they would get to keep one item at the end of the experiment, but first they had to make a series of choices. Would they prefer a pen or a candle? A vanilla-scented candle or an almond-scented one? A candle or a T-shirt? A black T-shirt or a red T-shirt? A control group, meanwhile — let’s call them the nondeciders — spent an equally long period contemplating all these same products without having to make any choices. They were asked just to give their opinion of each product and report how often they had used such a product in the last six months.

Afterward, all the participants were given one of the classic tests of self-control: holding your hand in ice water for as long as you can. The impulse is to pull your hand out, so self-discipline is needed to keep the hand underwater. The deciders gave up much faster; they lasted 28 seconds, less than half the 67-second average of the nondeciders. Making all those choices had apparently sapped their willpower, and it wasn’t an isolated effect. It was confirmed in other experiments testing students after they went through exercises like choosing courses from the college catalog.

For a real-world test of their theory, the lab’s researchers went into that great modern arena of decision making: the suburban mall. They interviewed shoppers about their experiences in the stores that day and then asked them to solve some simple arithmetic problems. The researchers politely asked them to do as many as possible but said they could quit at any time. Sure enough, the shoppers who had already made the most decisions in the stores gave up the quickest on the math problems. When you shop till you drop, your willpower drops, too.

Any decision, whether it’s what pants to buy or whether to start a war, can be broken down into what psychologists call the Rubicon model of action phases, in honor of the river that separated Italy from the Roman province of Gaul. When Caesar reached it in 49 B.C., on his way home after conquering the Gauls, he knew that a general returning to Rome was forbidden to take his legions across the river with him, lest it be considered an invasion of Rome. Waiting on the Gaul side of the river, he was in the “predecisional phase” as he contemplated the risks and benefits of starting a civil war. Then he stopped calculating and crossed the Rubicon, reaching the “postdecisional phase,” which Caesar defined much more felicitously: “The die is cast.”

The whole process could deplete anyone’s willpower, but which phase of the decision-making process was most fatiguing? To find out, Kathleen Vohs, a former colleague of Baumeister’s now at the University of Minnesota, performed an experiment using the self-service Web site of Dell Computers. One group in the experiment carefully studied the advantages and disadvantages of various features available for a computer — the type of screen, the size of the hard drive, etc. — without actually making a final decision on which ones to choose. A second group was given a list of predetermined specifications and told to configure a computer by going through the laborious, step-by-step process of locating the specified features among the arrays of options and then clicking on the right ones. The purpose of this was to duplicate everything that happens in the postdecisional phase, when the choice is implemented. The third group had to figure out for themselves which features they wanted on their computers and go through the process of choosing them; they didn’t simply ponder options (like the first group) or implement others’ choices (like the second group). They had to cast the die, and that turned out to be the most fatiguing task of all. When self-control was measured, they were the one who were most depleted, by far.

The experiment showed that crossing the Rubicon is more tiring than anything that happens on either bank — more mentally fatiguing than sitting on the Gaul side contemplating your options or marching on Rome once you’ve crossed. As a result, someone without Caesar’s willpower is liable to stay put. To a fatigued judge, denying parole seems like the easier call not only because it preserves the status quo and eliminates the risk of a parolee going on a crime spree but also because it leaves more options open: the judge retains the option of paroling the prisoner at a future date without sacrificing the option of keeping him securely in prison right now. Part of the resistance against making decisions comes from our fear of giving up options. The word “decide” shares an etymological root with “homicide,” the Latin word “caedere,” meaning “to cut down” or “to kill,” and that loss looms especially large when decision fatigue sets in.

Once you’re mentally depleted, you become reluctant to make trade-offs, which involve a particularly advanced and taxing form of decision making. In the rest of the animal kingdom, there aren’t a lot of protracted negotiations between predators and prey. To compromise is a complex human ability and therefore one of the first to decline when willpower is depleted. You become what researchers call a cognitive miser, hoarding your energy. If you’re shopping, you’re liable to look at only one dimension, like price: just give me the cheapest. Or you indulge yourself by looking at quality: I want the very best (an especially easy strategy if someone else is paying). Decision fatigue leaves you vulnerable to marketers who know how to time their sales, as Jonathan Levav, the Stanford professor, demonstrated in experiments involving tailored suits and new cars.

The idea for these experiments also happened to come in the preparations for a wedding, a ritual that seems to be the decision-fatigue equivalent of Hell Week. At his fiancée’s suggestion, Levav visited a tailor to have a bespoke suit made and began going through the choices of fabric, type of lining and style of buttons, lapels, cuffs and so forth.

“By the time I got through the third pile of fabric swatches, I wanted to kill myself,” Levav recalls. “I couldn’t tell the choices apart anymore. After a while my only response to the tailor became ‘What do you recommend?’ I just couldn’t take it.”

Levav ended up not buying any kind of bespoke suit (the $2,000 price made that decision easy enough), but he put the experience to use in a pair of experiments conducted with Mark Heitmann, then at Christian-Albrechts University in Germany; Andreas Herrmann, at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland; and Sheena Iyengar, of Columbia. One involved asking M.B.A. students in Switzerland to choose a bespoke suit; the other was conducted at German car dealerships, where customers ordered options for their new sedans. The car buyers — and these were real customers spending their own money — had to choose, for instance, among 4 styles of gearshift knobs, 13 kinds of wheel rims, 25 configurations of the engine and gearbox and a palette of 56 colors for the interior.

As they started picking features, customers would carefully weigh the choices, but as decision fatigue set in, they would start settling for whatever the default option was. And the more tough choices they encountered early in the process — like going through those 56 colors to choose the precise shade of gray or brown — the quicker people became fatigued and settled for the path of least resistance by taking the default option. By manipulating the order of the car buyers’ choices, the researchers found that the customers would end up settling for different kinds of options, and the average difference totaled more than 1,500 euros per car (about $2,000 at the time). Whether the customers paid a little extra for fancy wheel rims or a lot extra for a more powerful engine depended on when the choice was offered and how much willpower was left in the customer.

Similar results were found in the experiment with custom-made suits: once decision fatigue set in, people tended to settle for the recommended option. When they were confronted early on with the toughest decisions — the ones with the most options, like the 100 fabrics for the suit — they became fatigued more quickly and also reported enjoying the shopping experience less.

Shopping can be especially tiring for the poor, who have to struggle continually with trade-offs. Most of us in America won’t spend a lot of time agonizing over whether we can afford to buy soap, but it can be a depleting choice in rural India. Dean Spears, an economist at Princeton, offered people in 20 villages in Rajasthan in northwestern India the chance to buy a couple of bars of brand-name soap for the equivalent of less than 20 cents. It was a steep discount off the regular price, yet even that sum was a strain for the people in the 10 poorest villages. Whether or not they bought the soap, the act of making the decision left them with less willpower, as measured afterward in a test of how long they could squeeze a hand grip. In the slightly more affluent villages, people’s willpower wasn’t affected significantly. Because they had more money, they didn’t have to spend as much effort weighing the merits of the soap versus, say, food or medicine.

Spears and other researchers argue that this sort of decision fatigue is a major — and hitherto ignored — factor in trapping people in poverty. Because their financial situation forces them to make so many trade-offs, they have less willpower to devote to school, work and other activities that might get them into the middle class. It’s hard to know exactly how important this factor is, but there’s no doubt that willpower is a special problem for poor people. Study after study has shown that low self-control correlates with low income as well as with a host of other problems, including poor achievement in school, divorce, crime, alcoholism and poor health. Lapses in self-control have led to the notion of the “undeserving poor” — epitomized by the image of the welfare mom using food stamps to buy junk food — but Spears urges sympathy for someone who makes decisions all day on a tight budget. In one study, he found that when the poor and the rich go shopping, the poor are much more likely to eat during the shopping trip. This might seem like confirmation of their weak character — after all, they could presumably save money and improve their nutrition by eating meals at home instead of buying ready-to-eat snacks like Cinnabons, which contribute to the higher rate of obesity among the poor. But if a trip to the supermarket induces more decision fatigue in the poor than in the rich — because each purchase requires more mental trade-offs — by the time they reach the cash register, they’ll have less willpower left to resist the Mars bars and Skittles. Not for nothing are these items called impulse purchases.

And this isn’t the only reason that sweet snacks are featured prominently at the cash register, just when shoppers are depleted after all their decisions in the aisles. With their willpower reduced, they’re more likely to yield to any kind of temptation, but they’re especially vulnerable to candy and soda and anything else offering a quick hit of sugar. While supermarkets figured this out a long time ago, only recently did researchers discover why.

The discovery was an accident resulting from a failed experiment at Baumeister’s lab. The researchers set out to test something called the Mardi Gras theory — the notion that you could build up willpower by first indulging yourself in pleasure, the way Mardi Gras feasters do just before the rigors of Lent. In place of a Fat Tuesday breakfast, the chefs in the lab at Florida State whipped up lusciously thick milkshakes for a group of subjects who were resting in between two laboratory tasks requiring willpower. Sure enough, the delicious shakes seemed to strengthen willpower by helping people perform better than expected on the next task. So far, so good. But the experiment also included a control group of people who were fed a tasteless concoction of low-fat dairy glop. It provided them with no pleasure, yet it produced similar improvements in self-control. The Mardi Gras theory looked wrong. Besides tragically removing an excuse for romping down the streets of New Orleans, the result was embarrassing for the researchers. Matthew Gailliot, the graduate student who ran the study, stood looking down at his shoes as he told Baumeister about the fiasco.

Baumeister tried to be optimistic. Maybe the study wasn’t a failure. Something had happened, after all. Even the tasteless glop had done the job, but how? If it wasn’t the pleasure, could it be the calories? At first the idea seemed a bit daft. For decades, psychologists had been studying performance on mental tasks without worrying much about the results being affected by dairy-product consumption. They liked to envision the human mind as a computer, focusing on the way it processed information. In their eagerness to chart the human equivalent of the computer’s chips and circuits, most psychologists neglected one mundane but essential part of the machine: the power supply. The brain, like the rest of the body, derived energy from glucose, the simple sugar manufactured from all kinds of foods. To establish cause and effect, researchers at Baumeister’s lab tried refueling the brain in a series of experiments involving lemonade mixed either with sugar or with a diet sweetener. The sugary lemonade provided a burst of glucose, the effects of which could be observed right away in the lab; the sugarless variety tasted quite similar without providing the same burst of glucose. Again and again, the sugar restored willpower, but the artificial sweetener had no effect. The glucose would at least mitigate the ego depletion and sometimes completely reverse it. The restored willpower improved people’s self-control as well as the quality of their decisions: they resisted irrational bias when making choices, and when asked to make financial decisions, they were more likely to choose the better long-term strategy instead of going for a quick payoff. The ego-depletion effect was even demonstrated with dogs in two studies by Holly Miller and Nathan DeWall at the University of Kentucky. After obeying sit and stay commands for 10 minutes, the dogs performed worse on self-control tests and were also more likely to make the dangerous decision to challenge another dog’s turf. But a dose of glucose restored their willpower.

Despite this series of findings, brain researchers still had some reservations about the glucose connection. Skeptics pointed out that the brain’s overall use of energy remains about the same regardless of what a person is doing, which doesn’t square easily with the notion of depleted energy affecting willpower. Among the skeptics was Todd Heatherton, who worked with Baumeister early in his career and eventually wound up at Dartmouth, where he became a pioneer of what is called social neuroscience: the study of links between brain processes and social behavior. He believed in ego depletion, but he didn’t see how this neural process could be caused simply by variations in glucose levels. To observe the process — and to see if it could be reversed by glucose — he and his colleagues recruited 45 female dieters and recorded images of their brains as they reacted to pictures of food. Next the dieters watched a comedy video while forcing themselves to suppress their laughter — a standard if cruel way to drain mental energy and induce ego depletion. Then they were again shown pictures of food, and the new round of brain scans revealed the effects of ego depletion: more activity in the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s reward center, and a corresponding decrease in the amygdala, which ordinarily helps control impulses. The food’s appeal registered more strongly while impulse control weakened — not a good combination for anyone on a diet. But suppose people in this ego-depleted state got a quick dose of glucose? What would a scan of their brains reveal?

The results of the experiment were announced in January, during Heatherton’s speech accepting the leadership of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the world’s largest group of social psychologists. In his presidential address at the annual meeting in San Antonio, Heatherton reported that administering glucose completely reversed the brain changes wrought by depletion — a finding, he said, that thoroughly surprised him. Heatherton’s results did much more than provide additional confirmation that glucose is a vital part of willpower; they helped solve the puzzle over how glucose could work without global changes in the brain’s total energy use. Apparently ego depletion causes activity to rise in some parts of the brain and to decline in others. Your brain does not stop working when glucose is low. It stops doing some things and starts doing others. It responds more strongly to immediate rewards and pays less attention to long-term prospects.

The discoveries about glucose help explain why dieting is a uniquely difficult test of self-control — and why even people with phenomenally strong willpower in the rest of their lives can have such a hard time losing weight. They start out the day with virtuous intentions, resisting croissants at breakfast and dessert at lunch, but each act of resistance further lowers their willpower. As their willpower weakens late in the day, they need to replenish it. But to resupply that energy, they need to give the body glucose. They’re trapped in a nutritional catch-22:

1. In order not to eat, a dieter needs willpower.

2. In order to have willpower, a dieter needs to eat.

As the body uses up glucose, it looks for a quick way to replenish the fuel, leading to a craving for sugar. After performing a lab task requiring self-control, people tend to eat more candy but not other kinds of snacks, like salty, fatty potato chips. The mere expectation of having to exert self-control makes people hunger for sweets. A similar effect helps explain why many women yearn for chocolate and other sugary treats just before menstruation: their bodies are seeking a quick replacement as glucose levels fluctuate. A sugar-filled snack or drink will provide a quick improvement in self-control (that’s why it’s convenient to use in experiments), but it’s just a temporary solution. The problem is that what we identify as sugar doesn’t help as much over the course of the day as the steadier supply of glucose we would get from eating proteins and other more nutritious foods.

The benefits of glucose were unmistakable in the study of the Israeli parole board. In midmorning, usually a little before 10:30, the parole board would take a break, and the judges would be served a sandwich and a piece of fruit. The prisoners who appeared just before the break had only about a 20 percent chance of getting parole, but the ones appearing right after had around a 65 percent chance. The odds dropped again as the morning wore on, and prisoners really didn’t want to appear just before lunch: the chance of getting parole at that time was only 10 percent. After lunch it soared up to 60 percent, but only briefly. Remember that Jewish Israeli prisoner who appeared at 3:10 p.m. and was denied parole from his sentence for assault? He had the misfortune of being the sixth case heard after lunch. But another Jewish Israeli prisoner serving the same sentence for the same crime was lucky enough to appear at 1:27 p.m., the first case after lunch, and he was rewarded with parole. It must have seemed to him like a fine example of the justice system at work, but it probably had more to do with the judge’s glucose levels.

It’s simple enough to imagine reforms for the parole board in Israel — like, say, restricting each judge’s shift to half a day, preferably in the morning, interspersed with frequent breaks for food and rest. But it’s not so obvious what to do with the decision fatigue affecting the rest of society. Even if we could all afford to work half-days, we would still end up depleting our willpower all day long, as Baumeister and his colleagues found when they went into the field in Würzburg in central Germany. The psychologists gave preprogrammed BlackBerrys to more than 200 people going about their daily routines for a week. The phones went off at random intervals, prompting the people to report whether they were currently experiencing some sort of desire or had recently felt a desire. The painstaking study, led by Wilhelm Hofmann, then at the University of Würzburg, collected more than 10,000 momentary reports from morning until midnight.

Desire turned out to be the norm, not the exception. Half the people were feeling some desire when their phones went off — to snack, to goof off, to express their true feelings to their bosses — and another quarter said they had felt a desire in the past half-hour. Many of these desires were ones that the men and women were trying to resist, and the more willpower people expended, the more likely they became to yield to the next temptation that came along. When faced with a new desire that produced some I-want-to-but-I-really-shouldn’t sort of inner conflict, they gave in more readily if they had already fended off earlier temptations, particularly if the new temptation came soon after a previously reported one.

The results suggested that people spend between three and four hours a day resisting desire. Put another way, if you tapped four or five people at any random moment of the day, one of them would be using willpower to resist a desire. The most commonly resisted desires in the phone study were the urges to eat and sleep, followed by the urge for leisure, like taking a break from work by doing a puzzle or playing a game instead of writing a memo. Sexual urges were next on the list of most-resisted desires, a little ahead of urges for other kinds of interactions, like checking Facebook. To ward off temptation, people reported using various strategies. The most popular was to look for a distraction or to undertake a new activity, although sometimes they tried suppressing it directly or simply toughing their way through it. Their success was decidedly mixed. They were pretty good at avoiding sleep, sex and the urge to spend money, but not so good at resisting the lure of television or the Web or the general temptation to relax instead of work.

We have no way of knowing how much our ancestors exercised self-control in the days before BlackBerrys and social psychologists, but it seems likely that many of them were under less ego-depleting strain. When there were fewer decisions, there was less decision fatigue. Today we feel overwhelmed because there are so many choices. Your body may have dutifully reported to work on time, but your mind can escape at any instant. A typical computer user looks at more than three dozen Web sites a day and gets fatigued by the continual decision making — whether to keep working on a project, check out TMZ, follow a link to YouTube or buy something on Amazon. You can do enough damage in a 10-minute online shopping spree to wreck your budget for the rest of the year.

The cumulative effect of these temptations and decisions isn’t intuitively obvious. Virtually no one has a gut-level sense of just how tiring it is to decide. Big decisions, small decisions, they all add up. Choosing what to have for breakfast, where to go on vacation, whom to hire, how much to spend — these all deplete willpower, and there’s no telltale symptom of when that willpower is low. It’s not like getting winded or hitting the wall during a marathon. Ego depletion manifests itself not as one feeling but rather as a propensity to experience everything more intensely. When the brain’s regulatory powers weaken, frustrations seem more irritating than usual. Impulses to eat, drink, spend and say stupid things feel more powerful (and alcohol causes self-control to decline further). Like those dogs in the experiment, ego-depleted humans become more likely to get into needless fights over turf. In making decisions, they take illogical shortcuts and tend to favor short-term gains and delayed costs. Like the depleted parole judges, they become inclined to take the safer, easier option even when that option hurts someone else.

“Good decision making is not a trait of the person, in the sense that it’s always there,” Baumeister says. “It’s a state that fluctuates.” His studies show that people with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower. They don’t schedule endless back-to-back meetings. They avoid temptations like all-you-can-eat buffets, and they establish habits that eliminate the mental effort of making choices. Instead of deciding every morning whether or not to force themselves to exercise, they set up regular appointments to work out with a friend. Instead of counting on willpower to remain robust all day, they conserve it so that it’s available for emergencies and important decisions.

“Even the wisest people won’t make good choices when they’re not rested and their glucose is low,” Baumeister points out. That’s why the truly wise don’t restructure the company at 4 p.m. They don’t make major commitments during the cocktail hour. And if a decision must be made late in the day, they know not to do it on an empty stomach. “The best decision makers,” Baumeister says, “are the ones who know when not to trust themselves.”

John Tierney (tierneylab@nytimes.com) is a science columnist for The Times. His essay is adapted from a book he wrote with Roy F. Baumeister, “Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength,” which comes out next month.

Editor: Aaron Retica (a.retica-MagGroup@nytimes.com)

Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch (Copied)

2012-01-28T11:28:00.000+03:00

Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch

http://www.fastcompany.com/1810674/culture-eats-strategy-for-lunch

BY FC Expert Blogger Shawn ParrTue Jan 24, 2012

This blog is written by a member of our expert blogging community and expresses that expert's views alone.

Get on a Southwest flight to anywhere, buy shoes from Zappos.com, pants from Nordstrom, groceries from Whole Foods, anything from Costco, a Starbucks espresso, or a Double-Double from In N' Out, and you'll get a taste of these brands’ vibrant cultures.

Culture is a balanced blend of human psychology, attitudes, actions, and beliefs that combined create either pleasure or pain, serious momentum or miserable stagnation. A strong culture flourishes with a clear set of values and norms that actively guide the way a company operates. Employees are actively and passionately engaged in the business, operating from a sense of confidence and empowerment rather than navigating their days through miserably extensive procedures and mind-numbing bureaucracy. Performance-oriented cultures possess statistically better financial growth, with high employee involvement, strong internal communication, and an acceptance of a healthy level of risk-taking in order to achieve new levels of innovation.

Misunderstood and mismanaged

Culture, like brand, is misunderstood and often discounted as a touchy-feely component of business that belongs to HR. It's not intangible or fluffy, it's not a vibe or the office décor. It's one of the most important drivers that has to be set or adjusted to push long-term, sustainable success. It's not good enough just to have an amazing product and a healthy bank balance. Long-term success is dependent on a culture that is nurtured and alive. Culture is the environment in which your strategy and your brand thrives or dies a slow death.

Think about it like a nurturing habitat for success. Culture cannot be manufactured. It has to be genuinely nurtured by everyone from the CEO down. Ignoring the health of your culture is like letting aquarium water get dirty.

If there's any doubt about the value of investing time in culture, there are significant benefits that come from a vibrant and alive culture:

Focus: Aligns the entire company towards achieving its vision, mission, and goals.
Motivation: Builds higher employee motivation and loyalty.
Connection: Builds team cohesiveness among the company’s various departments and divisions.
Cohesion: Builds consistency and encourages coordination and control within the company.
Spirit: Shapes employee behavior at work, enabling the organization to be more efficient and alive.

Mission accomplished

Think about the Marines: the few, the proud. They have a connected community that is second to none, and it comes from the early indoctrination of every member of the Corps and the clear communication of their purpose and value system. It is completely clear that they are privileged to be joining an elite community that is committed to improvising, adapting, and overcoming in the face of any adversity. The culture is so strong that it glues the community together and engenders a sense of pride that makes them unparalleled. The culture is what each Marine relies on in battle and in preparation. It is an amazing example of a living culture that drives pride and performance. It is important to step back and ask whether the purpose of your organization is clear and whether you have a compelling value system that is easy to understand. Mobilizing and energizing a culture is predicated on the organization clearly understanding the vision, mission, values, and goals. It's leadership’s responsibility to involve the entire organization, informing and inspiring them to live out the purpose the organization in the construct of the values.

Vibrant and healthy

Do you run into your culture every day? Does it inspire you, or smack you in the face and get in your way, slowing and wearing you down? Is it overpowering or does it inspire you to overcome challenges? It's important to understand what is driving your culture. Is it power and ego that people react to, and try to gain power, or a culture of encouragement and empowerment? Is it driven from top-down directives, or cross-department collaboration? To get a taste of your culture, all you have to do is sit in an executive meeting, the cafe or the lunch room, listen to the conversations, look at the way decisions are made and the way departments cooperate. Take time out and get a good read on the health of your culture.

Culture fuels brand

A vibrant culture provides a cooperative and collaborative environment for a brand to thrive in. Your brand is the single most important asset to differentiate you consistently over time, and it needs to be nurtured, evolved, and invigorated by the people entrusted to keep it true and alive. Without a functional and relevant culture, the money invested in research and development, product differentiation, marketing, and human resources is never maximized and often wasted because it's not fueled by a sustaining and functional culture.

Look at Zappos, one of the fastest companies to reach $1 billion in recent years, fueled by an electric and eclectic culture, one that's inclusionary, encouraging, and empowering. It's well-documented, celebrated, and shared willingly with anyone who wants to learn from it. Compare that to American Apparel, the controversial and prolific fashion retailer with a well-documented and highly dysfunctional culture. Zappos is thriving and on its way to $2 billion, while American Apparel is mired in bankruptcy and controversy. Both companies are living out their missions--one is to create happiness, and the other is based on self-centered perversity. Authenticity and values always win.

Uncommon sense for a courageous and vibrant culture

It's easy to look at companies like Stonyfield Farms, Zappos, Google, Virgin, Whole Foods, or Southwest Airlines and admire them for their passionate, engaged, and active cultures that are on display for the world to see. Building a strong culture takes hard work and true commitment and, while not something you can tick off in boxes, here are some very basic building blocks to consider:

Dynamic and engaged leadership
A vibrant culture is organic and evolving. It is fueled and inspired by leadership that is actively involved and informed about the realities of the business. They genuinely care about the company's role in the world and are passionately engaged. They are great communicators and motivators who set out a clearly communicated vision, mission, values, and goals and create an environment for them to come alive.
Living values
It's one thing to have beliefs and values spelled out in a frame in the conference room. It's another thing to have genuine and memorable beliefs that are directional, alive and modeled throughout the organization daily. It's important that departments and individuals are motivated and measured against the way they model the values. And, if you want a values-driven culture, hire people using the values as a filter. If you want your company to embody the culture, empower people and ensure every department understands what's expected. Don't just list your company’s values in PowerPoints; bring them to life in people, products, spaces, at events, and in communication.
Responsibility and accountability
Strong cultures empower their people, they recognize their talents, and give them a very clear role with responsibilities they're accountable for. It's amazing how basic this is, but how absent the principle is in many businesses.
Celebrate success and failure
Most companies that run at speed often forget to celebrate their victories both big and small, and they rarely have time or the humility to acknowledge and learn from their failures. Celebrate both your victories and failures in your own unique way, but share them and share them often.

Shawn Parr is the The Guvner & CEO of Bulldog Drummond, an innovation and design consultancy headquartered in San Diego whose clients and partners have included Starbucks, Diageo, Jack in the Box, Adidas, MTV, Nestle, Pinkberry, American Eagle Outfitters, IDEO, Virgin, Disney, Nike, Mattel, Heineken, Annie's Homegrown, The Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research, CleanWell, The Honest Kitchen and World Vision. Follow the conversation at @BULLDOGDRUMMOND.

Changing Team

2011-03-09T11:46:00.000+03:00

Motivating a Team to Change

He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery. – Harold Wilson

Previously we have talked about what motivates people and what can we do to motivate somebody else. The discussion had generally been on self motivation or one to one motivation. Today the focus will be how can we motivate our team to change for the better. The difficulty level climbs exponentially if we have to motivate more than one person as barriers to change are different for different people.

These barriers to change being

a) Agreement to Change or Improve (We should change or Its time to change)

This is the first step in building a critical mass towards change. However, this is one of the most difficult steps as people are very happy in their comfort zones and perspectives. Convincing them to move out of comfort zones or change perspectives is an uphill task. Pointing at numbers or graphs may not convince people to change because those who are doing good at numbers feel no need to change, while others take is as criticism and feel that they are not more needed and hence generally start looking to be part of another team.

To make people agree to change, focus should be to bring them out of “behind the desk” and bring them face to face with reality, so that they see what you are seeing.

b) Availability of means to Change or improve (We have the resources that will help in change)

Once people agree to change, they will surely find ways to change as they will start leading their brain http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/pushing-people-to-give-in-their-best.html

But still they would not have fully moved out of their comfort zone and would start question the availability of resources that will help them in changing, the question being will we be successful in this change. These questions either make them trim the ambitions to change or start waiting for the resources to be available to change. Unluckily, we currently live in a “resource constrained world” hence the team leader focus should be in redirecting the resources to areas with biggest possible payoff.

c) Wanting to Change or improve (I am motivated to change)

We have discussed recognition, and how it is used to tame killer whales http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/rrecognition-can-tame-killer-whale-why.html

Trust as a motivator http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/people-respond-to-trust-by-upholding-it.html

Challenge as a motivator http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/life-challenges-help-us-discover.html

Direction and Communication as a motivator http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/efforts-and-courage-are-not-enough.html

Association as a motivator http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/02/camaraderie.html

Motivation via growth opportunity http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/02/growth-1.html

Motivation via personal stake http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/02/own-risk.html

d) Politics (This change are in alignment with my vested interest)

Vested interest always resist change, the more likely the change becomes, the more loud these voices become. The focus is always to protect one self or one self position. Creating alliances is one way out of the political hurdle, another being making people think win-win and lastly you can always make people focus on the objectives of changing / not changing rather than the position they have taken towards change. Position is an emotional state and is difficult to break with the objective is more logical and easy to break / convince.

Again, its not simple as ABC. The importance given by different team members to the above barriers changes with time, hence making it difficult to bring about a quick change. This makes it very difficult to have a formula to change. However, a time comes when a lot of people are “For the change” or “Against Change” and this direction/inclination of the critical mass of people decides will the change be successful or unsuccessful.

Your comments will be appreciated, Please feel free to add...... and visit the full blog at http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/

Change is inevitable - except from a vending machine. ~Robert C. Gallagher

Mt. uhud

2011-02-24T06:42:00.000+03:00

Musk Cave

Mt. Ohad (Madina-Saudiarabia)

During the battle of Uhud, due to the incident at the Archer's hill, the course of the battle changed. The Prophet (pbuh) himself was wounded.

Some of the followers, escorted the injuried Prophet (pbuh) away from the battlefield and towards the Uhud mountain.

They climbed the mountain to come to a cave where the Prophet (pbuh) rested until the Meccans had finally retreated from the battlefield. Since then, it is said that this cave smells of musk.

I personally visited the cave on 23rd Feb 2011, and it does smell of a special musk.

At the foot of the mountain Uhud there are no traces of the smell. But once you are inside the cave, you feel the wounderful smell. Attached are some pictures.

Musk Cave in Mt. Uhud - Madina Saudi Arabia

Inside the Musk Cave

Your comments will be appreciated, Please feel free to add...... and visit the full blog at http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/

Jabl Noor

2011-02-23T06:51:00.000+03:00

Jabl Noor (Noor Mountain)

Cave of Hira

Pictures from of Mount Noor (Jabl Noor) and Cave of Hira. It was here that the first revelation took place when the Angel Gibrael visited the Prophet Mohammed.

Cave of Hira (almost 2500 feet above the sea level)

Almost inside the cave. Its a small place where hardly 2 to 3 people can fit in

View of Mecca from the top of the cave (Haram is next to the big building)

View from the top (other side)

Monkeys on the way

Your comments will be appreciated, Please feel free to add...... and visit the full blog at http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/

Own Risk

2011-02-21T08:55:00.000+03:00

Motivation via Personal Stake

Persuasion is often more effective than force.

5As of Motivation http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/motivating-others-driving-others.html (1) Appreciation, (2) Authority, (3) Avoiding Pain (internal to self) (4) Affluence and (5) Association. And the 9 tactics around the “5As” that lead to self / others motivation being (1) Recognition, (2) Trust, (3) Challenge, (4) Direction and Communication, (5) Opportunity, (6) Personal Stake, (7) Freedom of Choice, (8) Incentive and (9) Association with a team or group.

We have discussed recognition, and how it is used to tame killer whales http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/rrecognition-can-tame-killer-whale-why.html

Trust as a motivator http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/people-respond-to-trust-by-upholding-it.html

Challenge as a motivator http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/life-challenges-help-us-discover.html

Direction and Communication as a motivator http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/efforts-and-courage-are-not-enough.html

Association as a motivator http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/02/camaraderie.html

And Motivation via growth opportunity http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/02/growth-1.html

Today lets talk about, how do Pleasure or Consequences drive our motivation. We as humans, run away from pain and try to move towards pleasure. Hence, we by nature, would get motivated to move away from pain towards pleasure, somebody has to make us visualize the pain or pleasure.

As humans, we have two ways to deal with one another. Reason or Force, every human interaction falls into one of those two categories. I personally don’t believe in motivation via threat or force, as this brings a sour flavor in the relationship. Although I know that at times you still have to motivate people via pain avoidance or threat. I believe in motivation via pleasure i.e. let people do, because they want to do it. Lets focus on persuasion and keep force as a last resort. Unluckily, force leads to injustices that leads to most of the ills in the society.

How to we make people do it because they want to do it. Two directions (a) Negotiate or (b) Coach.

Negotiations works best when people think win / win, focus is on the objective and not on a position or emotions. Some negotiation tactics being (a) Never become emotional or personal with other party. This makes us forget the objective, (b)Information is king in any negotiation so don’t underestimate the other party and enter will all the data at hand, (c) Think long term, think win / win and (d) Never give an ultimatum until you really mean it and once you give an ultimatum, be ready to walk out.

Coaching is a process that enables the individual achieve their full potential. It helps the individual find their “blind spot”, purposefully moving them out of their comfort zone and stretching oneself to new heights.
It is different from teaching or facilitating. In teaching/facilitating the instructor tells what is the right way of doing thing. However, in coaching, the coach only asks the questions to the coachee to help him find the direction themselves. In the end, coaching bears better results, because, people have more ownership to their ideas rather than somebody else’s ideas.

Now the question appears, how to go on about doing coaching. Lets follow the GROW model (Goal, Reality, Options and Will) of coaching http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_89.htm

§ Goal (Establishing a Goal) i.e.

oAgree on the topic of discussion with the coachee

o Agree on specific, measurable, realistic and time bound objectives that the coachee wants to achieve post this engagement.

§ Reality (Examining the current reality) i.e. asking the coachee to describe the current reality, this will help in knowing where they are. Coach should not assume the current situation, neither put words in coachee’s mouth, but should only be listening and asking questions so as the coachee can personally understand the reality. The question one can ask are

o What is happening now?

o How often does this happen?

o How does it impact your life?

o Is it a logical problem, emotional problem or a feeling issue?

o What have you tried to overcome this?

o What has worked?

o What has not worked?

§ Options (Exploring the Options) i.e. asking the coachee how does he/she moves forward, its time to explore what is possible, meaning all the possible options should be put on the table by the coachee (not the coach). As a coach your responsibility is to help your team member generate as many options as possible via probing on

o What can we do to change the situation?

o Are their any alternatives to this, any other alternative?

o Lets change your perspective, and consider yourself as a third person looking at this situation, what is he seeing, what options will he recommend you?

o How would your life change, once this problem is overcome?

o Have you seen anybody else with this issue, what did they do, can you do the same?

o What constraints are there?

o How can you weigh different options?

As a coach, one should not suggest options, but ask questions in leading the team member towards different options.

§ Will (Establishing the Will to improve) i.e. Most probable, by now, your coachee will have a good ideas on how to achieve their Goal. This is a major step forward, however, you need to establish a will (as a coach) to ensure that their plans materialize and they are motivated to change / improve / stretch. The questions that you can ask your team to generate that motivation are

o Which option will take you towards your goal the quickest?

o So what will you do now and when?

o What can stop you from moving forward?

o How will you overcome these obstacles?

I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it. ~Pablo Picasso
Your comments will be appreciated, Please feel free to add...... and visit the full blog at http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/

Growth 2

2011-02-19T09:03:00.000+03:00

Motivation via Growth Opportunity

Part 2

If we don’t appreciate our life, and the opportunities it throws at us, then we are doing is only existing and waiting for death.

A few days back we discussed http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/02/growth-1.html that, we should not get bothered if people point fingers at us and tell us that “you are no good, stop trying, stop doing things you have not done before”, we should also not blame our losses to somebody else, lets not be cowards. In the end, it is not about how hard you are hit in trying a new thing, its all about keep moving forward and exploring new things and ideas.

Today lets talk about, how do we push people out of their comfort zone?. Unfortunately, we as humans avoid pain and move towards pleasure, moving out of our comfort zone is a painful experience, we are entering the unknown, there is this fear of failure or chance of embarrassment. HOWEVER, if the world would not have been a better place, if people had not marched into the unknown. If we continue to listen to the same music, read same magazines, take same route to office etc, we would not know what we are missing in this world. May be the new type of music suits are ear buds better, maybe the other magazine has a better prospective etc.

Simple steps to push people out of their comfort zone and towards growth.

Step 1:- Explain what’s in it for them. The main reason why people don’t move out of their comfort zone is the fear factor. Fear of unknown, fear of embarrassment, fear of failure. BUT if somebody can make them see how would their life be positivity impacted by marching out of the comfort zone. They will gain some impetus towards the unknown. However, they may still have the fear because of the lack of self belief.

Step 2:- Show confidence / Trust that they will succeed. One time or the other, everybody needs a reassurance to boast back self belief. “Yes you can”, “I can bet my life on your success” etc are some phrases that one might need to use to smoothen the shaky start, and also to communicate, that you are right besides them and will help them all the way. This confidence boaster is necessary, especially when the person has just moved out of the comfort zone, because at that time the mind is calculating all the negative “What ifs” and help is needed to lead the brain in positive direction. http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/lead-brain.html

Step 3:- Try to hand over the power/authority over “plan of action” and “plan of implementation”. Every human has more ownership of their OWN plans rather than plans of the others. Chances of success are enhanced if the plans are made and implemented by the same team.

Step 4:- Follow up to maintain the drive. It not a “walk in the park” when somebody heads out of their comfort zone, brain plays all the negative scenarios, and the easiest thing to do is walk back into the comfort zone. The urge to do this is immense. Hence, somebody should follow up to explain what’s in it for them, build confidence, to help in planning / implementation so as to maintain the drive.

Your comments will be appreciated, Please feel free to add...... and visit the full blog at http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/

Growth 1

2011-02-16T16:14:00.000+03:00

Motivation via Growth Opportunity

Part 1 (What and Why)

The freedom to move forward to new opportunities and to produce better results motivates humans to live in future rather than past.

Today our focus will be Growth opportunities as a motivator. In this day and age, everybody wants to move up the ladder in career or in society. Hence, an opportunity to advance motivates us to give our 200% if we know that the hard work will pay off. The three well know theories on management (a) Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, (b) ERG theory and (c) Two factor theory have “Growth as motivator” in common amongst themselves.

Maslow

ERG

Two Factor

Generally the management believes that the staff is leaving a job because of money i.e. “pull of better bank account”. However, in-depth discussion during exit interviews, point towards a different reality i.e. the “Push from management” towards personal growth. No wonder, companies with out a formal career development initiative, are left with less talented people because talented people are primarily motivated by need to grow and move on.

What is growth?. A person / child / adult “grows” when pushed out of their comfort zone. We like to listen to a certain kind of music, read a few specific magazines, drive to office a specific way, cook dinner a specific way, meet other in a particular fashion, move around a grocery store in a set way, like doing some known things etc etc. This is our comfort zone. HOWEVER, to develop ourselves, to learn about the world, to learn about others, to learn about ourselves, we need to go out of the comfort zone. Its going to a restaurant and ordering a different dish than the usual one. In the end you understand that do you enjoy the new thing or not.

A ship in the harbor (comfort zone) is safe but that is not what the ships are for.

So its not necessary to motivate people by promoting them up the corporate ladder, but they will be motivated if they are pushed outside their comfort zone and made to conquer the unknown. These unknown can be (a) A new assignment, (b) An unfamiliar project, (c) A new department, (d) Reporting to a tougher boss, (f)Responsibility of more people etc etc (any thing that puts a specific person out of the comfort zone). For a child this can be as simple as taking the first step, or learning how to eat without creating a mess, or use of money at a grocery store.

The gist is we should not get bothered if people point fingers at us and tell us that “you are no good, stop trying, stop doing things you have not done before”, we should also not blame our losses to somebody else, lets not be cowards. Unluckily, the world is becoming a nasty place that tries to beat us to the ground and tries to keep you there permanently if we let it. In the end, it is not about how hard you are hit in trying a new thing, its all about keep moving forward and exploring new things and ideas.

Your comments will be appreciated, Please feel free to add...... and visit the full blog at http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/

Incentives

2011-02-14T14:43:00.000+03:00

Motivation via Incentives

Money is not the most important thing in the world, love is. Unfortunately, people have started loving money.

5As of Motivation (1) Appreciation, (2) Authority, (3) Avoiding Pain (internal to self) (4) Affluence and (5) Association. And the 9 tactics around the “5As” that lead to self / others motivation being (1) Recognition, (2) Trust, (3) Challenge, (4) Direction and Communication, (5) Opportunity, (6) Personal Stake, (7) Freedom of Choice, (8) Incentive and (9) Association with a team or group.

We have discussed recognition, and how it is used to tame killer whales http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/rrecognition-can-tame-killer-whale-why.html

Trust as a motivator http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/people-respond-to-trust-by-upholding-it.html

Challenge as a motivator http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/life-challenges-help-us-discover.html

Direction and Communication as a motivator http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/efforts-and-courage-are-not-enough.htmllogspot.com/2011/01/efforts-and-courage-are-not-enough.html

And Association as a motivator http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/02/camaraderie.html

Today lets discuss Incentives as a motivator. Before we start, let me clarify that I do not recommend using monitory incentives to motivate people, although I do acknowledge that monetary incentives work wonders in motivating people, but it is only short term.

Incentives = additional remuneration in recognition of goal achievement.

Why do incentives work. In this day and age, Money has become very important, while personal values have lost importance. 25+ years ago, friendships were made on values and common ground, now, friendships are made on business interest. Unluckily, Money is seen as the tool that will help satisfy social needs, psychological needs, security needs and Esteem needs. In essence, Money is a tool that is applicable throughout the Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs (below).

Unluckily, Only a few men have the ability to withstand the highest bidder

Why I do not recommend using incentives as a motivator. I acknowledge that in the short term, incentives do wonder, given money is possessing most peoples imagination. However, in the long term, incentives have a negative impact as it becomes term of business. Gist being, that in the short term, incentives improve your bargaining position, however, its not a long term strategy.

Let me give you a hypothetical example, imagine your team is under delivery pressure of a project. It seems that the project will not be delivered on time. So you tell everybody that ½ salary will be given, if the project is delivered on time. And low and behold, you see your team stretching their limits, working nights even weekends. And the project does get delivered on time. Now imagine, what is your team exited about after the project delivery. MONEY and not that they stretched themselves to deliver the project to deliver on company mission / vision. After a few weeks you will realize that your people will start hinting on incentives program to deliver i.e. it becomes term of business. Once we reach this stage, its very hard to get out. Because, now I expect to be paid extra for stretching myself. Continuing with the hypothetical situation, assume that you give-in to your employees demand and start an incentive program. Now you will realize that you have many disgruntled employees. People outside your department will be dissatisfied because they can not be part of this incentive scheme. While people in your department will be dissatisfied, because they will feel that person X has easy targets vs. them. Hence they will feel that you are not doing justice. In the end, you will be working in a disgruntled company that is not focused towards the vision / mission but towards money. I.e. management should bribe me to do my job.

Let me give you one real life example. A few years ago, I was working with a company that was under huge volume pressure. To jumpstart the volume, Management decided to incentivize the sales force (for one month) by suggesting incentives based on targets. It worked wonders, almost everybody achieved the target and got the incentives (40 inch Plasma TV), people who did not achieve the targets, got disgruntled and tried to pressurize the management to attain the incentive stating that factors beyond their control impacted their volume. Next month was very interesting, for the first 15 days (50 % time gone), the company only achieved 20% of the volume. Management got worried and called in the sales people. During the meeting I realized, that the sales team is given all the reasons under the sun to justify lack of volume delivery. In the end, the Management asked, “how can we deliver this month” and the united response came as “We can try to deliver (although its very difficult) if we are incentivized with a surround sound system”…….. this continued for the next six months, volume did get delivered but the sales team got their homes redecorated with incentives. Everyone outside the sales team was disgruntled, felling that the management is unjust………..

In Summary, in the short term, incentives do work. However, in the long term, incentives have a negative impact as it becomes term of business and demotivates people.

Your comments will be appreciated, Please feel free to add...... and visit the full blog at http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/

Camaraderie

2011-02-07T08:29:00.003+03:00

Motivation via Association

Ideas and relationships can not be supressed by force.

Coming back to the 5As of Motivation (1) Appreciation, (2) Authority, (3) Avoiding Pain (internal to self) (4) Affluence and (5) Association. And the 9 tactics around the 5As that lead to self / others motivation. The nine tactics being (1) Recognition, (2) Trust, (3) Challenge, (4) Direction and Communication, (5) Opportunity, (6) Personal Stake, (7) Freedom of Choice, (8) Incentive and (9) Association with a team or group.

We have discussed recognition, and how it is used to tame killer whales http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/rrecognition-can-tame-killer-whale-why.html

Trust and the behaviors that help build trust http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/people-respond-to-trust-by-upholding-it.html

Challenge http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/life-challenges-help-us-discover.html

And Direction and Communication http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/efforts-and-courage-are-not-enough.html

Today lets shed light on motivation via Association with a group. Everybody knows that Camaraderie helps bring the best out of people. We forget the divide of religion, gender, sect, country etc when we are feel the camaraderie. Living examples being English Premiership teams, where supporters of Manchester United are distributed all across the world, even in rival countries, but as soon as the MAN U match starts, they get together all across the globe and are motivated to support MAN U. Similar examples are seen in school, where children of different classes and ages are associated into “houses” for extra circular completion. And these boys/girls forget all their differences and are motivated to be one to support their house during competition. Other examples being your offices, where people associated to a specific department, sense a connection amongst themselves. One of my friend used to summarize this via saying

“It me in opposition with my boss in a meeting amongst ourselves, but its me and my boss against the GM when we go and present to the GM and its me, my boss and GM as one team motivated to sell our ideas against our Group Vice president.”

Building association is very easy. If you let people socialize they will (with in) a few days build association with each other. It is as simple as putting people in a room together all day, day after day, and within no time you will realize that they are comfortable with each other, chatting and joking and helping etc etc. If you are meeting outside the office, than association building is more quicker, that is the reason team building exercises are conducted outside the office. Another example is a plane ride, where, strangers sit together and within a few hours they are talking to each other and trying to make that connection / association. At the base, we as humans want to be in our comfort zone, and if people around us are unknown, we try to know them find common ground and build that association.

To see how companies have motivated people via building association, we refer to the Fortune magazine, 100 best companies to work for 2011 and 2010 .http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2011/full_list/ This will give us some practical insight in how companies build association amongst its employees. We see four themes popping out (A) Company cares about the employee, (b) Diversity in people is appreciated, (c) Employees are consider stakeholders and are treated as such and (d) Fun events with employees are arranged.

§ The company has created an environment, that i dont want to leave.

As the saying goes in villages, Contentd cows give more milk. The top 100 companies to work for create an atmosphere, where everything is taken care of, and the only problem that workers have is excelling in their work.

Lets take example of SAS (Ranked # 1 in 2010). Here there are two subsidized day-care centers for 600 children and a facility for summer camp for older children. There is drycleaning, care detailing, a UPS depot, book exchange, mediation garden, in-season tax-prep vendor. Free snacks including Krispy Kremes and M&Ms. Extensive on-site sports leagues, SPAs and health care centers.

Locally, i have seen smaller companies having pool table, fuzeball, Wii, Playstataion. And employees have developed a Camaraderie around these activities, and they end up spending more time in /around the office. Because "My friends are here"

The company cares about me– sense of belonging.

If you take care of the employees, they will take care of their communities and investors. Dont think the employees are criminals.

Nustar Energy (Ranked 30^th) apart from giving good compensation and benefit. Focuses on keeping the spirit of its employees sky high via showing them that the company cares about them. Examples being : On Christmas eve, an employee on medical leave- had her house burn down. The company sent $3000 immediately to help her enjoy Christmas and find a place to live.

Another example being, Hurricane damaged houses of some of the employees. Nustar sent other employees from across the country to help repair the homes of their colleagues, cook meals and distribute free stuff.

Spouse of the store manager of Aero (ranked 94) got sick, the chairman asked the store manager to go to his wife and stay with her as long as it takes with out and deductions.

§ The company recognizes employee differences, and accept them on who they are.

Management mantra goes, that if you are supportive of employees and their families, they will reciprocate, especially during the down turn.

Nustar Energy Chairman once fired a talented senor executive because he continually berated his subordinates. These companies honors personal choices, if the employee says that the job is not safe and he/she will not undertake it, the company honors this and find something else for the employee.

Another small but impactful example being, that Flexible working hours are arranged for employees who have some personal committments.

§ The company considers each employee as a stakeholder.

Its all about US and not about US vs. THEM.

At Nustar Energy everybody gets a bonus – or no body does. Lay offs are few and far between. Aero (ranked 94) gives 30% discount to its employees on all of company products, on the spot bear hugs on exceptional performance. Employees here can grow as high as they are capable of, it like “from cleaning bathroom to boardroom”

§ Fun events

As mentioned previously, associations build quicker outside the office. These companies recognizes this and once a while, the company makes the employee forget all the stresses of the office and decides to have fun.

Summer parties or family days out are arranged, safely celebrations are undertaken. Management goes around the offices, strap on aprons and serve up barbecue.

If I miss anything about my office, it's the camaraderie of my teammates

Association or Camraderie make people like their place of work or area of association. It makes them spend more time at office or even after office hours they like to spend time together (again discussing office) and aperantly working 24/7/365. High association, makes people give 100+% to what ever they do, this passion is in support to the people they are associated with, its not the job responsibility they are trying to uphold, but they are trying to uphold the relationship and trust with other associate.

Your comments will be appreciated, Please feel free to add...... and visit the full blog at http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/

Coaching

2011-02-02T23:01:00.000+03:00

Coaching

Helping individuals help themselves

On 26^th January 2011, Jeddah had unprecedented rain that led to flooding on the roads. This led to extraordinary personal or business loss in terms of cars getting totaled to people spending umpteenth hours walking on the flooded streets to the shop mechanizes wasted. Following the social media, in such a situation, made me realize that there are “generally” two groups of people (a) Who are sharing sad pictures of the city and blaming the issue to somebody and (b) People who have moved forward and are now helping in rehabilitation. What I have come to conclude is that it all boils down to the “Mind-Set” that lead us to react differently to the same situation. It all boils down to how we “lead our brain” in a specific situation as discussed http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/lead-brain.html

A few days back, we talked about how can we PUSH people towards a positive mindset. http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/pushing-people-to-give-in-their-best.html . Unluckily, not all the individuals are willing to take “dictation” so today we will talk about how can we COACH people towards helping themselves.

Coaching is a process that enables the individual achieve their full potential.

It helps the individual find their “blind spot”, purposefully moving them out of their comfort zone and stretching oneself to new heights.

It is different from teaching or facilitating. In teaching/facilitating the instructor tells what is the right way of doing thing. However, in coaching, the coach only asks the questions to the coachee to help him find the direction themselves. In the end, coaching bears better results, because, people have more ownership to their ideas rather than somebody else’s ideas.

Now the question appears, how to go on about doing coaching. Lets follow the GROW model (Goal, Reality, Options and Will) of coaching http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_89.htm

§ Goal (Establishing a Goal) i.e.

o Agree on the topic of discussion with the coachee

o Agree on specific, measurable, realistic and time bound objectives that the coachee wants to achieve post this engagement.

o What is happening now?

o How often does this happen?

o How does it impact your life?

o Is it a logical problem, emotional problem or a feeling issue?

o What have you tried to overcome this?

o What has worked?

o What has not worked?

o What can we do to change the situation?

o Are their any alternatives to this, any other alternative?

o Lets change your perspective, and consider yourself as a third person looking at this situation, what is he seeing, what options will he recommend you?

o How would your life change, once this problem is overcome?

o Have you seen anybody else with this issue, what did they do, can you do the same?

o What constraints are there?

o How can you weigh different options?

As a coach, one should not suggest options, but ask questions in leading the team member towards different options.

o Which option will take you towards your goal the quickest?

o So what will you do now and when?

o What can stop you from moving forward?

o How will you overcome these obstacles?

Coaching is all about making sure that the coachee knows that they are working with you, not for you

Best quality of the coach is to ask alot of challenging questions and let the coachee come back with solutions.

Your comments will be appreciated, Please feel free to add...... and visit the full blog at http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/

Coach will let the people see what they can, rather than what they cant.

Pushing people to give in their best

2011-01-31T08:49:00.001+03:00

Continuing with lead the brain discuss http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/lead-brain.html below is a summary of a book that throws light on how can we help people around us build a habit of "leading their brain out of adversity"

MindSet (Summary of a book by Carol S. Dweck)!

Don’t divide the world into week and strong, success or failures…. But divide the world into learners and non-learners.

There are two types of Mindsets

1. Fixed mindset. Where an individual believes that his/her qualities are carved in stone. They have a specific amount of intelligence, personality and moral character. And they have to prove this over and over again, because they feel every situation is evaluated. And they have to ensure that they deliver on their personal belief of the amount of intelligence, personality and character they have. These people end up blaming the "3rd Person" for any adversity or challenge in their life. Hence are stalled in their feet when stretched.

2. Growth mindset. Here an individual believes that his/her qualities can be cultivated through efforts. Although, initially, people may differ in every which way – in their initial talents and aptitudes. But everyone can change and grow through application and experience. This creates a passion for learning and stretching themselves. People in growth mindset, thrive on challenge as the bigger the challenge, the more they can stretch and learn. In growth mindset, failures don’t define you, but it is considered t be a problem that has to be dealt with and learned from.

How to Develop Growth Mind Set in Others. It can be developed at any age

1. Send development messages. Every word and action sends a message. It tells children or students or peers or athletes – how to think about themselves. It can be a fixed mindset message that says: you have a permanent trait and I am judging it. Or it can be a growth mindset message that says: you are a developing person and I am interested in your development.

2. Don’t stereotype or label people. Praising people for their effort as well as the result. This will help people find success via learning and improving. If you start labeling people, they move towards fixed mindset and hence do not admit and correct their deficiencies. A student mentioned that I am always praised for my intelligence rather than my efforts, and slowly buy surely I developed an aversion to difficult challenge.

3. Inculcate True self confidence via pushing them towards learning mode i.e. the courage to be open – to welcome change and new ideas. This will help in making people ready to grow. To grow true self confidence, we should focus on praising the work that they have put in i.e. That homework was so long and involved. I really admire the way you concentrated and finished it. Focus on inculcating that skills and achievement come through commitment and effort.

4. Push people towards Observe, Learn and Improve Set high standards for people around you and keep raising the bar. Focus on telling them that “you have to apply yourself each day to become a little better. By applying yourself to the task of becoming a little better each and every day over a period of time, you will become a lot better”

Gist being

“Did I win? Did I lose? These are wrong question. The correct question is: did I make my best effort? If yes that you may be outscored, but you will never lose”

To read the full blog please visit http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/

Lead the Brain

2011-01-29T15:55:00.000+03:00

Lead the Brain

First say to yourself what you would be;
and then do what you have to do

On 26^th January, Jeddah had unprecedented rain that led to breaking of a few smaller dams leading to flooding on the roads. Some major roads were flooded, that led to extraordinary personal or business loss in terms of cars getting totaled to people spending umpteenth hours walking on the flooded streets to the shop mechanizes wasted.

Following the social media, in such a situation, made me realize that there are “generally” two groups of people (a) Who are sharing sad pictures of the city and blaming the issue to somebody and (b) People who have moved forward and are now helping in rehabilitation.
What I have come to conclude is that it all boils down to the “Mind-Set” that lead us to react differently to the same situation. It all boils down to how we “lead our brain”

To elaborate:

Brain in my opinion, responds to the questions we ask it. If we tell our brain we are in a disaster due to this rain, the brain will reply, yes you are doomed, and now xyz bad things will happen to you. However, if you had asked your brain, that how can I make best use of this circumstances due to rain. The brain will start thinking towards finding a solution. All in all, we have to lead our brain and ask the right question.

Lets do an exercise, look at any object around you and tell your brain, this object is blowing up. I am sure that most of you would have visualized the object blowing up and you getting hurt. Now, if you look at the same object and tell your brain that look how beautiful this object is. Most probably, your brain would have shown you aspects of this beauty.

Lead your brain, rather than being led by it.

Whenever in distress, People with positive “mind set” ask the question of “what is the solution of this problem” rather than people who have a negative mindset who keep telling themselves that things are bad and their brain keeps reinforcing this. And this is the difference we see on the road, some people are working on their cars to get them running again (positive mind set), while the others are sitting besides their cars with both their hands on the head (negative mind set). It will not help in blaming others or in reinforcing the negative feeling. Rather it would help, if we ask the brain, how can we get out of this situation….

Lead your brain, rather than being led by it.

Success Begins With Personal Development And Ends With Goal Attainment

Jeddah Rain 26th Jan 11

2011-01-26T17:33:00.001+03:00

26th January 2011

Water on Andalus Street (inbetween arafat street and tahlia). The amazing observation was that people were stuck for hours at end, but they did not lose their cool and enjoyed.

And now the area of Bariman. Location in between hira st and Panda bariman on Amir Mitb road

I hope every body in jeddah reached home safely. Also, i was amazed to see females walking into tahlia mall to shop while the roads outside were flooded. Kudos to their focus and motivation to shop.

Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction

2011-01-25T09:22:00.000+03:00

We have discussed recognition, and how it is used to tame killer whales http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/rrecognition-can-tame-killer-whale-why.html

And Trust and the behaviors that help build trust http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/people-respond-to-trust-by-upholding-it.html

And Challenge http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/life-challenges-help-us-discover.html

Todays focus will be role of Direction and Communication in motivating self and others

As humans we don’t want to move out of our comfort zone, hence a comprehensive direction will make us feel in control and motivate us to move forward. Everyday we face a lot of challenges, that throw our focus around and at times break our heart and resolve. However, if we are sure of our direction/goals, we will continue to move as Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal and if we lose focus we should remind ourselves that we are kept from our goals not by obstacles but by a clear direction forward.

Jim Collins in his book “Builds to last” mentions that companies that outlasted different generations, economic up and down trends, wars etc were driven via sense of purpose beyond just money, and this sense of continuity of purpose acted as a bond that held the organization together and focused in the face of change.

A strong sense of Direction helps us become architect of future rather than victims.

Communication helps as a feedback loop for us and the whole team, it is used to comfort us in adverse times, pep us up during challenges, direct others who are losing focus and so on.

Good communication is as stimulating as a strong black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after

Please feel free to add...... or visit the full blog at http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/

Now.....Go on confidently in the “direction” of your dream, live the life you have imagined. No wonder, people live a year very happily if they stick to their resolution and direction.

Life challenges help us discover ourselves

2011-01-24T08:42:00.000+03:00

Challenges help us discover ourselves

These days we are discussing the 9 tactics that lead to self / others motivation. The nine tactics being (1) Recognition, (2) Trust, (3) Challenge, (4) Direction and Communication, (5) Opportunity, (6) Personal Stake, (7) Freedom of Choice, (8) Incentive and (9) Association with a team or group.

We have already talked about Trust http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/people-respond-to-trust-by-upholding-it.html

And recognition, and how it is used to tame killer whales http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/rrecognition-can-tame-killer-whale-why.html .

Today lets think “Challenge” i.e. asking people to do, what they have not done before. Word it right and watch them reach their zenith. Its is proven that people thrive at tasks that are at or just beyond their skill level. If you word it wrong, people might get de motivated see the video below as example of both instances and choose for yourself. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnvjaaeVBxo&feature=player_embedded

While thinking about distributing responsibilities to your team. Dont think of giving it to people who have already done such a work before. Think of an old OAK Tree, because the strongest oak tree of the forest is not the one that is protected from the strom and hidden from the sun. It is the one that stands in the open where it is compelled to struggle for its existence against the winds and raind and the sun.

We will continue to grow if we think that life's challenges are not suppose to paralyze us, they are their to help us discover who we are.

For inspiration, please see the below vidoe.,,, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoSdCCt4Ljs

People respond to trust by upholding it. Trust is a motivator

2011-01-23T09:08:00.000+03:00

During the next few days we will discuss the 9 tactics that lead to self / others motivation. The nine tactics being (1) Recognition, (2) Trust, (3) Challenge, (4) Direction and Communication, (5) Opportunity, (6) Personal Stake, (7) Freedom of Choice, (8) Incentive and (9) Association with a team or group.

Yesterday we talked about Recognition, and how it is used to tame killer whales http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/rrecognition-can-tame-killer-whale-why.html .

Today lets think “Trust”

It takes years to build up trust, and it only takes suspicion, not proof, to destroy it
Trust is one of the most powerful forums of motivation and inspiration. People want to be trusted and they respond to trust by trying to uphold it. Nothing is as fast as the speed of Trust.

Below is a small summary of a book I read over the past few days titled “The Speed of Trust”. Simply put Trust means confidence. The opposite of trust – Distrust- is suspicion. The moment there is suspicion about a person’s motives, everything he/she does becomes tainted. That is the moment when people automatically start discounting everything you say by 20/30 % or even more. We are living in a very fast paced and changing world. As you go to work or home or somewhere else, your top responsibility should be to build trust.

Trust is a function of two things: character and competence. Character includes your integrity, your motive as perceived by others, your intent as perceived by people. Competence includes your capabilities, your skills, your results, and your track record. Competence is situation: it depends on what the circumstance requires.

There are 13 behaviors that can help you build trust with anybody. All the 13 behaviors require a combination of both character and competence. The first five flow initially from character, the second five from competence and the last three from an almost equal mix of character and competence.

Behavior # 1 – Talk Straight i.e. be honest, tell the truth. Let people know where you stand. Don’t manipulate people or distort facts and hence don’t leave a false impression.

Behavior # 2 – Demonstrate Respect i.e. genuinely care for others. Show you care. Treat people as human beings, if they know you care, it brings out the best in them. Respect the dignity of every person and every role. Treat everyone with respect, especially those who can’t do anything for you. Each contribution needs to be honored and respected no matter how small a contribution is to an activity or an effort. Show kindness in the little things. Don’t fake caring.

Behavior # 3 – Create Transparency i.e. Tell the truth in a way people can verify. Get real and genuine. Be open and authentic. Operate on the premise of “What you see is what you get. “ Don’t have hidden agendas, don’t hide information.

Behavior # 4 – Right Wrongs i.e. More than simply apologizing, make restitution. Its doing what you can to correct the mistake and then a little more. Make things right when you are wrong. Apologize quickly. Demonstrate personal humility. Don’t cover things up. Don’t let pride get in the way of doing the right thing.

Behavior # 5 – Show Loyalty i.e. give credit freely. Acknowledge the contributions of others. Speak about people as if they were present. Represent others who aren’t there to speak for themselves. Don’t bad mouth others behind their backs. Don’t disclose others private information.

Behavior # 6 – Deliver Results i.e. Get the right thing done. Make things happen. Accomplish what you are hired to do. Don’t over promise and under deliver. Don’t make excuses for not delivering. Results give you instant credibility and instant trust. They give you clout. They clearly demonstrate that you add value that you can contribute, that you can perform.

Behavior # 7 – Get Better i.e. continuously improve. Increase your capabilities. Be a constant learner. Develop feedback systems both formal and informal. Act on the feedback you receive. Than people for feedback. Don’t consider yourself above feedback. Don’t assume today’s knowledge and skills will be sufficient for tomorrow’s challenges.

Behavior # 8 – Confront Reality i.e. take the tough issues head on. Its about sharing the bad news as well as the good, Don’t bury your head in the sand.

Behavior # 9– Clarify Expectations i.e. Remember all conflict is a result of violated expectations. Clarifying expectations is all about creating shared vision and agreement about what is to be done up front. You can also call it behavior of prevention by disclosing and revealing expectations, discussing them, validating them, Renegotiating them if needed and possible. Never assume that expectations are clear or shared.

Behavior # 10 – Practice Accountability i.e. Take responsibility for results. Be clear on how you will communicate how you are doing and how others are doing. Don’t avoid or shirk responsibility. Don’t blame others or point fingers when things go wrong.

Behavior # 11 – Listen First i.e. Listen before you speak. Understand. Diagnose. Listen with your ears and your eyes and heart. Don’t presume you have the entire answers o all the questions.

Behavior # 12 – Keep Commitments i.e. Say what you are going to do, then do what you say you are going to do. Make commitments carefully and keep them. Make keeping commitments the symbol of your honor. Don’t break confidences. Don’t attempt to PR your way out of commitment you have broken.

Behavior # 13 – Extent Trust i.e. Demonstrate a propensity to trust. Extend trust abundantly to those who have earned your trust. Extend trust conditionally to those who are earning your trust. Learn how to appropriately extend trust to others based on the situation, risk, and credibility of the people involved. While Behavior 1 to 12 help you become a more trusted person, this behavior will help you become a more trusting leader. Not only des it build trust, it leverages trust. It creates reciprocity, when you trust people, other people tent to trust you in return.

Please feel free to add...... or visit the full blog at http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/

Rrecognition can tame a killer whale, why not humans

2011-01-22T08:35:00.000+03:00

There are two things people want more than money and power……. Recognition and Praise.

During the next nine working days we will discuss the 9 tactics that lead to self / others motivation. The nine tactics being (1) Recognition, (2) Trust, (3) Challenge, (4) Direction and Communication, (5) Opportunity, (6) Personal Stake, (7) Freedom of Choice, (8) Incentive and (9) Association with a team or group. http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/motivating-others-driving-others.html

Starting with Recognition i.e. Acknowledging people on all the good they have done, motivates them to repeat the same.

Some of us have visited the Sea world in Orlando etc, but none of us have ever thought about how are these Killer Whales trained. Yes these are Killer whales, who are doing a show infront of you. They are caught from the sea and then trained to be tame. HOW can a human train a Killer whale, suppress their instincts?

“Whale Done” a book written by Ken Blanchard (One minute manager fame), highlights how these huge killer whales (most feared predators in the ocean) are tamed to perform amazing acrobatic leaps. The trainers basically (a) accentuate the positive and (b) redirect the negative behavior. Gist being, that the trainers focus on

Recognition i.e. Whale Done i.e. Catch people doing the right things and in return the people get motivated to repeat the same over an over again.

To learn more visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbQvrwjT7yo&feature=related

Please feel free to comment / suggest / feedback....

To read the full blog, click on http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/

"First Break all the Rules" and 5As

2011-01-19T08:35:00.000+03:00

Individual commitment to a group effort -- that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work

Below is a summary of a book “First Break all the rules”. This book is based on learning of research from 80,000 managers across different industries. The gist being: that companies that got positive responses from their employees on the below 12 question were more profitable, more productive, had low employee turn over and had highly satisfied internal / external customers.

Do I know what is expected of me at work?
Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best everyday?
In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
Does my supervisor or someone at work seem to care about me as a person?
Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
At work, do my opinions seem to count?
Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?
Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?
Do I have a best friend at work?
In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?
This last year, have I had the opportunity at work to learn and grow?

Linking the above questions with 5As of Motivation discussed two days ago http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/motivation-drive-towards-doing.html

1) Appreciation (recognition, acknowledgement, respect etc)

§ In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?

2) Authority (Power, influence, control etc )

§ Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?

§ At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best everyday?

§ At work, do my opinions seem to count?

3) Avoiding Pain “internal to self” ( Internal sense of duty, Philanthropy, accountability, freedom of choice etc)

§ Do I know what is expected of me at work?

4) Affluence (Wealth, prosperity, income etc)

§ Is there someone at work who encourages my development?

§ In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?

§ This last year, have I had the opportunity at work to learn and grow?

5) Association (Being part of a group etc)

§ Does my supervisor or someone at work seem to care about me as a person?

§ Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?

§ Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?

§ Do I have a best friend at work?

Feel Free to add……

Motivating Others = Driving others towards higher achievement.

2011-01-18T08:34:00.000+03:00

We excel in life as a group, individually we are one drop, but together we are an ocean.....

Motivating Others = Driving others towards higher achievement.

Yesterday we discussed the 5A model for motivation (http://hunt-for-motivation.blogspot.com/2011/01/motivation-drive-towards-doing.html) today lets talk about the 9 Tactics that can help motivate people around us and how they fit into the 5A's

1) Appreciation (recognition, acknowledgement, respect etc)

a. Recognition– Acknowledging people on all the good they have done, motivate them to repeat the same.

b. Trust - Show faith in people and they will move mountains to maintain your faith in them.

c. Challenge - Ask people to do, what no body has done before. Word it right, and watch them reach their zenith

2) Authority (Power, influence, control etc )

a. Direction and Communication – As humans we don’t want to move out of our comfort zone, hence a comprehensive direction will make us feel in control and move us forward.

b. Growth Opportunity – We want to move up the ladder, show us the opportunity to advance and then see how we beat your expectations.

3) Avoiding Pain “internal to self” ( Internal sense of duty, Philanthropy, accountability, freedom of choice, Personal Challenge etc)

a. Pleasure or Consequences or Personal stake – Pleasurable rewards move people, I personally don’t believe in threats, at it brings a sour flavor in the relationship. Let people do, because they want to do it, rather than they want to avoid pain. As humans, we have two ways to deal with one another: Reason or force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuation. Force should be the last resort in social interaction, as force leads to injustice that leads to most of the ills in society.

b. Freedom of choice and deadlines – People with high internal accountability, work the best against a deadline that they have set for themselves. Also these people generally work best on their own ideas (freedom of choice)

4) Affluence (Wealth, prosperity, income etc)

a. Incentives – J

5) Association (Being part of a group etc)

a. Team – Camaraderie help bring the best out of people.

Please feel free to add any other tactic that i may have missed

Motivation = Drive towards doing something

2011-01-17T09:10:00.000+03:00

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. It does not matter where you have been, what matters is where you are going, what are you becoming.....

Motivation = Drive towards doing something.

Today lets look at the “Whys” behind motivation i.e. “why do we do the things we do?” or “Why we make a certain decision?” or “Why are we driven towards a certain direction?”

To answer the “Why” lets look at what motivates an average human? I call it the 5A of Motivation

Appreciation (recognition, acknowledgement, respect etc)

Authority or Achievement (Power, influence, control etc )

Avoiding Pain “internal to self” ( Internal sense of duty, Philanthropy, accountability, freedom of choice etc)

Affluence (Wealth, prosperity, income etc)

Association (Part of a group etc)

Depending on the day, mood, historical perspective, we give higher weight to one of the above “A” and make a decision that leads us towards it.

Please feel free to add…..