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Every month myGreenlight.com hosts the Social Capitalist series, where top entrepreneurs, executives, and thought leaders are interviewed about the human side of success – the friends won, people influenced, and skills learned in everything from performing at work to launching a business.
Our most recent guest, Mark Divine, CEO of SEALFIT, NavySEALs.com, and US CrossFit, had some great ideas about managing stress, arguing that stress is actually necessary to grow, learn, and achieve high-performance.
He introduced the phrase “stressing yourself for success.” As he explained on the call:
“You can’t develop mental toughness without challenging yourself. I call it stressing yourself for success. There’s no question the human body is designed with that fight, flight, or freeze response, and you can interpret that to mean we’re not supposed to essentially stress ourselves out because we’re supposed to avoid stress or eliminate stress (which is impossible by the way) because it’s not good for our bodies."
“Well, that’s not true. Even in caveman days, it was the hunter who was able to control the stress response and turn it into a performance behavior that would allow him to get the most meat, face down the charging tiger, and organize a team to defeat him. That was called leadership. So, just because we have stress everyday in our life, doesn’t mean it has to be debilitating or lead to disease in our bodies.”
He suggested the following strategies to channel your stress into high performance and actionable success: Read more →
Did you read the recent New Yorkerpiece on brainstorming? Jonah Lehrer, the author of Imagine: How Creativity Works, took on the orthodoxy of the “brainstorming session” as the best way to generate innovation and creativity. Every day I see companies whose leaders want people to think outside the box, and most of them have come to rely on brainstorming as the way to do it.
“Brainstorming” dates back to 1948, when Alex Osborn first developed the idea in his book, Your Creative Power. For Osborn, and for brainstormers ever since, the most important ground rule is to suspend criticism and negative judgment. In the safe space of the brainstorm, any idea is good, so goes the gospel.
The problem, as Lehrer points out, is that this doesn’t really help generate new ideas. Research conducted since the ‘70s shows that allowing criticism and debate reliably generates more ideas, and more of the ideas are truly innovative and practical. “It is the human friction that makes the sparks,” Lehrer writes. Read more →
This week, try out some terrific time-management tips from Jason Womack, the author of Your Best Just Got Better. One of the things I like best about Jason's approach is that he focuses on the value of the 15-minute increment – so key when so many of us have schedules that have very few wide-open spaces. It's pragmatic, but also a great reminder that every free moment is an opportunity to, as his subtitles goes, "work smarter, think bigger, make more."
Here are Jason's favorites strategies for making immediate improvements to your time management. They're excerpted from his book, which I guarantee is worth finding time for.
Start meetings on the 00:15 of each hour. Invite your colleagues to a meeting that starts at 9:15am and ends at 10:00am, or starts at 2:15pm and ends at 3:00pm. In my experience, most one-hour meetings can be handled in 45 minutes. In fact, they usually are as, often, especially later in the day, people are generally running 5 to 15 minutes late for meetings anyway. If it's part of your corporate culture to run late, start your meetings at 9:15; because people usually get ready to leave their desks on the hour, you may be pleased to find your colleagues actually show up "on time."
ABR: Always Be Ready. I'm repeating this because it's that important. Bring small chunks of work with you wherever you go. Then, while waiting for a meeting to start or for a delayed flight to depart, you'll be able to reply to an e-mail or phone call; in other instances, you might have enough time to review materials for another meeting or project you are working on. If you're prepared, you can also confirm appointments, draft responses, or map out a project outline.
Gain some ground early in the day. When you get to the office or sit down at your desk each morning, begin by working on something that you can finish. After a few weeks, you'll find that you've completed a lot of little things that needed to be done, and may just have a bit more time, mental space, and inspiration to tackle some bigger issues. Completion increases your energy level and sets the standard for consistent forward motion on projects at all levels of importance.
Interrupt people less. Consider keeping a piece of paper off to the side on your desk. This way, when you think of something nonurgent that you need to tell or ask someone, write it down instead of e-mailing, calling, or talking to the person right away. Experiment with this approach; instead of interrupting someone three times per hour with one thing each time, you'll only be contacting him or her once an hour with three items.
Add your favorite tips, and reactions to Jason's book if you've read it, in the comments!
The success of any business, small or large, is heavily dependent on innovation. But so many people make the mistake of equating innovation with a product or device that changes the world. Heads up: You don’t have to create the next Facebook in order to innovate successfully and grow.
The president of SAP North America, Robert Courteau, and I recently sat down to talk about exactly that – innovation in today’s global age. By the end of our talk, it was very clear that the most innovative companies have a solid foundation of talent at their core.
The foundation of any business is its people. With all the competition around, we need to retain our best talent by keeping our people engaged and challenged — or they’ll be gone, just like that, either because we’ll have to lay them off because things aren’t getting done, or because they’ll find somewhere better to work. Read more →
According to a survey conducted by U.S. Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) in 2010, approximately 18% of corporate directors are women and 14.5% are minorities. To put this into perspective, the number of women and minorities on corporate boards is less than half what would be expected based on their proportion of the general population.
The fact that there is a discrepancy is indisputable, but the reason for the shortfall is not so clear. Is it blatant discrimination, or is there something else at work here? The answer is probably a combination of both.
I have worked with many women and minorities in my executive coaching business and I have found that when they apply the principles of perception, visibility, and influence—what I refer to as the PVI model—they are able to advance their careers faster and further than they previously thought possible. They do this by earning the respect of their colleagues and bosses, becoming known throughout the company as someone who can be depended on to solve problems and deliver quality work, and learning how to exert their influence at all levels of the organization.
Many of the challenges faced by women and minorities in the workplace can be attributed to cultural differences and differences in the way boys and girls are raised. These challenges can be overcome if you are aware of them and adapt your behavior to change the way you are perceived.
Here are three challenges women and minorities might face, along with strategies you can use to overcome them. Read more →
My short piece for the January-February HBR is available online already, about promoting workplace candor – a blurb:
…in our research at more than 50 large companies over the past three years, we identified “observable candor” as the behavior that best predicts high-performing teams. But asking people to be candid in the absence of a supportive organizational culture is a challenge. We believe that forthrightness should not just be encouraged but required. We’ve developed three techniques to help coworkers at all levels interact more directly…
Relationship Roundup - some conventional and unconventional recommendations for taking advantage of the social season and upping the ante on the intimacy in your relationships.
side of success – the friends won, people influenced, and skills learned in everything from performing at work to launching a business.
innovation and creativity. Every day I see companies whose leaders want people to think outside the box, and most of them have come to rely on brainstorming as the way to do it.
Jason's approach is that he focuses on the value of the 15-minute increment – so key when so many of us have schedules that have very few wide-open spaces. It's pragmatic, but also a great reminder that every free moment is an opportunity to, as his subtitles goes, "work smarter, think bigger, make more."
